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Bofferbrauer2 said:

Plenty of poor people do care about immigration,too. The reason for this is mostly that they are jobless or not earning enough to sustain themselves and then somebody comes along and saying that immigrants took the job that person ought to have. Rural regions tend to have much less immigrants and thus are more susceptible for this kind of scaremongering, even though with some logic thinking it would be clear that this can't be true (how could immigrants stole their jobs if there are none around?).

This is why in Europe, poor people were by far the most adamant against the immigration waves from Syria and northern Africa and along farmers the main source of voters for the populist and eurosceptic parties, especially the Front National (now Rassemblement National) in France, the AFD in Germany, UKIP and Brexit party in the UK, Lega and Five Star Movement in Italy... (The list goes on and on)

I do agree about all the rest, including the part that you cut, but saying that only rich people care about immigration is just not true.

Okay well I'm just relaying statistical facts for you. Statistically speaking, immigration never polls as a priority concern of poorer people in this country. It does among people making more than $100,000 a year though. Also, rural America is not always poor. I would say that, yeah, country club types are often the leading anti-immigrant voices in the country. The fact is that the average person who supports Trump simply because that person is scared of immigrants is some 70-year-old guy who owns hundreds of acres, not somebody who lives in a community that's seen as too poor for Walmart and McDonald's to want to set up shop in because they'd lose money.

Now I can't speak to what the situation in Europe on that is because the fact is that recent waves of refugees have been composed of very different sorts of people from very different sorts of backgrounds (often conservative Muslims from places like Syria) who really and actually do tend to increase the crimes rates and the commonality of social violence in general when they migrate in massive numbers. Trump's claim that Latinos have that effect is statistical bullshit, but there is definitely a reason why Sweden's open-door policy toward Syrian refugees lasted only a matter of months those years back when as much was at its peak. It's because violent crime and rapes skyrocketed during that window for self-evident reasons. It seems to me that there can, in fact, be some legitimate concerns in cases like that, honestly.

I'm not saying that projects like Brexit are justified (on the contrary, Brexit is a reactionary scheme backed by Moscow as a key step in the undermining of Europe as a whole, and no part of it will benefit any part of Europe, least of all the UK, in reality; it has to be firmly opposed, as in more firmly opposed than what Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party has been doing), but I am saying that there may be reasons that institutions like the Brexit Party and pro-Brexit factions of the Conservative Party are able to exploit many low-income people from rural areas into getting on board with ideas like that that go beyond just the obvious concerns that working people from rural areas may have (as here in the U.S.) about being abandoned by major businesses that have supplied their livelihoods for generations here in the age of globalization.

Last edited by Jaicee - on 17 October 2019