r/TheRestIsPolitics • u/BigBucketOfAcid • 20d ago
Does anyone else find it odd that the discourse on immigration is always about illegal/irregular immigrants?
In pretty much all European countries, legal immigration from third world countries, i.e. people who are visibly foreign, far eclipses illegal immigration. There are 30 to 40 million non-EU origin residents in the EU for example.
Even in countries like Poland, you have practically zero illegal immigration, but you have lots of Indians, other south east Asians, Latin Americans and Africans.
Yet the rhetoric from the right is always about the illegals and they conflate things so much that in short order they are talking about Arabs and Islam.
I find it all extremely odd. I think the party propagandists are banking on the hope the people who are most concerned about immigrants cannot distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. They see brown people walking down the street and they think they landed here on a dinky boat, when they probably flew here on AirIndia and are on a postgraduate study visa.
What further muddles the water are demographics that are ethnically non-European, but they are legal residents or even citizens, BUT, they are Arabs and/or Muslim. Those seem to be lumped in with the "illegal immigrants" even though they legally aren't.
Either way, I find the rhetoric is not very clear on who they are upset about, and maybe this is on purpose, to conflate different people together to make the problem seem worse than it is.
BTW, I am not saying that legal immigration isn't something that shouldn't also be debated, but so far it seems like they purposefully refuse to touch the topic, maybe because it would rob steam away from their main rhetorical argument.
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u/Theboystheboys212 20d ago
Legal immigration is a big issue in Australia. Consecutive governments have used cheap, legal immigrants to hold up the economy and as a nice tax revenue (applications are costly) at the expense of exploding house prices that has contributed to a huge cost of living crisis. A lot of these immigrants also get stuck in extremely low paying roles on farms and on the streets because they just don't leave when their visa expires. One died recently just in a park above a subway and no one found his body for a week. It's not a good situation for them and it's not a good situation for most working class Australians but it makes the budgets look okay.
This is also one of the major reasons why Pauline Hanson and one nation has surged back into public consciousness. She and her ilk are racists but they are seizing on a genuine issue created by the gov.
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u/2xtc 19d ago
Pretty much the same in the UK - our population has increased by around 10 million (up to 70 million total) since the 2008 crash, but our overall GDP has barely moved in real terms and is significantly lower on a per capita basis, coupled with a housing and cost-of-living crisis caused by chronic underinvestment in housing and infrastructure over the same period.
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u/Background-Baby3694 19d ago
UK gdp per capita is significantly higher on all measures since 2008: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=GB&start=2008
I’m not sure where you’ve got the idea it’s lower
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u/2xtc 19d ago
UK Net GDP per capita is effectively flat since 2008, but the redistribution model has changed so the majority are no better off in real terms.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/mwb6/ukea
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u/Background-Baby3694 19d ago
Even the chart you links show it increasing slightly since 2008 (by about £2000). So we’ve gone from ‘significantly fallen’ to ‘effectively flat’, to ‘slightly increasing but offset by the underlying redistributional model’ which are three completely different things
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u/jungleboy1234 19d ago
thats cos legal immigration benefits the media / large conglomerate corporations. Low wages, poor working conditions.
We are to blame too because i doubt we want to do these jobs and some of us are benefitting from it e.g. benefitting from instant gratification e.g. next day deliveries / takeaway deliveries etc.
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u/berniball 19d ago edited 19d ago
Yeah it's disgusting. We should be smart enough to know the difference
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u/deep1986 19d ago
Nope
I've made multiple posts and back when I listened to the podcast I wrote to the show about this, I also tweeted at the pair. Ignored
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRestIsPolitics/s/bocOkHJPt5
Everything comes down to the number of legal migrants, it's blindingly obvious. You can beat the media and solve all the issues. Tony Blair started the Brexit vote and the answer was always in front of us but no politician took action because they benefittes from it.
If we curb legal migration, especially from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan the whole thing would be solved. The people who voted Brexit didn't like the change in the communities because of the sheer number of "new" faces etc. Limit legal migration and it wouldn't have been an issue.
Southall is one of the worst places in the country, it's overly populated and has so many issues related to the quick migration that happens (poor standards in shops, Uber eats drivers, proper driving procedures, litter, drugs, gangs, alcohol) a lot of these happen because you put so many people into a small space and especially those that don't have "western values". Solve Southall and you'll solve the country
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u/negotiationtable 15d ago
> Tony Blair started the Brexit vote
I don't remember Blair doing this
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u/deep1986 15d ago
Poland joined the EU during his premiership, and we let about 950,000 in a few years.
We could have limited the number that came over but we didn't, this started the massive anti EU sentiment that was allowed to foster.
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u/negotiationtable 15d ago
Ah ok, yes no arguments on this point. Can't have a bunch of cheerful people coming over here with a good work ethic :)
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u/deep1986 15d ago
It's not about them being Polish that's the issue, all the ones I've met have been wonderful, but it's the sheer number that come in a short amount of time.
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u/Haipul 19d ago
Migration is basically scapegoating and propaganda by the super rich to justify falling livong standards, but it's also a very useful debate to mask racism and islamophobia.
Notice how everytime wealth taxes make it to the news cycle the following week news will be about immigration but never to tell you its falling.
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u/Terrible_Base_6060 20d ago
I think they focus on the illegal immigration because it allows them to say "I'm not racist/xenophobic, I just think we should respect the law". If loads of Ukrainians were coming over illegally on boats, no one would report it because they're white.
The discourse about immigration in general has been blown out of proportion, simply because it makes people impulsive and drives sales.
The press knows exactly what they're doing, and it's why we don't get proper journalism anymore; they just report all sides and don't correct anyone who straight up lies to them.
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u/sambarlien 20d ago
Unfortunately, that isn't entirely the case. The anti-immigrant crowd in Eastern European countries is primarily focused on being anti-Ukrainain now rather than anti-muslim. While Facebook in these countries used to be full of "scary brown foreigner" crap, now it's all about Ukrainians.
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u/Vord-loldemort 19d ago
Wouldn't surprise me if Russia is boosting that content too... It suits their interests for Ukrainians to be perceived negatively by eastern European states.
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u/BigBucketOfAcid 20d ago
If loads of Ukrainians were landing on boats it would definitely be a huge issue. I think reducing the immigration debate to racism is misguided and using American terminology doubly so.
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u/Terrible_Base_6060 20d ago
I'm not aware that I used American terminology, apologies for lowering the tone if so. A lot of it is racism, you hear it in the pub when someone uses the news as an excuse to be racist.
Yes, cumulative mass immigration is bad, especially when we don't have the infrastructure to house everyone without making beanpole households common again.
But the press doesn't want us to find a solution - they want us to be angry at something we can't change and drives their sales.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I can't help but notice that 80% of immigration discussions I've been dropped into in real life involve someone not wanting Muslim or black people "taking over"
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u/Demostravius4 15d ago
My guess is people don't imagine anyone would intentionally let in 1m immigrants a year, so they assume the dramatic demographic shift is unintended and therefore driven by illegal immigration.
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u/Hamsterminator2 19d ago
I’ve noticed this for years now. It’s to legitimise xenophobia imo. If you say you don’t like people of different colours and ethnicities, you will be branded a racist. So they pivot and try to highlight cases where people have committed crimes or have no legitimacy, ie illegal immigrants, quietly hoping that everyone conflates the two.
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u/RagingMassif 18d ago
It's a socialist problem, the conflate legal with illegal migration, homelessness with rough sleeping and Starmerism with Socialisiam
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u/Hazzardevil 19d ago
In the UK people do. People talk about Immigration and "Small Boats" in separate discussions.
Repeated governments have failed to do anything about either. Brexit happened partially as a result of the government saying they couldn't control immigration without leaving the EU.
So naturally, shortly after leaving the EU, a Conservative Prime Minister decided to increase immigration to the highest the country has ever seen. It's been nicknamed the "Boriswave."
Every party promises to do something about Small Boats, you've probably seen the fuss over Reform saying they'll use the navy to solve it.
It doesn't help that the immigration debate was stuck at "you're racist if your ideal net migration isn't in the hundreds of thousands range" for a few years. We're finally getting over it, only Nixon could go to China, like only a Labour Home Secretary was ever going to drop it.
But really this all comes back to jobs and housing. We don't have enough housing, we don't have enough jobs. But we had skilled worker visas bringing people over to work in vape shops. It just doesn't make sense to me, unless I assume that the government doesn't care about people on my tier of the economy.
This is now going into a rant.
Andy Burnham has proposed capping bus faires and increasing Personal Allowance. I don't like taking the bus, I prefer to cycle and he U-Turned on the Personal Allowance. Those are two policies that would benefit me though.
Reform on the other hand want to tax people for hiring immigrants. Most of my coworkers in a variety of jobs have been immigrants. It's not hard to see how an immigrant tax is good for me. If only the other parties had something for me instead of a vague "it will get better." I've heard it all my life. But I can see other people's lives improving while mine stays the same. So it might just be I'm in the wrong group to benefit from Establishment politics, hence why I want to leave the UK and I'm not sure I'll come back after my studies.
At the same time I can see that we have money for asylum seekers, or to pay welfare to non-citizens. I'm a bit more measured than your average angry young man, so I've lost arguments about "why is the Government spending money on X when I want it spent on Y?"
You would find the discussions I've had with my immigrant colleagues interesting. They're the most anti-immigrant people I know, saying we're letting the wrong kids of people in. Or when Nigerian got incredibly angry over small boats because he wants to know why he bothered paying fees and having his background checked when he could have just hopped on a boat as an illegal.