Guardian (Suketu Mehta): Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage Archived Message Posted by Sinister Burt on November 4, 2019, 10:26 am Some interesting bits in this long article - here's a couple of excerpts, but it covers more stuff https://www.dumptheguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/27/immigration-panic-how-the-west-fell-for-manufactured-rage "The fear of migrants is magnified by lies about their numbers; politicians and racists train minds to think of them as a horde. In all the rich countries, people – especially those who are poorly educated or rightwingers – think immigrants are a much bigger share of the population than they really are, and think that they get much more government aid than they really do. A recent study found that Americans, as an overall average, think the foreign-born make up around 37% of the population; in reality, they are only 13.7%. In other words, in the American imagination, we are three times as numerous as we are in reality. The French think that one in three people in their country is Muslim. The actual number is one in 13. British respondents to the poll predicted that 22% of the people will be Muslim by 2020; the actual projection is 6%. A quarter of the French, one in five Swedes and one in seven Americans think immigrants get twice as much in benefits as the native-born. This is not remotely true in any of these countries. Americans estimate that a quarter of all immigrants are unemployed; in reality, under 5% are." ... "But the greatest facilitator of race-hatred against refugees isn’t a tabloid; it’s Facebook. Researchers at the University of Warwick recently studied every anti-refugee attack – 3,335, over two years – in Germany. They found that among the strongest predictors of the attacks was whether the attackers are on Facebook. The social network aids the dissemination of rumours, such as that all refugees are welfare cheats or rapists; and, unmediated by gatekeepers or editors, the rumours spread, and ordinary people are roused to violence. Wherever Facebook usage rose to one standard deviation above normal, the researchers found, attacks on refugees increased by 50%. When there were internet outages in areas with high Facebook usage, the attacks dropped significantly. The conversation about immigrants in America, too, is approaching incitement to genocide. Not just restraining or detaining the undocumented, but murdering them en masse. Virgil Peck, a Kansas state assemblyman, offered a solution to America’s immigration problem in the legislature during a 2011 committee meeting on shooting wild hogs from helicopters: “If shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem.” He later said that he’d been joking, that he was just speaking like “a south-east Kansas person”." Message Thread: Guardian (Suketu Mehta): Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage - Sinister Burt November 4, 2019, 10:26 am edit - no platform for fascists - Some Random Passerby November 4, 2019, 11:36 am It's a video made by a Nazi. What's this offensive rubbish doing on this bulletin board? nm. - Laurie November 4, 2019, 12:25 pm Re: It's a video made by a Nazi. What's this offensive rubbish doing on this bulletin board? nm. - Raskolnikov November 4, 2019, 1:13 pm Re: Guardian (Suketu Mehta): Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage - Raskolnikov November 5, 2019, 6:33 am Astonishing...really no comment. - Ken Waldron November 5, 2019, 9:58 pm   Searching