8 ms·
I think you'd be surprised at how quickly that sentiment has moved from the far-right to close to the center. People are (rightly, in my opinion) pretty upset
by Auracle 3mo ago
I think you'd be surprised at how quickly that sentiment has moved from the far-right to close to the center. People are (rightly, in my opinion) pretty upset at their governments for letting mass migration happen with pretty much only downsides for their actual citizens. People are all about the idea of helping the downtrodden when it's just an ideal, but when they realize it's having negative consequences for them that can easily change.
- Computer0 3mo agoThere’s expected to be 1 billion climate refugees by 2050. What will be this factions answer to that? Bullets?
- throwitaway222 3mo agoWe were sold one thing and got another.
- microgpt 3mo agoWhat were you sold and what did you get?
- nekusar 3mo agoTo be fair, it already mostly exists. Its 4chan politically incorrect. https://boards.4chan.org/pol/ https://boards.4chan.org/pol/ And yeah, its as terrible as you can possibly imagine. And then even more so.
- jackb4040 3mo agoA "free speech" HN is just HN. It would end up with the same cryptic way of describing replacement theory, because it's not for the purpose of evading censors. It's for the purpose of cosplaying having "dangerous opinions". The idea of left-wing censorship on Paul Graham's website is a joke.
- dpoloncsak 3mo agoI think, all pretty recently (atleast in the 'States), there's been much news and noise about the abuse and fraud of these systems designed to help the downtrodden. Now whether that's all true, has always been true, is propaganda...whatever, but it's easy for me to understand why sentiment has been changing as the spotlight is focused more and more on the abuse of the systems as opposed to the benefits. I also think there's some 'hierarchy of needs' going on here, where as the economy shifts and more and more Americans are struggling to afford housing, groceries, and other necessities, it's easy to feel like you should be putting yourself first over strangers. Combine that with the prior point, and you have a great recipe to build resentment. Selfish, maybe, but I can understand how you get there. This is NOT to say 'There is no xenophobia' or anything...racism in general is alive and well in the USA... but I have pretty sound-minded people around me starting to echo this mindset, and this is my best understanding of what's been brewing.
- agar 3mo agoFor what it's worth, the most effective propaganda is that which reinforces latent biases. Humans en masse are selfish, self-serving, and tribal, so it's incredibly easy to believe that there is massive abuse of social services like SNAP/EBT, those delivering services are incompetent, and that we should investment more in fraud reduction. However, the reality is that the US spends $3.75 for each $1 of fraud discovered. And, "fraud" includes clerical errors made by the government, so the actual ROI of enforcement is even lower. So much of the propaganda -- "immigrants steal benefits paid for by hardworking US taxpayers, so we should ramp up enforcement spending to make more room for [white] citizens" is designed to simply reinforce our biases because it's just so darned believable to a cynical and tribal people. In reality, spending more on benefits enforcement just loses taxpayers more money while cutting more US citizens off from benefits they both need and are eligible for. It results in the opposite of its stated goal and this is well known to any policymaker. So if saving taxpayer money, and punishing those guilty of fraud, isn't the actual objective of all this toxic propaganda, you have to ask yourself what is.
- froh 3mo agoevery $$ spent on this "abuse" is a $$ not spent on tax evasion while giving an impression of "finally someone is doing something" and the $$ that could be made in plugging corporate tax evasion by gar outrun the $$ saved on the no income side. in Germany we talk 350Mio€ vs 10Bio€ y/y the us numbers will have a similar ratio
- microgpt 3mo agoHow can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right? Migration is all a distraction anyway. Brown people existing doesn't hurt you. Whenever you think they drive up rents or whatever, that has nothing to do with the brown people, that has everything to do with the system that sets rents.
- Geonode 3mo ago[flagged]
- dang 3mo agoReligious flamewar is not allowed on HN so please don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nec4b 3mo agoThere is one person/bot here with well over 30 comments in this comment section making all about race and racism even though the topic is migration. Don't you have any guidelines about that?
- dang 3mo agoOf course we do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Don't make the mistake of assuming moderator omniscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20omniscience&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)! - we don't see most of what gets posted to HN, and we mostly don't read the threads sequentially.
- nec4b 3mo agoI don't assume you are omniscience, but I do expect you have at least minimal tools/stats where you can see things getting of charts. You did have to find the comment to which you replied and reminded the author of not starting religious wars somehow too.
- mindslight 3mo agoAt least from a US perspective, the problem is that the downsides are the deliberate policy goals of the political class. Immigration was but one tool used to achieve them, and now the immigrants themselves serve as a convenient visceral scapegoat for releasing the grassroots political pressure. We finally built enough political capital to do something about the economic vise most Americans find themselves in, only for it to be squandered on performative vice signalling.
- dbingham 3mo agoNo. That sentiment didn't "move toward the center". What happened is that the far-right -- and, lets not use euphemisms like "the far right" here, we're talking about fascists and literal Nazis (ethno-fascism is Nazism) -- have successfully taken control of much of our mass media. They've also more or less captured the government of one of the world's super powers. Those two things put together have allowed them to make their views appear mainstream. This is exactly what happened during the 1920s and 1930s prior to World War II. And similarly, you were finding Nazi views expressed openly and proudly and being given a veneer of respectability. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...) But they are no less extreme now than they were then. They are still fascist and Nazi views. And they still ought to be abhorrent to anyone who considers themselves a decent human being.
- microgpt 3mo ago[flagged]
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo agoYou're getting downvotes, but Rwanda has become a textbook study of how racist stresses were amplified to create the conditions for a genocide. https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135902 https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135902
- theossuary 3mo agoAnother point of the Rwandan genocide that's important to remember, is the party who eventually committed the genocide spent months talking about how the other side was about to use extreme violence and they were really the victim. This allowed them to preemptively use violence "in self defense." Highly recommend the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast on it - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-lions-led-by-donkeys-podca-31015945/episode/episode-327-the-rwandan-genocide-part-1-211543930 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-lions-led-by-donkeys-podc...
- Auracle 3mo agoIt's beyond incredible that anyone thinks that the far right has taken control of the mass media. It's clearly the left that has control of most of the media, which makes sense. People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left.
- runjake 3mo agoFrom a US perspective, just up until a decade ago, it was a sentiment that left-center perspective that people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had. I was caught quite off-guard by this new "open borders" perspective. It doesn't seem sustainable at all.
- nxm 3mo ago[flagged]
- Auracle 3mo agoThat may be, but everyone is afraid to openly criticize it because they're afraid of being accused as racists.
- ausbah 3mo agowhat planet are you living on? “border control with pathways for immigration” (and variants) polls consistently high among both US parties
- jimbokun 3mo agoExcept for the majority of voters who elected Trump.
- exiguus 3mo agoIt's not just talking about it. It's how and also how much you talk about it.
- Auracle 3mo agoWell, some people are far more affected by it than most people. I'm in an area with a huge influx of Somalis in proportion to our population and I've heard many vague hushed conversations about it but our newspapers are filled with stories about how great our diversity is.
- 3mo ago
- radicalbyte 3mo agoMigration in my part of Europe (Holland) has largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do. These people are abused as a sort of semi-serf labour mainly in the farming sector. Some groups are a big net benefit to our (looking at the income the group benefits / social support costs) and others slight net negative. But once you take the economy into account it's positive.
- denismenace 3mo agoIt has been shown repeatedly in multiple studies (you might have heard a very prominent one from Denmark) that Non-European/Non-Western migrants are a net loss for the economy during their lifetime and also their children are a drag on the economy. Meaning the money spent by the government to support them is never made back (from the working) during their whole lifetime. So no, most migrant groups are not a big benefit. Especially considering that this is only taking the economy into account. When you take into account the societal disruption and anti-values that they bring with them, then its clear how negative they have been for Europe.
- deanishe 3mo ago> largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do. The Dutch were happy to do those jobs 50 years ago. After every single "jobs the natives won't do", there's an unspoken "for the dogshit pay we offer."
- picofarad 3mo agoYou'd have to stop importing the things you're not paying people enough to produce, otherwise your own products will be more expensive than the next nation over that has no qualms about poor pay for agriculture or whatever. It all sounds great until the last 40+ years goes away, with the apples year round and bananas, etc. Going back to just what you can produce in your country is gunna be a rude awakening for billions.
- schnitzelstoat 3mo agoPeople wouldn’t be willing to pay those prices for food, so they’d just end up importing it all. You could force people to accept the low wages by removing all welfare but that has its own problems.
- ashley95 3mo agoComparing the US and Sweden, it's also useful to know that the proportion of refugees accepted by these two countries is wildly different. Sweden has historically taken in many refugees (including draft dodgers from the US). In 2015 (an outlier) they accepted rouhgly 1 refugee (163k) for every 60 people (~9.4m) in the country. At its peak in 2024, the US admitted 100k refugees, significantly fewer than the Swedish peak. The impact of refugees is much more visible (also in budgetary allocations) in Sweden than the US because of this difference.
- Auracle 3mo agoWhy are you just comparing refugee numbers? That's incredibly disingenuous. A very large portion of the US's population is here illegally, and it would be significantly larger if we didn't have birthright citizenship. They're effectively the same thing.
- grafmax 3mo agoImmigrants are a timeless scapegoat for the problems faced by the working class.
- foxes 3mo agoYou mean the Overton window or whatever has drifted right. Nationalism is a right wing concept.
- olelele 3mo ago„Letting mass migration happen „ is such a fallacy in and if itself.
- vrganj 3mo agoSentiment hasn't moved from far-right to the center. If it feels like that to you, it sounds like your perspective changed because you moved from the center to the far-right.
- NoGravitas 3mo agoIt does appear that the Overton Window has shifted far to the right on immigration, such that far-right views are mainstream enough to be highly visible, and found in representatives of formerly or otherwise centrist parties. I consider this shift deplorable, but it's clear that it has happened.
- zug_zug 3mo agoI think it's phrasing and the phrase "damn parasites" that makes it far-right. The idea of changing immigration policies is not unique to any political party. However the quote isn't that, it's trying to stir up an angry us/them reaction at a large group based on national/racial lines. Also "damn parasites" is somewhat dehumanizing (whether you apply it to billionaires or immigrants).