Easy.
There is a huge portion of the country, about 1/3, that knows they aren’t living the American dream, but they work hard and don’t understand why.
Then, someone tells them something slightly true. That there’s not enough pie to go around (semi-true), and that the reason there’s not enough pie is all the immigrants and freeloaders who aren’t working and are taking handouts (false).
What they aren’t told is there could be enough pie to go around, if the top 1% was willing to share. They aren’t. And they now control ~35% of wealth in the USA.
And then the top 1% uses that extra capital to tell that 1/3 of people that their Hispanic neighbor is the problem.
a big chunk of that bloc is first gen immigrants themselves.
all my 2nd gen immigrant friends have parents who hate new immigrants and support ICE type policies and are big Trump fans.
First gen immigrants are affected by new immigrants, they’re in direct competition with the new guys and many are quite happy to pull up the ladder.
If that was all that was going on, it would be pretty understandable for that subset.
What I don’t get are the white ones with first gen immigrant partners.
most of the immigrant women I have dated wanted a conservative white guy boyfriend. it’s a cultural thing.
I often give the benefit of the doubt towards minorities. My internal hope is that since they are a minority, they surely have experienced bigotry, reflected on it as victims, and rejected that spirit.
That mentality of mine has been completely shattered over the last couple years. The majority of the immigrants I have known have floored me with their bigotry towards so many others. It has made me curious: Are they attracted to that part of our culture? Is this the predominant spirit of the world? What the hell does it mean?
No. they are just people. everyone is like that.
the issue is you thought people were better than they are. they aren’t.
but we can’t make any progress until we are open about who and what we really are. the lefties and the righties are both in total denial about the complexity of the world and put forth this vague bullshit idealism about who and how people are suppose to be.
most the of the rich white enlightened liberal/leftie set are incredibly sexist, racist, and bigoted towards others who aren’t like themselves. their discourse and ideals are mostly about signally to each other they are part of the ‘good people’ and it’s all the ‘bad people’ who are those things. by forming and out-group you get to get to pretend you have ‘purged’ the ‘bad’ by projecting it onto ‘others’ who don’t share your views or lifestyle. but everyone does this. everyone hates some ‘other’ bad group of people in order to claim their group is ‘good’. every immigrant group thinks they are the ‘hard working’ group and the other are ‘lazy exploiters’.
the issue is you thought people were better than they are. they aren’t.
I am very cynical, but my hope is that we can collectively improve our situation. I pull my hair out when people keep playing their tribal games. All they have to do is reason it out.
people like it when collective improvement benefits people that look like them. they don’t when the people don’t look like them.
the scandanvian models works because of the lack of diveristy. it’s starting to break down due to the influx of immigration.
people are hardwired this way. it is incredibly difficult to change it.
Is it hardwired, or trained?
I have prejudices that are wrong. I know that they are wrong. I know the kind of futures that will never exist if I exercise them. I don’t know, if it’s nature or nurture.
hardwired and trained.
for someone to not be that way takes decades of specific training and a life of abundance. most people are never going to have that. most people don’t perceive their life as being abundant, even if it objectively is.
Before you judge too harshly, remember that they can’t physically vote and probably don’t know as much about politics. It is very easy to fall into right-wing pipeline under these conditons.
More importantly, them not being able to vote means they don’t effect you as much as some people want you to believe.
A lot of democrats were convinced immigrants caused the 2024 and started the fucked up tiktok trend of reporting their neighbors to ICE.
A lot of democrats blamed immigrants for the 2024 election results
No Democrats blamed illegal immigrants, if that’s what you mean. That just did not happen because it makes no sense.
They DID blame the people who voted for Trump, even if they were from a community with a lot of immigration. Rightfully so.
This is how it plays out locally: I live in a low cost of living town in Northeast PA. Our area has historically not been very diverse. Over the past 20 years they’ve ben building a lot of huge warehouses and distribution centers in our area to take advantage of the low cast of living. The industrial parks in the area all competed with each other to land these “job-creating” warehouses, and they competed by offering tax-free deals for x number of years.
So they build these warehouses, and when they hire, everybody apart from the 4 managers are hired part time, and can only work up to max of 28-30 hrs per week, to prevent the company from owing them any kind of health care retirement. Mostly, the only people desperate enough to move here for those jobs are immigrants, and since there’s no attachment to one warehouse or another, as soon as there’s slightly better offer, they move right on out. Our schools are getting hammered because their tax revenue hasn’t increased, but instead of of 1-2 new students per year in a grade level, they’re dealing with 5-6 new kids per WEEK, and a good number them come in with little to no English. Frequently, the families have to separate to get here, and that just makes everything even harder.
Now, if you’re not paying too close attention, you look at the area compared to 20 years ago, and think,
- There are more immigrants
- The school have less money and test scores are down
- Crime is worse
- Wages are unliveably low …
- Immigrants did it
The “nice” thing is if you own a warehouse, you don’t even need to spend any money “convincing” people to blame immigrants, you just make a bunch of money, pay them as little as possible, and watch the nightly news talk about all the danger and crime in the area.
You are now banned from Piefed. Please lay down while the death squadron comes for you.
This pretty much
If magas could read a post this long they might get it
Not a chance.
My brother, who dropped out of school, lays carpet. He is very mad about immigrants “takin’ our jerbs”. He is also not a very good employee and miserably failed when he tried to start his own business…he wanted to be the boss without doing any work himeself… I imagine most people have made poor life choices and just need someone to blame.
Immigration in my area is heavily used for wage suppression.
That’s Capitalism you’re mad at, not immigrants…
Not really, you’re mad at capitalism, I personally hold no rage to ‘immigrants’. I hold rage towards the lazy ignorant selfish citizens in our world that sit by as we get sold out. I feel rage towards people that don’t care as the free-world dies.
Where I live we have democracy. We have the ability to invoke change. We have the ability to stand up and defend the rights, and the futures of others. We have the ability to progress as a society. I think blaming Capitalism is absurd. If people can’t come together to agree on positive change, it’s not about ‘the system’ it’s fundamentally about the people in the system.
Well I encourage you to look into why it is that people don’t actually have the ability to stand up and defend the rights, and the futures of others.
Hint: the answer begins with C, ends in M, and the former USA is a textbook perfect example of how it ends.
To be fair, capitalism itself isn’t exactly it. It’s unbridled capitalism. But because the people who benefit most from unbridled capitalism will spend a bunch of their excess money convincing people like you unbridled capitalism is just the best…we end up here.
Here’s the problem I see with your perspective. We do have regulatory processes, we do have access to democratic processes, we do have freedom of expression, we do have civil rights. People instead choose to invest themselves in bipartisanship. I don’t see how your argument holds up. Our country has things like gerrymandering that corrupt the process, but on a basic level… people don’t care.
I think you’re wearing star spangled tinted glasses if you really believe everything you just wrote. I believe you have the illusion of those things, nothing more.
I encourage you to read about the “dual state” theory which is absolutely spot on in my opinion.
From my perspective, you are likely an example of someone who was successfully convinced capitalism is infallible by the people who benefit by far the most.
How has immigration affected the average voter?
Tasty ethnic food. There are tasty tacos around, some good Pho, there was an Ethiopian place around here, and tabouli with BBQ.
The remaining Caribbean place around here is really disappointing and the pulled pork is dry, so there is that.
It’s not just ethnic food. It’s all food. Did your food come from a farm? An immigrant worked on that farm.
How has immigration affected the average voter?
More competition on the job market, housing market and so on? Especially visible in big companies and big cities?
And immigrants famously will work longer hours for less, thus the capitalists are using them to keep wages low.
No, not at all. Most Americans aren’t being threatened by immigrants. There are a few places where the uber rich immigrants flock to, but people in Average America, Iowa aren’t competing with immigrants.
Immigrants create more jobs due to an increased need for services. Immigrants are a net positive to an area, and they can fill in skill gaps.
Capitalists can keep wages low by rigging the game via bribing politicians to reduce social programs. They don’t need immigrants to do that. They need immigrants as scapegoats. They need people to buy into their warped view of the world, and they need people to turn against each other, like you’re doing here.
Capitalists use sticks, live poverty, homelessness, and healthcare, to keep people inline and eating up their bullshit. Without the sticks, the capitalist have no power, and they know this.
Seems like a good reason for unions and worker protection. Let’s have a good highly visible corp prosecution as a lesson
Seems like a good reason for unions and worker protection
Yes. There’s not enough unions in the EU and the power is overwhelmingly favouring the employers (interestingly that is the effect of allowing mass immigration into the EU: more workers who didn’t unionise and were willing to work more hours for less money tends to weaker the worker class power; I have no idea how to give us more power short of literally eating the rich). I don’t even want to think how shit the worker situation is in the USA.
our shit wouldn’t be as cheap however and nothing is stopping people from building enough housing save the desire to keep prices artificially high. Lacking demand they could have just built less to maximize their gain. Given more demand yet they could have built more but little enough to again maximize gain. Seeing a pattern here?
nothing is stopping people from building enough housing save the desire to keep prices artificially high
I don’t know where you’re located. I live in a big European city. The space here is limited. The new housing is mostly being built outside of the city really, and it will take years for it to get the proper treatment (like buses, trams, metro line). The immigrants are directly competing with me for the in-city apartments. This could be different if you’re located in, IDK, Iceland, where the space is not really a problem, or in USA where you don’t have public services.
our shit wouldn’t be as cheap
Our cheap shit is imported from cheap countries though?
Given more demand yet they could have built more but little enough to again maximize gain
In 10 to 20 years. But the problem of competing for limited resources is now. Seeing a problem here?
The space here is limited… The immigrants are directly competing with me for the in-city apartments.
More desirable locations will be too expensive for many, or most, people to afford. As local economies change, and different locations become desirable, people will be priced out and forced to move. Good city planning decisions can slow this down to allow people to adapt, but trying to freeze things in place is futile.
It’s not really possible to set up city planning regulations so the population stays exactly the same. If a city were successful in making itself an undesirable place to live so that no one new would move there, it would probably start losing it’s population, which (like growth) forces its own hard planning decisions.
Thank you captain obvious. What’s your point in the discussion, as you havent made one in that comment.
Seeing a problem here?
Not really. This is not a new problem. This is not a surprise. This is the result of putting off change until it becomes a more serious issue.
Given the nature of politics, of people, problems will always be ignored until they become critical
Fuck the taco vote might break elections if people realize
The average American eats tacos with pre shred cheddar and sour cream. And it’s not bad, I like some Americanized foods, I liked Taco Bell before it became more expensive than getting the real thing. Most haven’t had a Mexican taco.
For anyone here, who isn’t satisfied with “white people taco night” and wants something better, I found a wonderful woman who is sharing her cooking knowledge from her beautiful outdoor Mexican kitchen:
A few years ago, she posted a recipe for her Nana’s sopa de tortilla Sopa de Tortilla and it’s so good I’ve made it twice in the last few weeks.
I’ve been watching her cook for years, and I’ve learned a lot. Great recipes! You don’t need to know much Spanish to follow either!
Sounds like a good way to practice cooking Mexican food and Spanish at the same time, thanks!
I was thinking on this just the other day. Without immigration, and native people alike, we wouldn’t have such good food. How can’t you hate people with such good food!?
I live in Canada. While it is not the fault of individual immigrants, even the Government of Canada and big banks have admitted that abuse of the International Student and TFW programs has put a lot of strain of public infrastructure and housing supply and has suppressed wages. These issues have absolutely objectively affected the average Canadian.
Every now and then you get someone on social media try to be smart and smugly say something like, “International Students can’t afford to buy a house. Explain to me how they’re driving up the cost of housing.” But they fail to realise it increases demand for rentals, and people buy single family homes to rent the rooms to those students, and so the demand for those rentals drives up the cost of houses.
You can acknowledge that not all immigration is good without blaming individual immigrants themselves. I’m always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don’t understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy.
Yeah this is so accurate or hurts that people don’t get it, or go the opposite way and blame the migrant.
I was teaching in a college from 2021-2024 and by the time I left my classes were at least 95% international students. The greed of our higher education institutions has caused a massive problem.
It’s a lack of nuance. Higher rates of population growth can be good, if pressure points like housing are planned for with zoning and permitting systems that promote densification in popular locations. The badness is neither the additional people nor the housing regulations individually, but instead is that they don’t match.
Also, there’s a lot of racism in the mix. The people with legitimate concerns about growth planning (or the lack thereof) end up mixed in with the people who are horrified at the idea of their racial group becoming a minority of the country’s population.
You:
Higher rates of population growth can be good
Commenter before you:
I’m always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don’t understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy
Sure “the higher rates of population growth” can be good. Usually for the wealthy and or privileged classes though, and ultimately always they don’t solve the underlying issue causing the original problem.
Equating advocacy for planning for projected near- and middle-term population changes with advocacy for “infinite” growth is exactly the lack of nuance that frustrates me.
Yaaay nuanced opinion!! Thank you for posting :)
Well, how many international students do you get?
They’re wrongfully attributing to the immigrants what should be attributed to corporations, businesses and the extremely wealthy who are exploiting and trafficking immigrants.
And the wealthy help conservatives get elected, and conservatives demonize immigrants, and on and on it goes with half the country being mad at the wrong people.
No reasonable person has an issue with legal immigration, though plenty of unreasonable ones do. As far as illegal immigration goes, even Bernie Sanders said that a country without borders is not a country and that open borders is a Koch bothers idea.
there are several immigrants that made things worst: melania, THIEL, musk, cruz, . just not the ones that came with no money.
If ICE went after them instead, I would be okay with ICE.
Decades of talkings heads offering an explanation for rural decline, that’s how. Look back to Rush Limbaugh and his predecessors.
The irony is rampant immigration (and our tolerance to it) was an economic miracle for the US, an envy of the world. We’d be facing a population cliff like S Korea, Japan, China or Russia without it. But now that’s coming for us too :(
Definitely a misdirect from the corporate takeover of everything.
I grew up in a shitty small rural town, but while I was in high school I watched the shitty “mom and pop” stores slowly disappear and the local factory vote against unionization only to be closed a few years after I moved away. You know what immediately moved into the fill the void? Wal-Mart and Dollar General.
My dad was so focused on immigrants taking his job and other insane republican economic talking points that he lost that job when the company decided it wasn’t cost effective to operate in the US anymore.
You must have lived down the street from me. We had a few mom and pop joints, two local restaurants, and “the plant”. They didn’t get Walmart but now they’ve got the world’s worst Dairy Queen, the world’s second worst Sonic, and two different brands of dollar store.
TBH some of the points were right. Democrats took big bucks from corporations too, especially Big Tech and basically anything focused in metros.
And it was also a distraction.
Rural folks should have voted differently, yeah, but it was an easy trap to fall into.
The “population cliff” is a made up boogeyman for capitalists. That’s because they’ve relied on population growth for market growth. What’s the harm in population stagnation or even decline?
And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions. Just not the kind of solutions capitalists can abide. (and if you think about it, it’s a temporary issue anyway).
And I don’t want to hear about young people supporting aging populations. That’s a man-made problem that has solutions.
Well, okay. I have a bridge to sell you.
Look. Everything is a “man made” issue with solutions.
It doesn’t matter what economic system we want or have; fact is something has to put a ton of work into taking care of old folks, unless you kill them off or let them rot. Hope and ideology isn’t going to fix one’s body/mind, and that has nothing to do with capitalism.
…Will we automate the problem away some day, WallE/Star Trek style? Sure. That’s the goal. But we aren’t close to there yet. Overloading the young taking care of the old IS our short term problem, and we have plenty of land to support a growing population with room for expanding conservation, as long as we don’t do stupid shit like ranch excessively and expand oil. Then we can level off the population.
But okay. Let’s say tomorrow, every country on the planet rises up, abandons capitalism, and embraces cooperative economics, with a magic snap of the fingers. That’d be great.
But we continue to let populations in developed countries age.
Then what?
How does that change the needs of elderly folks at all?
Reducing overconsumption and overproduction will help a ton. We do not need nearly as much stuff as we are currently consuming. In addition, there are a lot of jobs these days that are just… not necessary. Take advertising for example, or all the job positions that are all about how to fuck over the consumers the most, then all the energy and work into fixing it or counteracting it, everything that is done not because it’s efficient, but because it’s profitable
We are far far more productive today than we ever were before in human history. It’s all about prioritization
I wouldn’t make that generalization.
We aren’t even close to post-scarcity in, say, healthcare. Keeping people alive and healthy is expensive and labor/education intense, even without the current structural inefficiencies.
Distributing healthy food is not trivial either, which ties into that.
You also shouldn’t overlook just how much is done because it’s profitable, and not efficient, though
The simple example is of course enshittifying services. But it’s also things like making 30 different versions of chips and candy and so on while putting lots of resources into preventing local homeless people from stealing any of the food they need for survival. Investing lots of research in making hyper-palatable foods that are addicting instead of how to make more efficient logistics towards everyone.
And then there’s of course the part where it being a competitive system means stopping others from making use of your research/effort and sharing things, because that means more and stronger competition, which leads to doubling of efforts and so on…
And I mean, I could go on, but the point is that, if you look closely enough, you’ll start seeing this everywhere. Inefficiencies made in the name of competition and profit seeking, not what is actually good for society and would be considered a job done well. A restructuring of society would help massively. From paying medical specialists more and making their jobs more tolerable instead of squeezing as much profit as possible, to opening up more human resources from other areas of society which could in theory help out more either directly or in the peripherals
We are massively massively more productive today than in the past. There is no excuse
And yeah, of course it isn’t the be-all end-all. But I would argue it would help more than it might seem on the surface. Directing resources towards where they are needed, and not just where they are profitable
Keeping people alive and providing healthy food is not as expensive as it’s made out to be. Socialism for the wealthy, now that’s expensive! Elon Musk could feed the entire world three times over! And there are lots of solutions, money just doesn’t back them.
For example, Holland had two issues. College students didn’t have places to live or couldn’t afford places, and they didn’t have enough people taking care of the elderly. So they put them together, the students have a place to live and the elderly are being taken care of. It was just something they tried and the results were spectacular!
The problem in the states is that we don’t even TRY ANYTHING! We have more resources than smaller countries and we don’t even try. We could try 50 different solutions in 50 different states, use the scientific method to measure the results, and then implement the methods that worked. We could even try thousands of different solutions by trying different methods in different counties of each state. But instead, we CHOOSE to continue to argue and bicker between ourselves. What a waste of time and energy!
I agree that the capitalists economy is a complete scam. Americans are so used to having so much land, that we just continue to shit up as much as we want and then move on to shit up another area. The earth cannot support continued population growth, especially with climate change. And even America will eventually run out of land to shit on. Other smaller countries have to respect what land they have and how to use because it’s limited. We could learn a thing or two from these smaller countries.
In France we have the “30 glorieuses”, 30 years of unprecedented economical growth. Guess who came and worked tirelessly to make it happen? And guess who waxes poetic about this blessed moment in time?
Of course the difference is that at the time, the immigrants lived in slums outside major cities, and they knew their place if you catch my drift.
Population decline has little to nothing to do with immigration. It’s just affordability. Anytime the lower and middle classes (most of the population) are doing well, people have more kids.
Rich people said poor people have no health care because poorer people get sick sometimes.
Many people, when they look out at the world, all they want to see is themselves reflected back at them. When they see something else, they feel afraid.
All my favorite food and culture comes from regions I am not native.
Well you see, they are coming here to steal all our jobs but they are also jobless losers stealing all our welfare
Reagan was an evil genius with the “welfare queen” branding.
Hateful branding is always easier than inclusive branding. Just think about how many different words Americans have historically used for black people: all “they” have to do to turn a positive term into a slur is to say it with a sneer.
These are the same people who were simultaneously protesting “Stop the count” and “count the votes” on election day in 2020.
Alas. Will no one spare one word of prayer for the cats and the dogs of the people that live there that the immigrants are also eating
Don’t forget that they stick to themselves and form parallel communities while also stealing our wives
Because any kind of minority is inferior to white straight people and they’re the reason for every ill in the world today.
It’s truly just racism. It’s worked for 4000 years, since the establishment of civilizations.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” - LBJ
Y’all - look, downvote all you want, but the main problem with no-borders immigration is that it does allow those willing and wanting to do harm to other people and the country to do whatever they want. And there’s fucking enough of those already with the white supremacists.
Overland migration into the US is also very much not limited to people from countries in the Western Hemisphere. I have been told 3 separate times by people in West Africa and Turkey (guy was Syrian but in Turkey) that “you just fly to Mexico and you get in!” I didn’t even ask - people just were excited to tell me after asking where I’m from.
Two issues that happen across Africa where borders are only for foreigners is that 1) all those JNIM/ISGS/ISIS/Al Shebab/Boko Haram guys go anywhere they want and no one stops them, and 2) human trafficking rings have no limits or friction. Most modern-day slavery exists in corridors where there’s basically free movement across borders because you just get off the bus, walk 20 meters into the bush, walk across the border, and walk back to the road and get on the bust again. Half of those victims are children. Don’t gotta own an island to traffic humans.
These are not related to economic issues, wages, dog whistle racism, etc. These are objective problems that are global in scope anywhere with a situation like this. There are no easy solutions. But the friction of knowing who comes and goes into the country reduces both of those.
Feel free to try and change my mind on this if you want, but having personally crossed borders on foot myself, intentionally and even on accident, y’all gotta bring some sources and logic.
