Border control is not equivalent to racism. The people pushing for it loudly just tend to be doing it for blatantly racist reasons. Unsurprisingly, those people tend to abuse any ounce of power given to them. When they're granted extraordinary government powers, they make up official sounding reason to achieve their racist agenda. Hence the general consensus that any talk of border control is racism. The non-racist-driven border control agenda just controls the border, and shut the fuck up about it. They don't boast about arrests, they don't make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs, they don't send in the military to schools to grab kids out of class, they don't shoot people in the face when they look at them wrong.
You think people who support border controls are simply prejudiced based on skin color? Like, their problem with Little Mogadishu or Little Bangladesh is that people in those places don't need sunscreen? Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?
That's literally not what he said. He's saying the majority of people supporting border controls are not racist, but the vocal minority are the ones who "boast about arrests" / "make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs"
This seems like a sarcastic/unserious comment, but based on my interactions with people who are supposedly anti-immigration - yes, it's entirely based on skin colour.
Someone from India, China etc whose family immigrated in the 1800s to work in gold mines/railroads etc and probably has deeper roots in the country than the person criticising them = immigrant, bad, shouldn't be here. Somehow simultaneously taking all the jobs and living off the state and not contributing.
Someone from Europe/America/Canada with white skin who either came here as a child or was born here to immigrant parents = not a problem at all, they "don't count" for some reason.
I agree the people who lump children of Chinese railroad workers in with illegal immigrants are racist. But it’s the pro-immigration folks that do that pervasively, under the label “people of color.” Meanwhile, you have to look at pretty fringy parts of the right to find that.
>Do you think that, if Ilhan Omar was Albanian, people would love her?
You do realize who a great deal of the "southern Italians" in certain parts of New York and New Orleans actually are, right? Or is your point solely about religion?
Europeans, with some exceptions (the UK, Germany, maybe Sweden), generally care way, way less about accusations of bigotry than Americans do, and the Swiss are one of the most DGAF nations in this regard.