The impact of Right wing bullshit hoax messages becoming viral on social media. It is the modern equivalent of how Adolf used the media to turn good people into highly concerned people who “needed to take action” against a mythical foe. Look at what happened with Brexit in the UK. There are still people believing the completely debunked lies.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has had a history as a subject in school that generally, any native population does not like newcomers. Before we had actual foreigners it was the people from some towns over who weren’t welcome.
This isn’t news or surprising to me, just an unfortunate truth that in these darker times people no longer are ashamed of having.
I don’t think it’s some sort of carefully-manufactured phenomenon. I think that people just generally complain about immigration.
From the article:
Ireland, according to this narrative, has opened the floodgates to foreigners with no controls or checks, leaving rapists and murderers to prowl the streets, and no one – not the government, not opposition parties, not the media, not the police – is taking it seriously.
“People need to fight for this country,” said Samantha, a 27-year-old mother, as masked youths clashed with police attempting to retake Eden Quay along the River Liffey. “I’m not racist; I don’t mind people coming in if they respect Irish people. But the likes of the toerags coming into this country – they’re not vetted and are causing havoc.”
You can put the shoe on the other foot, go back to when there were waves of Irish immigration to the US, and people complained about the Irish then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment
Nineteenth-century Protestant American “Nativist” discrimination against Irish Catholics reached a peak in the mid-1850s when the Know-Nothing Movement tried to oust Catholics from public office. Henry Winter Davis, an active Know-Nothing, was elected on the new “American Party” ticket to Congress from Maryland. He told Congress that the un-American Irish Catholic immigrants were to blame for the recent election of Democrat James Buchanan as president, stating:
The recent election has developed in an aggravated form every evil against which the American party protested. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country – men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. Again in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.
Much of the opposition came from Irish Protestants, as in the 1831 riots in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Protestants of the nineteenth century would use crime statistics to allege that Irish Catholics were over-represented in crime.
During the 1830s in the U.S., riots for control of job sites broke out in rural areas among rival labour teams from different parts of Ireland, and between Irish and local American work teams competing for construction jobs.
Irish Catholics were isolated and marginalized by Protestant society, but the Irish gained control of the Catholic Church from English, French and Germans. Intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants was strongly discouraged by both Protestant ministers and Catholic priests. Catholics, led by the Irish, built a network of parochial schools and colleges, as well as orphanages and hospitals, typically using nuns as an inexpensive work force. They thereby avoided public institutions mostly controlled by Protestants.
The Irish used their base in Tammany Hall (the Democratic Party machine in New York City) to play a role in the New York State legislature. Young Theodore Roosevelt was their chief Republican opponent, and he wrote in his diary that:
There are some twenty five Irish Democrats in the house… They are a stupid, sodden and vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue. Three or four however…seem to be pretty good men, and among the best members of the house are two Republican farmers named O’neil and Sheehy, the grandsons of Irish immigrants. But the average catholic Irishman of first-generation as represented in this Assembly, is a low, venal, corrupt and unintelligent brute.
Humans have a certain reservation against newcomers yes. But the way this is excarberated by politicians and right wing media outlets is very much crafted.
It is first crafted on the level, that immigration is not aided with integration, e.g. giving people fast access to education and working opportunities. Then the resulting poor social status is correlated with higher crime rates, as it is with the native population too. Then few high profile crimes are plastered all over the media and it is claimed that this would be intrinsic to the newcomers and it is them being newcomers and not them being held at arms length and deliberately kept in poverty that is at play.
It is classic divide and conquer, to pit the lower social classes against each other instead of the leading elites. This also shows in your example from the US. The problem wasnt Irish catholics. The problem was Irish catholics integrating and taking positions in government offices and exercising their right to vote. It threatened the established elites power and they reacted by targeting them with xenophobia.
I genuinely want to know, I’m not against immigration. I support it. But what is the long term plan here. We’re going to reach population maximum simply due to resources. Are third world countries just supposed to forever stay in third world crisis sending refugees to the first world countries? Are we not striving for the same equality world wide where every area can develop to a functioning first world society? We could retain everyone’s diversity if crisis areas could retain their culture instead of destroying it for the sake of short term single generation profit.
For that to happen, the West should start fostering prosperity and democracy worldwide, instead of extracting all the wealth and invading/overthrowing any government that doesn’t play along.
I agree
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A bus and a car blazed on O’Connell Bridge while masked groups marauded across the city centre looting shops, attacking police and shooting fireworks, turning the air acrid.
A police helicopter hovered and officers with shields and batons were assembling at the far end of O’Connell Street but the heart of Dublin, for now, belonged to the young man in a black hoodie who started to dance in the glow of the flames.
Ireland, according to this narrative, has opened the floodgates to foreigners with no controls or checks, leaving rapists and murderers to prowl the streets, and no one – not the government, not opposition parties, not the media, not the police – is taking it seriously.
So when social media rumours attributed a horrific stabbing attack on three children and a creche worker to a foreigner – Algerian, Moroccan, Romanian, versions varied – groups descended on Parnell Square, the scene of the crime, and decided to unleash chaos.
The economy is at full employment and the state is flush with tax revenue but their social media feeds depict a country overrun with “non-native” predators such as Jozef Puska, a Slovak man convicted earlier this month of murdering a teacher, Ashling Murphy, in 2022.
It did not seem to matter that one of the people who stopped that attack was a Brazilian Deliveroo rider, Caio Benicio, and that Dublin gangs have assaulted numerous South American couriers in recent years.
The original article contains 1,177 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It’s pretty stupid and short sighted to hate foreigners. Every developed country has a declining birth rate right now and an inverted pyramid age graph where there are far more elderly people than young people. The only way countries can keep up their current level of productivity is by allowing immigration. Ban immigration and you basically guarantee your country is going to suffer economically.
Of course the racists think that this is a “white genocide” which is obviously bullshit. The entire Earth is on a trend of declining populations. It’s actually estimated that we very likely will hit a peak population of 11 billion and then it will start to drop dramatically and could drop down as far as 6 billion by 2100.
Here’s a wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections\_of\_population\_growth#/media/File:World\_Population\_Prospects.svg
And a nice picture from the same article showing the trend: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0e/World_Population_Prospects.svg/1280px-World_Population_Prospects.svg.pngIt’s pretty stupid and short sighted to hate foreigners. Every developed country has a declining birth rate right now and an inverted pyramid age graph where there are far more elderly people than young people.
Not, that it would not be stupid to hate foreigners, but this argument is as well and slolely based on a mixture of wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. Immigrants are a limited ressource and using them as the fundation of your economy is unsustainable. Economies have instead to be restructured and adjusted to declining populations - e.g. later and lower pensions. Immigrants should if at all only used to reduce the transition pain.
The only way countries can keep up their current level of productivity is by allowing immigration.
And this is just blatantly wrong. Productivity is defined as output per input. If you produce half the output with half the population, productivity stays exactly the same. You could even argue, that productivity increases in the real world with declining populations, as less people are producing only slightly less output by compensating with more intense work and by eradicating unnecessary work.
Okay, I chose the wrong word, but it’s semantics, I’m pretty sure you know what I mean by the word “productivity”. There are already plenty of countries where there are jobs going unfilled for months or even years. Teams stretched thin and expected to do the same amount of work as 2 or even 3 people would have done in the past, and it’s only going to get worse if immigration is limited because developed countries currently depend on immigration to fill the gaps.
You’re right that it’s totally unsustainable to depend on immigration to fill gaps in your labour pool. The hope many governments seem to be hinging on is that this crisis will rectify itself as the bloated elderly population of the pyramid starts to die off. There definitely needs to be systemic change, but that takes time. In the short term, there are plenty of immigrants that can fill those roles and keep your country’s economy strong in the short term. Countries that fail to recognize that are going to have a rough time.
Of course there are plenty of other reasons that immigration should be accepted. I just figure conservatives are really the only ones who oppose it and they tend to think in terms of the bottom line and their own selfish interests, so I thought I would frame it in a way that would appeal to them.
I’m pretty sure you know what I mean by the word “productivity”
No, not really. Maybe it’s GDP, but why should anybody be interested in GDP over GDP per capita?
There are already plenty of countries where there are jobs going unfilled for months or even years.
That’s one of the transition pains, I was mentioning and nothing to be worried about. Using immigration as a pain killer is actually preventing a sustinable solution like most pain killers do.
keep your country’s economy strong in the short term. Countries that fail to recognize that are going to have a rough time.
Have a rough time now or a much rougher time later with further problems on top. The choice is easy if you’re willing to face reality. You’re literally admitting, that what you are suggesting is only a short term solution, even though you again use the wrong word here: it’s not short term but temporary and it’s not a solution but an arrangement.
The only way countries can keep up their current level of productivity is by allowing immigration. Ban immigration and you basically guarantee your country is going to suffer economically.
How about pay your current people enough and give them enough time off that they can raise a family so they aren’t so hesitant to have children?
