[EA-3167]

It sounds like the usual far right bottom line dressed up with a bunch of “Free Pizza” promises to cover it with a veneer.

Personally I wish people like his had the balls to stop hiding behind that kind of thing, we all know what someone is about when “immigration is the main problem” in their viewpoint.

Own it. Or if it’s something to be ashamed of… accept the shame.

[ai_critic]

Failure to recognize immigration as a problem for a sizeable chunk of the population--rightly or wrongly--ensures that they will fall pray to demagogues and will never again trust those who repeatedly blew them off.

Progressives fuck this up continually across the policy spectrum, by having no answer other than "no you're wrong/immoral/stupid" to people who express concerns in categories that have strong orthodoxy requirements.

[OkayPhysicist]

That's because they are wrong, immoral, and stupid. They're grovelling in the crumbs left over by the rich, and then getting pissed that there are other people groveling for the same crumbs.

Blaming immigrants is easy because you get an immediate base amongst racists (the immoral). They'll perk up at the sound of your dog whistles, and immediately start barking shit like "finally someone had the bravery to say what we're all thinking". That amplification of your message then reaches the reactionaries, who accurately look around at the world that is hell bent on destroying them, but are a little too dense to understand the web of systems that make up that world, and thus are eager for a simple explanation (the stupid). And once your message gets embedded in the zeitgeist from that lot, normal, relatively detached from politics people start hearing all this talk about immigration being a problem, and believe it (the wrong).

The same way you can't be frugal to make up for making poverty wages, you can't shrink the pool of disadvantaged workers to make them advantaged.

[dijit]

Sorry, you speak about this as though you are an American (not sure if you are) but you can't hope to understand the realities of living in a country that just injected 1/10th of its population in a decade.

The demographic of the largest cities in Sweden has changed from 17% foreign born in 1986 to over 55% today- in a single generation. (Malmö, were I live as a migrant myself).

At the same time, the healthcare service is struggling, the police can't cope with the crime situation and there are gangs shooting people and grenades blowing up apartments everywhere.

AND: At the same time, the Geni coefficient remains remarkably low, and income inequality much lower than the US, so this "blame the rich" makes sense in the UK and US, but it's not the problem that Sweden has.

Sweden has mismanaged a lot of its public services (training, then underpaying doctors - leading to them going private, then there being a shortage of doctors which leads to the government paying huge contractor rates for those doctors - which is hugely expensive, so nurses try to avoid you seeing a doctor - which leads to less preventative healthcare, and more serious issues, which is more strain on the healthcare service).

It's not uniquely immigrants fault, they have a role to play in the welfare system and being hugely overrepresented in crime, but it's really not rich peoples fault.

Not in Sweden.

[wasmitnetzen]

Note that while Sweden has a low income inequality, it has one of the worst wealth inequalities in the world.

[dijit]

There's a lot of billionaires, but if they make more money Sweden taxes them.

Sweden doesn't go after the money you have earned already.

There's no standing wealth tax or inheritance taxes that I'm aware of.

[viccis]

Not really, this looks more like pre-1990s leftism that you see from people like Caesar Chavez. Broadly redistributive policies towards the working class and a strict curbing of immigration as a source of exploited labor underclass for corporations to fatten their margins. There's a reason Bernie called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal".

[OkayPhysicist]

There is a very, very, very large gap between "open borders" and "keep all those disgusting foreigners out". I guarantee if you ask the average "immigration control activist" in most countries what the acceptable number of brown people to let into their country is, the answer is zero. Because the most active members of these movements are motivated by racism.

[rixed]

It must feel great to feel so vastly superior...

But everyone being crass and stupid was not even the question. The question was: how many more battles are going to be lost on that hill?

[constantius]

You seem to have decided that people who are against immigration are stupid, racist, authoritarian, and evil: by all.means, that's an understandable bias, as the most noticeable part of most countries' populations who hold this view indeed appear to be what you think. However, it is still a bias, that leads to you engaging in the kind of self-righteous, irrational rage that might make you feel like you're standing up for the oppressed when you're actually not.

Most people seem to conflate immigrants with refugees, which is false (refugees are a small minority of all immigrants), to see immigrants as poor, hard-working people who just need one chance, which is also false (most immigrants are skilled workers, generally not the poor of their country, and most immigrants you see are probably family members of other skilled workers), and to view immigration as a leftist cause (again not true, immigration is something that's mostly lobbied for by corporate interests).

But many more people feel opposed to migration for entirely different reasons: personal hardships directly due to immigration (loss of job or house), political leanings (pro-working class can mean anti-immigration), social cohesion/sustainability/community considerations, etc.

Not empathising with those people and having a reductionist view of immigration, which often stems from simply being shielded from any negative effects of it, as most on this forum are, lets people take a position like yours, which further polarises society and plays into the cards of the powerful you seem to oppose.

We probably agree on almost every political view apart from this.

[viccis]

You're inventing a person to get mad at. I don't see any evidence that this founder holds those kind of views.