• Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 hours ago

      Sorta.

      The cultural clashes between people with different cultural backgrounds are to be expected, and the bigger the percentage of people with different backgrounds the more it happens (hence why in the days of countries having 5% immigrants, the idea that “immigrants are a problem” had very little traction). This is just how things are - you can think it’s closed minded of most people (and, by the way, in my experience as an immigrant myself, that includes many if not most of the immigrants), but people are as they are, so we have to deal with it.

      Further, judging by the studies I saw in the UK back during the Leave Referendum, immigration does push down salaries in one category only - unspecialized workers. Economically one might think “well, it’s alright then”, but socially the ones suffering are already the worse off amongst the locals plus this is happenning under Neoliberal governments who are actually pulling down Social Safety nets and privatising essential services. This is probably why the Middle Class is often pro-Immigration whilst the anti-Immigration Far-Right Populists end up finding most of their traction amongst the Working Class - immigration benefits the Middle Class because immigrants barelly compete with them for the jobs whilst the mere presence of immigrants pumps up the Economy and lowers the cost of many services (so there is more business for the kind of work done by the Middle Class and services are cheaper for them), but the picture is very different for the Working Class.

      (This is why you see a lot of the non-mainstream “Thinking Left” in Europe who bought into Identity Politics is failing to gain any traction and even dissapearing whilst the far-right booms - unlike the old Left these people are from the upper levels of the Middle Class and don’t really see as a problem things which the Working Class sees as a problem and is increasingly hitting the lower Middle Class too, so ultimatelly they fizzle out because they do things like supporting “Open door immigration” because for them it’s not a problem but, de facto, those policies do end up making life worse for a lot of those lower down the economical ladder who would otherwise as they lose trust in the mainstream politicians gravitate towards those parties and instead end up captured by the simple anti-immigration messaging of the Far-Right).

      Last but not least, judging by my own country Immigration is the “solution” used to plug the low birthrate problem which is itself caused by decades of policies which lowered quality of life and pumped up realestate bubbles - the very politicians who are causing the problems that make the locals have fewer children, then claim that “we need Immigration because of an aging population” - Immigration is literally the tool used to keep countries going a little longer whilst the pillaging of the wealth of the many carries on. The poor immigrants have no blame for this - they’re just people looking for a better life, same as the locals - but Immigration Policies do have the blame on this and fake-Leftwing (neo)Liberals have purposefully confounded Immigrants (the people) with Immigration (the policy) to portray being against the latter (and, even more, against the artificial need for the latter and who gains most from it - which aren’t the immigrants) as being against “poor defenseless people”.

      Unsurprisingly this shit has eventually resulted in increasingly more people losing trust in the mainstream politicians and believing in populists preaching the simple message that “immigrants are bad”.