By the way the reflexive cries of “racism” to stifle every objection don’t help, only harm. This is used now to shout down every legitimate protest, all while those most affected by immigration and the depredations of neoliberalism are called “stupid” and “ignorant.”
When you observe — as I do in the IT industry — someone with an H1B visa imported by some rich person who takes a job that paid $100,000 a year and does it (almost-invariably poorly) for $20,000 a year, can you not see how that might lead to a bit of anti-immigrant sentiment? It had nothing directly to do with race, as I’ll discuss below. That’s a distraction.
Yes, it is misplaced in some way but these people in the US and the UK directly see good jobs being replaced by immigrants who work for very low wages. I see it right here in NC with my own eyes every day I go to the office. The only reason my own job hasn’t been replaced the very same way is that almost no one in the countries with such low wages can actually (yet) plausibly do what I do without destroying everything. And because I talk to customers almost every day and most American customers won’t talk to someone who barely knows English.
What’s funny is that in the UK is that cries of “racism” are bandied about while most of the immigrants (the narrow majority, though the stats are not very clear) are just as white as the UK person charged and convicted of racism.*
Can a white person be racist against a white person? I guess.
But it’s obviously more than just about a bunch of people wanting to get their racist on. That’s a facile argument that’s going to cause a worse world, not a better one, and it plays perfectly into what the neolib forces want.
*When I visited the UK frequently in the early part of this decade, almost all of the immigrants I encountered where just as white as I am, and I didn’t know they were not native Brits until they opened their mouths and a heavy Romanian, Moldovan, Russian or Polish accent made it clear.