I travel quite a bit and always encourage / force the people with me to visit museums and cultural highlights of the location because the truth is that only by being in a new city/state/country can you expand your horizons. The only thing I see coming from this anti tourist attitude is more xenophobia from residents and ignorance from would be travelers.
I honestly can't imagine people learning history just by scrapping wikipedia pages and not actually going to the sites that history happened.
I went to Venice during the Winter and the reality is that if it wasn't for tourists the city would be half empty outside of hyper wealthy individuals who own a vacation home there, it's a shame that every other store was a souvenir store but the only other stores there seemed to be Luxury Brand stores that probably wouldn't exist either.
I don't know, I come from a country that thrives on tourism and I definitely understand the hostility, but in the end of the day many cities wouldn't exist without this new wave of low cost tourism.
Want to see where the French Revolution happened? Sorry, Haussmann blew it up and built today's Paris on the rubble. Venice? OK, a few bits of St Mark's basin were there when the galleys came back from the crusades. Dare you to say which bits. Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution? Nup, their Palace of Westminster burnt down in the 19th Century. Imperial China? It fell down and was rebuilt with every earthquake.
Archeologists can go to these places, but they have to work hard for it.
One of the essays in Parkinson's Law turns this into a law of nature. When the grand parliament house was built, parliament no longer mattered, and the country was really run from a dingy shed out the back. That shed was later demolished and a well-appointed cabinet room built in its place, but by that time cabinet no longer mattered, and the country was run by a king.
On the other hand, visiting exotic places makes me curious about how they got that way, which is one way to discover history.
FYI, it shouldn't be surprising that replacing critical words can change the meaning of a sentence.
In this case, it's a partially successful analogy. Both mass tourist and immigrants travel to foreign lands, but one of them does so optionally while the other typically does so out of real or perceived necessity.
That's a big leap there though, ignoring the context and intent of the quote. The main issue expressed there is the mindless greed of the "mass tourist" when visiting these places, not truly viisting them to be temporarily part of the magnificence, but to use it to boost their own ego and tick a notch in some list. The intent of the immigrant is for survival and better standards of living, the intent of this kind of "mass tourist" is superficial consumption, which is what he's warning against.
As when home, a spirit of joy and generosity is the best way to go about going to other places.
People have found other ways to broaden their horizon in the past.