whereas if an american says it, it gets explained way as: 'they are a racist protectionist bigot'.
In Europe by contrast most nations are defined by their history. There is a certain nativism in European thought that can't really exist in the same way in the US since a vast majority of the population emigrated within the last few centuries, and in many cases much more recently.
These are superficial examples but you catch my drift.
In any case, both migration and temporary visitors (tourists) only works in balance. I think virtually everyone recognises that basic truth. But what constitutes balance is a matter of opinion, and some of these opinions are definitely driven by racism.
I agree that the people complaining the loudest often employ ugly arguments, but the crux of both the anti tourism and anti immigration arguments seem to be "There are lots of people in my city who don't look or speak like me and I don't like the way they act." As you said, it's a matter of balance, but I think most of the anti immigration people are closer in opinion to the anti tourism people than the anti tourism people would care to admit. We don't really get to choose how tourists or immigrants behave, they get the same freedoms as locals, and that includes the freedom to be rude with suitcases and speak Chinese unapologetically. Basically everyone is ok with immigrants provided they meet a bunch of qualifications that make them much less foreign, that's not exactly extreme open mindedness. In the US, it's often the people accused of being racist who say they don't mind immigration at all if the immigrants adopt American customs and learn English.
I also don't really see a difference between complaining about a street full of gift shops or complaining about a street full of llanteras.
These are complex issues, and I don't pretend to know the answer, but I don't know if it's fair to generalize the professed desire to preserve one's community into the category of xenophobia and racism.
And I completely agree that it's not fair to categorize it completely as xenophobia and racism. I was just agreeing with the guy above that I don't think it's fair that the anti immigrant stance gets categorized that way and the anti tourism stance gets lauded as a sort of preservation.
And while I don't fault the people who want to preserve their communities, once new people start showing up, your options are
1) to require that they adopt your culture and language, which strikes a lot of people as not really ok, especially if you are of the persuasion that cultures are something to be preserved. I feel like the counter to this is that local communities have a culture that should be preserved too, but I think we all subconsciously rank cultures. Tourists lose to everyone, tech employees lose to almost everyone (but they have enough money that they still move in), and I personally think that there are parts of American culture that maybe Baby Boomers consider intrinsic but a lot of younger people consider "not culture" (like... I don't know... Certain hamburger restaurants, I apologize for the dumb example) and that's where culture rankings get confused and people start getting called racist. There are little towns in the Midwest with cultures that are pretty marginalized (like the whole region being called flyover country) and when these people want to preserve their culture against anyone else's, they are often called racist, mostly independent of their sincerity in wanting to protect their culture. Like Googlers, their culture is less.
2) Or you can just not let in people who have different cultures, which will very often end up being explicitly racist in areas where the population is homogenous.
3) Or you can let in so very few immigrants that they don't change the character of a place, but over a country the size of the US, there's still more than enough immigrants that if they decide they want to live near people with similar cultures they can displace the locals in fairly large towns (note: these are not wealthy people).
4) or you can let in most everyone amd let them act how they want, within some broad bounds, and you get wholesale change in a lot of communities.
As someone from the Seattle area, I've seen parts of Seattle get gentrified, some parts that I knew before, and while I can commiserate with the locals that the rising rent sucks and the character of the places have changed, I also feel like the people moving in are just trying to live their lives. In order to feel the anger that the locals feel, I have to convince myself that the tech employees are somehow worse than me, but I can't. They're just people trying to live someplace cool.
The same thing is happening in Portland, and there are some signs around Portland that are really mean, directed at people moving up from California, and if they were directed at immigrants they would most definitely be xenophobic and racist. Once again, I totally understand the sentiment, the place they grew up is changing dramatically and losing a lot of the character that they loved. But at the end of the day, you can either go with it or you can tell the people moving in that their culture is less than yours so they need to either change or stop coming.
The article I linked above seems like it could be the best suggestion for dealing with this. It seems like we need to do our best to make room for everyone, while also finding a way to preserve local culture without having to make value judgements about whose culture is worth preserving.
Edit: redreading my comment I know that I'm really mixing together gentrification and immigration, but I guess I just don't really see a giant distinction. It's easier to take sides in gentrification and tourism because the newcomers are richer and less sympathetic, but they're still just people who are different. Now, economic inequality is a different issue that's connected to both, but in my mind a discussion about immigration and gentrification is more about the free movement of people.
At the same time, I'm not sure that truly unfettered freedom of movement would create a world which we actually want. For instance, if all border enforcement disappeared tomorrow, I don't see how there wouldn't be a mass immigration from regions at the bottom of the development index toward those at the top. And I would imagine the result of that would be to torpedo the cost of labour, and put stress on the social systems in those developed countries. I would imagine the wealthy would be just fine, but the middle class would be all but erased globally. So while I don't necessarily like the idea of boarders and exclusion, at some level I don't see how healthy and prosperous communities/cultures/societies can preserve their health and prosperity without having some filtering mechanism.
And as far as the options you give, I would agree with you in broad terms that we should strive to allow people to preserve what's unique and interesting about their cultures when they move into our communities (option 4), but the truth is there are a lot of gray areas and there will probably always have to be some of #1 as well.
For example, lets say that there is a population which moves into your neighborhood in Seattle which doesn't believe in vaccinating their kids, and now your kids who go to the same school are at risk of getting the measles. Is that enforcing your cultural superiority to insist that they get vaccinations against their belief system?
Or say there are people moving into your neighborhood who strongly reject homosexuality in their culture, and now your gay friends have to deal with dirty looks when they walk down the street holding hands in their own neighborhood. Should you just accept this as a form of cultural diversity?
So I think what I'm trying to say is that it's a nice idea to say we should open the borders and live and let live, but it's not as simple as that. A lot of us would probably agree that we're happy if people who share mostly the same values as us, and are of a similar socioeconomic strata come and bring their food, music, maybe even their language. But when it comes to real-world migrations I think there are a lot of grey areas, and we all have to draw the line somewhere as far as what should be accept as far as changes in our communities, but there's a lot of disagreement and negotiation involved in exactly where that line should be.
Anyway, like I say I don't know the answers, and it's a topic I struggle with philosophically.
What OP did say was, if they don't want you visiting, they certainly don't want you saying. And that may be true for some, sure, but I've said it certainly isn't necessarily true. And it's precisely because for very few people in the anti-tourism movement it's driven by being anti-foreign, it's a question of balance.
That may well be true for anti-immigrant movement, as well. But there's no denying that part of this movement wouldn't accept, view or treat any degree of foreigners as welcome and equal. The same can't be said for people who are frustrated by mass tourism.
There's a great deal of difference, and it hinges on time.
If your plan for visiting is "get the cheapest one-day return flight from Wherever, binge drink all night with your buddies, retch it up en route to airport and sleep on the return flight," all you care about is the cheap booze - literally nothing else matters (yes, this is a significant set of tourists around here).
Then you get the other tourists who actually come for something else spend money in addition to using the infrastructure. That is normal, albeit with major scaling problems (there's the issue - "don't have enough space to put all the tourists coming to see the Major Must-See Sights, as those aren't inflatable"). Those care about the appearance NOW ("people retching on public transport? How revolting!").
And then you get the normal city traffic - with locals, expats, and whoever else actually lives here. And those care about quality of life in long term ("what good is public transport, if it efficiently gets you into a city center that's devoid of actual life, only with a disneylandesque imitation? Will I want to live in such city in 5 years? What do I want to change?").
In other words, the longer you're planning to visit, the more probable it is that you'll be nicer about it, because you'll be expecting similar behavior in return. If you just pass through: eh well, break that window, piss in the street, kick that dog - not likely anyone will catch you within the remaining four hours. Note that this doesn't have any relation to whence the tourists are coming - the behavior correlates very closely with the length of the stay, be it an just-out-of-town sports team (common) or a stag party from the UK (also common).