Remember that a horrifying number of people, especially conservatives, are invaluable of caring about - or even noticing - any problem that doesn't personally impact themselves.
Nuh uh. I was born here. My parents were born here. (/s, of course)
Let's not go back any further than that because it hurts the argument.
For context, I am 50% Italian, 25% French, 12.5% Irish, and 12.5% English. At least going off what my parents had told me. I never did a DNA test or anything.
It's been barely 60 years since racism against Italian- and Irish-American individuals really eased up. All based on xenophobia and an anti-Catholic belief. Before that, they may as well have been Black. Or worse, Japanese.
Tons of people alive today that experienced it first hand. Did all the lead in the paint and gasoline make them forget all about it?
Even still today we have to tiptoe around ideas like renaming Columbus Day. On the one hand, he was a massive piece of shit. On the other hand, it's morphed into the only holiday celebrating Italian-American heritage. I very much agree with the former, but if we are gonna go all-out on St. Patrick's Day, Italians should have a day too.
Maybe we could make a bigger deal out of St. Joseph. I could really go for a zeppole right about now, but that's really all I know of the day. It's a day for a zeppole.
i live in a small town full of old people who incessantly whine about people "moving here and trying to change things" from other parts of the country. while sitting on stolen cherokee land.
among americans there is this weird fucked up notion that we are, and always were, entitled to this land, and no one else is allowed on it. including the people who were living here first. it's been passed down through generations since the first colonists and still remains, even among democrats. so we hate "other," but we especially hate them when they move into town. and god fucking forbid they ever speak anything but 'murican
for context, my town still has a confederate statue because the usual "bUt MuH hIsToReEeEeEeEs"
They also love to claim that they had a great-grandmother who was "full-blooded Cherokee" (it's almost always Cherokee) and if you check their DNA, nope. All European.
As a German, knowing what happened in Nazi Germany and what Hitler’s beliefs and actions were at that time, this “rhetoric” is beyond troubling and disturbing.
People forget very quickly. Just look at what's happening in Germany and Austria and the Netherlands and France and Italy. It's like everyone's ignoring history.
You’re right. I just meant that with the background of our history, that it’s something that wasn’t just said, but actually happened, it feels more concerning.
Fascism is the problem. Trump is a very notable symptom, but many others are also to blame for the fascism issue, including some democrats. I believe this fixation with Trump is due to people wanting simple answers to complex problems.
The fixation is because there is no clear line of succession. If he fails, who steps in? They'll splinter and fragment. They'll still be deplorable, but less effective when not united behind a single authoritarian leader.
Well, seeing as 1/3 of Americans are brainwashed by mass media into following whatever hype train is set forth by the rich, I can see that. If their favorite corporate owned and ran "news" told them they didn't need to eat, they would stop eating.
America is home to racist morons, has been since July 4th, 1776. Most of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, and the Senate and Electoral College were established to ease the slave owners/states that their "property" would remain theirs.
We've been a nation of hypocritical xenophobes who taught freedom and liberty while giving none of it to the majority, and every time we try to fix that they double down and make things worse. Not a single time has the US Government (or any government for that matter, but that's more a "whatabout" in this topic) given people what they wanted freely, and peacefully.
If we wanted to get rid of brain dead morons, we would solved it in the Civil War and Reconstitution. Second chance was in the 1960s when we were breaking down the barriers. Instead we still placated to the racists because we didn't want to be too mean to the racist, sexist morons who started the mess in the first place.
"We’re also a nation of immigrants, and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways."
and:
"Some in this country argue that the solution is to — is to deport every illegal immigrant and that any proposal short of this amounts to amnesty. I disagree. It is neither wise nor realistic to round up millions of people, many with deep roots in the United States, and send them across the border."
and:
"We must honor the great American tradition of the melting pot, which has made us one nation out of many peoples. The success of our country depends upon helping newcomers assimilate into our society, and embrace our common identity as Americans."
I got a lot of heat for saying it before, but as a Latino, out of all his shit, racist is not something I ever got from Bush. He did a lot for Africa in terms of foreign aid, more than any president before him. He has positive things to say about immigration like you mentioned, and he grew up around a lot of Latinos, and his brother is married to a Mexican. So I never saw his family as racists.
Fuck how is it possible I'm missing the Bush family?
You never saw GW Bush as racist, but Middle Eastern Americans would disagree because leaders at that time didn’t do enough to combat the wave of Islamophobia which occurred after 9/11. Now it’s just the Latinos turn being the scapegoat. Republicans almost always play the racism card, just the target is different. Americans deserve better.
Edit to point out that when I say “Republicans” in my post, I mean the talking heads. I know individuals and people who may vote Republican may not necessarily feel the same
I searched for the actual question text and found:
Q19a. The immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country.
The split was 14% completely agreed and 20% mostly agreed.
I'm not as surprised by the results as the headline would have suggested because of the use of the word illegally. It biases the question negatively.
The 20% who mostly agreed may have agreed with some negative connotation surrounding illegal immigration while ignoring the racism of "poisoning the blood." In other words, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who feels strongly about securing the border, I could understand how those respondents would lean towards agree simply because of the use of the word "illegal."
To further support this interpretation: In the same survey, more than 40% of respondents favor or strongly favor building a wall along the US-Mexico border.
Maybe I'm just optimistic that only around an eighth of the country is completely crazy and that is just a less clickbaity title.
Who did they poll? How was the poll conducted?
If it's a phone poll you're going to get old people, no one younger than 40 is going to do a phone poll. And most old people are conservatives.
When it comes to polls, it's very easy to manipulate the results either in how it's done or how the results are interpreted.
If only there were some sort of article you could click on and read which would answer these questions for you. Maybe with a link directly to that poll.
There are only a few counties in the world that draw the smartest and most accomplished from the rest of the world. The USA is pretty high on that list. This gives the USA an unfair advantage worldwide in several ways:
US schools and businesses get to pick from the best and brightest worldwide, promoting an atmosphere of high performance STEM jobs.
US replaces lost high education and high IQ population, since there is a negative correlation between education level and reproduction.
Finally, if you think in terms of winners vs losers, which I feel MAGAs do these days,, other countries lose their best and brightest, making them less competitive to the USA.
And of course don't forget that the vast majority of Americans come from families that immigrated, and few would argue that they themselves should be sent back "to where they came from".
No matter how you look at it, immigration is extremely advantageous to the USA if handled properly and an enviable position that many other countries wish they could be in.
So, you mean everyone except the native Americans should leave America? Just trying to understand clearly the implications of what you're suggesting :P
In all seriousness, after all this time I would bet most people couldn't trace a lineage to a single country now anyway.
They probably couldn't. And Europe being what it is, a bunch of them would have lineage going back to a country that no longer exists, i.e. if they were of any of the states that were ultimately absorbed into unified Germany in the 1800's.
It's all arbitrary. But we know damn well Trump and his goons don't mean "white" people when they say "immigrants."
The funny thing, though, is that the people who supported slavery also generally supported immigration. And I don't mean by importing slaves (that too, of course). They wanted immigrants because they wanted America to grow. Sure, they didn't want black immigrants, but that's a whole other thing. When Chinese immigrants started pouring into California during the Gold Rush era, the response wasn't, "immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country!" it was "Hey! Dirt cheap labor! And stay out of the buildings with the posted 'no Chinese' signs or else."
So even those people, awful as they were, wouldn't agree.
When Chinese immigrants started pouring into California during the Gold Rush era, the response wasn’t, “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country!”
Yea one of the big ironies of history was that Abraham Lincoln was that he wanted to ship all of the newly freed slaves out of the US and back to Africa or South America:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linconia
More proof of fake respondents. Basically some people, for whatever reason (depending on the poll it could be financial) just speed run the polls with no thought about what they're clicking on. So it makes any extremely unpopular view appear more supported. I can't find much about how this was done, if it was an online opt-in poll I'd be especially suspicious.
Edit: it seems this was done with a Ipsos KnowledgePanel, which as I suspected is an online, paid, opt-in panel. This is exactly the kind of design that's prone to speed running for cash.
As an American, the last 10 years have been a real surprise to me. I've always known that there were incredibly stupid and hateful people, but it seemed like a slowly shrinking minority. The slow, incremental progress of America has led to apathy for most progressive voters. After all, if nothing is broken and it is getting better on its own, why worry about fixing it.
The problem is that a very over the last 100 years, a small but very rich group of psychopaths have been slowly eroding things like our education, journalism, social support, workers rights, judicial systems, and more.
I'm not talking about some secret group like the Illuminati, I'm talking about individual psychopaths like Elon musk who pick one or two things that they feel get in the way of thier ability to grab the power they think they deserve. They whittle away, using their immense wealth to slowly chip at our institutions. And each new one is able to build upon the work of the previous psycho.
The problem is that the last hundred years of slow witling has left us with very weak foundations, and things are beginning to fall apart.
I'm not saying America is the center of world intellectualism, but you're also getting quite a selection bias since "stupid American" stories are even popular to other Americans.
This might be a controversial take, but I don't think racist bigotry is an intelligence thing
The study and measure of intelligence itself is a piece of the rationalization of racism.
We owe a lot of our scientific inheritance to genociders and racists and eugenicists - I wouldn't be quick to assume the MAGA base is just a bunch of dimwitted Americans.
I think this is also a problem of perspective: the US Democrats are only "left" when seen from inside the US political spectrum. Seen from the outside they barely reach a center position and would be considered conservative-right in many other countries.
13% of any national group is enough to account for people who don't have any good reason to identify with that group but do so because their friends or family did.
Knowing what 13% of Democrats think tells you what the party is not, not what the party is. It's irrelevant to the tired, old point that you've dragged out here.
I was at a Ska show last night. They played a tRump ad about the border before the music. We almost left. Surreal, honestly, for the type of crowd I would expect.
Music and politics are super weird. Paul Ryan, former Republican speaker of the house, was an RATM fan until Tom Morello told him to fuck off. Ann Coulter is a massive Deadhead. So is Tucker Carlson. There's even a photo of Tucker hanging out with Jerry Garcia when he was in his 20s. The story is in an interview here if you can stomach it: https://www.maxraskin.com/interviews/interview-with-tucker-carlson
And then there's the musicians themselves- Johnny Ramone, Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons, all conservatives.
Music and right-wing politics are weird. I can't even begin to count how many bands were proudly anti-war in the 70s. Then there's the punk movement, which was highly critical of Reagan and Bush.
I guess music and a message of hope/protest works better than a message of oppression, especially when appealing to youth.
Yeah, I get it. I was really into Dead Kennedys and Jellos spoken words. The whole movement was anti-rayguns. It's just super weird. I imagine Paul Ryan is so dumb he didn't realize he was the forces in which we we were raging. Conservatives are not big on context. i.e. YMCA....
After working construction for decades I can say that American workers are shit compared to foreigners. Muslim workers are the hardest. Especially from Ethiopia or Somalia. They learn fast too and are better in many cases than Mexican or SA workers. PLUS no drug or alcohol or daddy/mommy/religious issues.
When I was building in Africa we finished a project 3 days early. They didn’t even have the skills, we taught on site. That would NEVER happen with regular Americans.
I think it's probably important to find out why this is, rather than just wag the finger and move on. Because, if the trend continues the non fascists will be outnumbered. In fact, I would say that this is really saying that 1/3rd of Americans feel free enough to say this. There's a good chance there's a silent amount afraid to say their true thoughts.
If it's just outside brainwashing, then investigate that. If there's a genuine root concern that is causing this attitude, see if it can be reasonably addressed. If it's just idiocracy happening, well then we're all screwed.
I would posit the opposite - if the trend continues, fascists will shrink further. You gotta remember, horrors of the past are not that long ago. Wasn't all that distant in our past when segregation had majority support, or blanket bans on nonwhite folk becoming naturalized citizens, or eugenics before that.
If we beat them now, we can continue the next four years to fight to shrink the hold that fascist views have on our society still further.
Seems like at some point when the immigrants started getting a bit less pale in appearance.
I don't think the US has an immigrant problem really. I think it's just plain old fashioned racism dressed up with a fancier word.
The Trump campaign doesn't hammer the immigration issue just because they're xenophobic racists. They also do it because it's one of the few issues that they can run hard on that rallies their base and has the potential to attract some democrats.
People that hate immigrants from either party consider it a central issue, so because it's so charged, there are actually a small subset of democrats that will hold their nose and vote for Trump because of this single issue.
13% of Democrats agree with Trump on that.
What the actual fuck?
No surprise? People have nuanced views, different opinions, from left to center to right, even hardcore racist ones... and vote Democrats. Just as you could find conservatives who do not agree with the statement.
The statement is so vague and loaded and can be agreed or disagreed with from all kinds of people.
Edit: And yes it's quite ironic(?) that so many people agree with this - in a country where people unironically track that they're 12% German, or 20% Irish, or whatever.
Edit: Auto-Blocking Unreasonable people. I told you, all that they have is emotional responses and think spamming labels is what makes them right. It doesn't. Just makes you a broken record.
I'm going to take a hit but I don't care because I really have been talking to someone about this. Everyone is okay with immigration, until they have faced or been in situations where someone from another country is hired over someone who was naturally born in a country. Everyone is okay with immigration until a migrant is housed over someone who is naturally born.
I have my problems with immigration. I don't necessarily blame the individuals, well, some of them because some of the migrants I've come across have been quite socially unaware and absolutely refuse to like adapt to the atmosphere of the country they migrated to. And it can be frustrating to deal with. It's not entirely their fault that businesses seem to see them as just labor fodder as well as the government sees them as economic fodder.
It's an issue that needs to be discussed and addressed. People don't want to talk about it because they resort to just brandishing people as xenophobic. But I bet you may have a change of mind if you ever come across a couple of the scenarios I've exampled. We have problems in our country when it comes to the homeless, to the veterans and to the poor. I think it is absolutely unfair and unwarranted to prioritize thousands of migrants who come here over all of them.
That is where I think the agreement is coming from. I don't agree with Trump's way of handling it (then again every "solution" he comes up with is incredibly extremist and impossible to pull off, especially if it's coming from him.) I don't agree also to have open borders either.
We need to sit down and analyze the immigration policy closely, that has been broken for years. Why the hell have we not had a single politician yet that is running for presidency that has a solution by now? For christ sake.
If we continue to not fix this problem, America just going to be weighed down the same way Canada got weighed down. The same way some parts of the EU got weighed down. America is just going to follow suit.
But all we can say is "ugh, you so xenophobic" or "ugh, we're all immigrants!".
Come on people, let's be adults and actually address the issue to fix it, huh?
Everyone is okay with immigration, until they have faced or been in situations where someone from another country is hired over someone who was naturally born in a country. Everyone is okay with immigration until a migrant is housed over someone who is naturally born.
Uh...no, I have no problem with an immigrant getting a job in my country. Or having a place to live.
If you aren't okay with those, then when you say "immigration", you might be thinking of "tourism". If you're not okay with immigrants having a job and a place to live, you're not okay with tourism.
Everyone is okay with immigration, until they have faced or been in situations where someone from another country is hired over someone who was naturally born in a country.
I have every right to be here as you do. Why should you get a job that we both applied for just because you were born here?
I’m going to take a hit but I don’t care because I really have been talking to someone about this. Everyone is okay with immigration, until they have faced or been in situations where someone from another country is hired over someone who was naturally born in a country.
I guess they should have had better qualifications.
Everyone is okay with immigration until a migrant is housed over someone who is naturally born.
some of the migrants I’ve come across have been quite socially unaware and absolutely refuse to like adapt to the atmosphere of the country they migrated to.
That country being the "great melting pot" where those cultures get adopted by and integrated into society?
People don’t want to talk about it because they resort to just brandishing people as xenophobic.
Except all the people loudly talking about it all the time.
I don’t agree also to have open borders either.
Please name the people who want open borders.
Why the hell have we not had a single politician yet that is running for presidency that has a solution by now?
You mean why do they not have a solution you'll accept.
Really everyone came from somewhere else. If we all go back to where our most distant ancestors came from, that spot in Africa is going to be really crowded.
Witness this right wing authoritarian whining about getting ratio'd for spouting Moral-Fear-Propaganda openly dehumanizing one group of people under another, crying about it.
Fascism is a virus all of it's own, a weird evil in a bad way, the only kinds of degenerates with the only kind of kinks society must stop. Their bloodlust is the poison. This White-Supermacist, Eugenicist Cancer asks you to turn your neighbor in and destroys every nation that obliges.
So reader, Solidarity Forever. Ill promise you, you promise me, to never sell each other out to these murderous theives. I'll call you on your shit, please call me on mine. We'll work together, and our grass will be the greener in time. ❤️🔥
(Obvs wont be replying, will be mute-block-deleting any interactions from bigots)
I think you may have missed the point of the article. I don't think it's reasonable to assume democrats don't want to do anything about immigration. Trump and Biden both have basically the same plan to address illegal immigration. Harris' plan is similar to both of theirs as well.
Illegal immigration is not nearly as serious as the average Republican might believe. They add strain to systems already working beyond their limits, but legal or illegal migrant workers aren't displacing citizens at work and aren't leading to the kinds of outcomes Mr. Trump would like his followers to believe. It does happen occasionally, but not enough to justify the alarming hate filled rhetoric.
The problem is that "poisoning the blood" is nakedly racist. The phrase has been used for over 100 years as a dog whistle for white nationalism. How can you have a rational discussion about addressing the real problems that enable illegal immigrants (American businesses hiring them) or the additional strain they put on already over worked and under funded public services if one side is ideologically set on the notion that migrants are evil?
I don't think it's reasonable to believe that democrats don't want to address the border. Safe, legal migration into the United States benefits everyone. If we streamlined the legal immigration process and cracked down hard on businesses and individuals hiring undocumented migrants, that would address the bulk of migrants illegally crossing our borders.
Perhaps we make it a felony with mandatory jail time (per infraction) to hire an undocumented worker or own a company that employs them. Or perhaps we remove the exemptions some types of businesses enjoy from paying minimum wage. One of the reasons businesses hire illegal immigrants in the first place is they are cheaper than American workers because you can pay them less than minimum wage.
Right now there are a lot of businesses that benefit from cheap migrant labor, if we can break that trend, some of those businesses will fold, for sure. But do we want to let failed businesses that can't stay open without breaking the laws of the United States to continue to operate?
Edit: And of course as expected, three people already came up to bat and readily swung and missed by getting too emotional with their responses. That’s not really taking the issue like an adult.
Is that what you think really happened? Can you quote this emotionality from my response since I was one of those three?
Worth noting that the ancient Greeks believed that democracy is impossible without an ethnically homogeneous population. Otherwise, they believed that there would be too many different competing intentions, that politicians would not have any clear direction and it would be very difficult to get anything important resolved. People love making emotional arguments regarding inclusivity, which is hard to reject without sounding boorish, but there are actual practical concerns with the situation.
Yes, but they also thought that women were inferior to men and slavery was an awesome idea, so maybe they aren't the best people to look back on for opinions.
That's why you consider the reasons presented by those who invented democracy, rather than simply accepting an idea based entirely on who presented it.
You don't have to answer me, but ask yourself if our current societies have too many competing ideals, that it's hard to get anything important done.
I mean, I don't want to be too rude but look at the European democracies who are typically praised in contrast to the U.S. Their populations have been significantly more ethnically homogenous, and only recently have they begun to deal with significant immigrant populations of differently colored peoples. How have they done? Immediate rise of far-right groups and tons of anti-immigrant propoganda.
I'm not claiming the Greeks were right, I think they had a small-minded view of what diversity could bring them, but it is an interesting observation.
On the other hand look at the US, which has been extremely successful as an ethnically diverse republic and in fact wouldn't be nearly as successful without that diversity. America has problems, but none of them are because there are a lot of different people there.