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I think this is a portion of what's going on. I'll prefix by saying I'm no expert in history or political science but I believe through the larger lens of history, the big picture is that the West is undergoing an acceleration of empire collapse in several places.

Overall, the lessons of history teach that geographically large, wealthy, socially advanced empires don't actually survive all that long on average. They are complex systems with lots of moving parts, and various unexpected stressors can break essential components in unexpected ways. Major changes to the labor force, migration and productivity are very frequently the type of stressor that breaks empire systems.

The EU is a form of empire, that had many flaws from it's inception. The British Empire we believed had already fallen and was on the mend after WWII, had maybe found it's place in the EU, but the reality is looking like it still had further left to go to hit rock bottom. (If we look at the map of the vote it resembles Britain circa 1700, before the rise of British colonialism.)

Likewise, in the USA the American empire has hit the peak of it's capacity for expansion and economic dominance and is starting to get a taste of what the cracks in empire look like. This truly massive scale democratic republic is a real achievement but it's unclear what happens in a system like this at this scale. We may have simply exhausted the limits of a republic to project power, expand wealth and still maintain political harmony at home. The population's awakening to these changes, coupled with feeling the stress of labor shifts, is manifesting in political upheaval.

Anyhow I'm no expert in history or government but I don't believe it's out of the question to assume this is what it feels like to be embarking into the darker bits of history. Personally, I'm accepting that Asia will become the dominant economic driver for the remainder of my life and plan on embracing that from here out

There's also the fact that a larger empire can be more easily corrupted, because nobody can pay attention to all the moving parts, and corruption once established is harder to flush out because of the size of the running systems at stake.

The individual is far less connected to the government, the larger and more diverse it gets.

> As a result, people are mad "at the system", what what we're seeing is political movements redirecting public anger at whatever target they wish. In the US, anger is being redirected at Mexicans, in the UK, apparently, it's Immigrants and Brussels.

Agreed. This is a very strange time. I think the system went not how people hoped or thought about it. We thought we'd be living in a techno-utopia, with robots giving us massages and driving us to the beach. Instead we got a large wealth concentration at top and people at the bottom wondering what happened to their pensions.

> He's being told that regaining sovereignty, or stemming the immigrant flow will "make Britain great again", but there's no logical connection between A and B

Ok but when he is being told, who tells him and does the one telling him have a plan? That is do the sneaky politician have an ulterior motive, like they need Joe the Used-to-be-factory-worker to vote this way because they hope to $x ? (I don't know what goes there where $x is).

Why can't a person be opposed to mass immigration even if it won't bring economic benefits?

I'm not in UK frankly, but I'm definitely ready to sacrifice part of my income if that would curb mass immigration.

Unfortunately, nobody ever proposed so.

Ok. I'll bite on this one. Why are you opposed to mass immigration?

First of all, nobody asked me. I feel excluded from decisions on this policy and you can see how this amplifies my hostility to it.

Because even if we have a debate on mass immigration and I lose every argument, I'm still entitled to have my vote weighted. Is it my country or whose it is?

By default I don't owe people of other countries anything. It's our common right to let them in; but it's also our common right to kindly ask them to stay outside.

That's the basic outline, and I'll try and explain my unique reservations in another comment.

UPD to the sibling comment:

It's not that I have any obligations to not be a racist.

Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. Maybe I'm racist on even days and not racist on odd.

I my country I have rights to be whatever pleases me.

On other hand, if you want me to not be a racist, or at least not act as racist, you have to tell me what's in it for me.

I admire your willingness to be open minded and ask the question, but I've asked the question in the past, and I've never gotten a straight answer. Instead I get some pat pre-package talking points, and if I dig deeper I get a confusion of ideas. And that's because the people opposed to immigration tend to be motivated by racism, but they don't want to say that, so they every other imaginable thing. It's simply impossible to have an honest conversation with someone, if they aren't willing to be honest about why they favor a particular policy.

Isn't self-interest enough of an explanation? Mass-immigration is unlikely to be a short term benefit to the host country, particularly to low skill workers in that country. Why should they oppose their own self interest?

(I'm personally a very pro-immigration American, so I'm talking about this to understand the debate not to advance any particular objective.)

Self-interest is a valid explanation. And the question you pose is a very valid statement. I am sure that immigration poses problems when it is at the scale of modern society. Not everyone shares the same values and beliefs but the optimist in me is the of the thinking that humanity is no longer the tribal, "us vs them", neanderthal who only sticks to persons who visually look like them. The United States of America was built on this idea and it thrives today.

What I've noticed is that this issue of different-ness, seems only to surface when money or resources are scarce. The global rich are getting richer and richer, but counter-intuitively, this resource hoarding is not visible to the masses, who see a huge influx of new "different" people. These people will "potentially" take their jobs and their benefits, and then they "potentially" will bomb their buildings and rape their daughters and wives, because they are the boogeyman.

What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share.

> What they don't see is that they are competing with those people not because those people are different, but because the people on top have figured out how to take everything and not share.

It is not either or. Why are there all of the sudden a lot of "different" people around, hmm strange? Is that correlated with wealth redistribution? Is there a causal relationship, or are they completely orthogonal phenomena that those who are wealthy just use to distract the masses?

I agree with wealth disparity, but I am hesitant to buy the "racism" slant here (which I think I detect. i.e. people who don't want immigrant just hate people with a different skin).

Countries and cultures still exist. Scots are different than Englishmen. They almost voted to leave as well. We don't and probably will never live as a one universal, global, happy country, all citizens of the earth, singing peace songs together, dreaming of exploring space and so on. Now, I wish it was that. Sort of a world wide cataclim or aliens invading, I don't see that happening. People have been and will be tribal. It is a pretty well ingrained instict. And people will want to preserve their tribe's identity, culture, language and so on. Perhaps many see immigrants eroding that. That doesn't have to be tied to skin color. Painting it as racism discredits and that make your argument a bit too superficial.

Even if we are to fix ethnic crime, which I doubt we would:

Why should I like the large influx of people of different culture into my country? After all, they take my voting power in the country.

Maybe I would be content with 0,1% per year influx, but 1% per year is far into the pain zone. That's the amount of people who will try to influence culture, influence decisions and policies. And I was content with whatever we already have, thank you. I would much prefer to live in Russia than in Uzbekistan. Why let people in who would reproduce culture and politics and policy of Uzbekistan here? It's less viable, otherwise they won't desire to leave their homes for better life abroad.

When you let significant minorities in the country, of course they would want to have their say. Who won't? But this means that my voting power dwindles.

Pay no attention to the dread racist guard-of-terra! His seeming reasonableness is only further proof of his duplicity!

Now to the specific. The country in question is Russia and mass immigrants mostly come from Ukraine, Caucasus and Central Asia.

People from Ukraine, and fellow Russians coming home, I have no reservations against. They're as good cultural fit as anybody already in the country. I'll make the process smoother if I could.

People from Caucasus, they're often poor cultural fit. They're first to bend laws, they're sometimes violent, they form diasporas faciliating ethnic crime and corruption. Will definitely have at least visa regime introduced with their countries, to only let people in either as tourists or on definite work/enterpreneur visas.

People from Central Asia. Those are poor countries, and less than 25 years ago they participated in ethnic cleansings against any non-title nations in their own newly-born nationalistic republics. Drove millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, Koreans etc as refugees out. Why should we turn blind eye on this? Never forget I'd say. But instead policy makers can't even implement visa regime with those countries. Many of them are also islamic, poor cultural fit, not speaking Russian, praising "traditional values". Who would like neighbours like that? What do they have to offset that?

They also avoid paying taxes, and business employing them also avoids paying taxes by never reporting people they employ. They siphon tens of billions dollars from our economy to their countries. What's there to love?

Have to repeat again that I have no obligations whatsoever to let them in. "Default Deny" sounds just right. After all, that's exactly what I'm getting WRT entering US or EU or UK.

Are you Russian ? Russia already has Muslim republics, like Bashkortostan.

Yes I am Russian.

First of all, they're (Bashkirs, Tatars) mostly "culturally muslim" - as in, while having preference for mosques and green color, they, en masse, drink wine; have no objections against drawings; equal rights, education and employment for women. Not trying to stone people dead. Good culture fit. People from Central Asia - another kind of muslim. Much less desired if you ask me.

Second, if we have something, doesn't imply we want more of it. I'm quite content with muslim staying minority.

Rather than talking about "culture fit" it's more helpful to be specific about what behaviors are causing problems. The complaints you made sound like a good reason to improve enforcement of various laws and tax collection. If a person commits a crime, the criminal should be punished; the criminal's neighbor need not be exiled.

Regarding culture fit: They group on ethnic and clan basis.

Makes easy for them to have unofficial unemployment and avoid paying taxes; makes easy for them to avoid speaking Russian, avoid blending in country's culture, even avoiding punishment for crimes. They "boil in their own pot" - as if they're still a solid fragment of country they're from. In any conflict their back their own on clan basis, you can see how this skewed against native Russians who don't have crowd to back them up.

It's not in Russian culture already. Russians are pretty atomized, families and official organization units (bureaucracy) is our thing.

Unfortunately, we have this flawed law enforcement system and are stuck with it.

It can more or less deal with Russian criminals (atomized and marginal) but immigrants' diasporas poke holes in it.

I'm afraid it's easier to fix immigration than law enforcement. Unfortunately, I have zero effect on either.

It is interesting that you got downvoted without a reason. You asked a question and it didn't seem obscene or mean. It just didn't toe the line here, and well "down with you!"

I saw someone below basically saying everyone who opposes immigration is a racist deep down. It seems people are pretty angry at the moment, so they jump straight to the "r" word. Can understand that.

Anyway, I see the point. Yeah I am immigrant as well to US. It was a very hard process and very painful, more than it needs to be. But I understand that national identity, culture, borders, are there now and will stay there. Opposing immigration is something countries can decide and should be able to decide one, so yes, I can see immigration specifically being a reason many would vote based on (well, I don't just see, they clearly did vote already).

You can be opposed to whatever you like. Voicing your sentiment will, however, shine a light upon your understanding of the world. Maybe you could ask "Why do people think that I'm a bad person if I'm against mass immigration?" Assuming this comes closer to your request, I will try to answer that. But I will have to digress a bit, so please bear with me.

I have the feeling that how you see the world is very much characterised by whether you are (what I call) an inclusionist or an exclusionist.

Let me explain what I mean by that. Since we're on HN, I will use an analogy that might be up your alley. In CS, there is something called local search [1] for optimisation problems. The basic idea is: let's say, we have a number of states and we want to find the best one. And let's say, we have a method of determining how "good" a state is. A simple approach would be to start at some state, look around at the neighbour states and pick the better one. Then we move to that state and look around again. And so on, until we're at a state that is surrounded by only less or equally "good" states.

The problem with this method is that we might end up in a local maximum or on a plateau, but we're stuck there forever. To get past that, we can choose a random state now and then. This is what simulated annealing [2] does or the mutation in genetic algorithms [3]. Even though at times we might be distracted from the best state right in front of us by following serendipity, this strategy is overall superior to the myopic, greedy strategy.

This is an interesting insight: by including something into our consideration that is most likely worse than what we already have, we achieve an overall better strategy. This is not very intuitive. Let's keep that in mind.

This concept can be applied to (we're leaving the realm of science here, but being scientific wasn't the point in the first place) our world view in general. Let's call it the inclusionist view, while the opposite would be the exclusionist view.

The exclusionist would prefer everyone to stick to the generally accepted way of life, while the inclusionist sees the need to allow deviation from the norm.

Since the insight from above is not very intuitive, the inclusionist might think that whoever is for making an end to deviation and all for following the one true normative way must be a myopic exclusionist who is too single minded to grasp the bigger picture.

If you're in the inclusionist camp, you will have had a lot of frustrating conversations with exclusionists who will insist that going with the most likely less "good" option is stupid and you're a beady eyed, gullible philanthropist. While you might come to the conclusion that the exclusionist is a myopic, uneducated, neanderthal.

If you have witnessed many political discussions, a certain pattern emerges, and you get the impression that the racists, nazis, fascists, philistines are all the outcome of exclusionism.

Now, let's go back to the original topic. Immigration is one of those topics where the views of inclusionists and exclusionists play a role. Everything is kind of fine as long as the numbers are small and the places of origin for immigrants are not too outlandish. But when someone calls for caps or selective admittance or anything else to quickly deal with "mass immigration", the inclusionist smells an exclusionist. Someone who did not grasp, the inclusionist assumes, the greater ramifications of applying broad selections, etc. The inclusionist will also be wary of not allowing the exclusionist to make too much ground, because he suspects the same shortsightedness that goes with racism.

So, this is basically why you get a negative response if you use certain words or raise topics in a certain way. I have no idea, in which camp you are or if either camp actually exists, but maybe this might provide a glimpse into the slightly elitist mindset of oh so sophisticated people like me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

Frankly, I no longer have this nagging need to be considered "a good person". I've witnessed too many biases in how people tell good people from bad, they make outright errors, even worse, they refuse to acknowlege their errors, refuse to learn.

Now, it's enough for me to bring my point across.

> Everything is kind of fine as long as the numbers are small and the places of origin for immigrants are not too outlandish

However, a) the numbers of immigrants are huge, and b) places of origin of said immigrants are worrysome. Therefore it seems that your sentiment does not apply. I was content too when numbers were tolerable. That was long past.

> "caps or selective admittance or anything else to quickly deal with "mass immigration","

Here you can't see why the problem arose. The need to deal with immigration arose long ago, maybe 15 years ago, maybe 10. Nothing were done by policy makers or "inclusionists" or who you call them. They left doors wide open, even after it was obviously leading to social stress. Fast forward 10 years, they've lost all their cred with me. The time for slow and correct measures was 10 years ago and they weren't implemented. So obviously now I'm pro-quick solutions.

And inclusionists can think all they want. They ignored my concerns for too long for me to listen to them now. They rejected dialogue first. They were also calling names like you can't help yourself not to.

UPD: "You can be opposed to whatever you like." - people will also vote on referendums and elections whatever they like, don't come worried then.

To be honest, my digressions were so long that, once I reached the topic of immigration, I kind of started glossing over the details.

The entire point, however, wasn't to discuss finer points of immigration, but give a bigger picture of the mindsets that are at work here and in other topics.

> And inclusionists can think all they want. They ignored my concerns for too long for me to listen to them now. They rejected dialogue first. They were also calling names like you can't help yourself not to.

Well, I tried to provide you with a bigger picture, explaining on what grounds dialogue might have been rejected. You asked a general question and I thought you were genuinely interested in talking about the topic on a higher level. But apparently you're just here to go through the same thoughts again and again.

In my opinion, the whole "inclusionist" versus "exclusionist" distinction is much less important compared to "pushes their agenda no matter what" versus "listens to other parties' concerns".

So it happens that proponents of mass immigration in power were firmly in the first camp. They shoved immigration down our throats and continue it to that day, and they label anybody who object as various "-ists".

That's just not healthy and there will be unavoidable repercussions in the long run.

It's much easier to argue policies with people who you previously did not screw other, and that, "screwed over", is what I feel about this situation.

In all your claims I can sense the deeply ingrained notion that, no matter what I think, voice or oppose, it's me who will have to cave and make peace on your terms. What's if it's no longer so? What's if it's you who are looking forward to several decades of your valid concerns discarded and ignored? What if wheel has turned?