My father in law, a very right wing italian. Me, a foreigner living in Italy for quite some time now.
The way he managed to justify the hatred towards a generic "them" while accepting people like me is a simple trick (I don't know if he came to this conclusion all by himself or with the help of the right wing intellectual class that concoct new tricks every day in the newspapers he reads):
He says that these dirty immigrants should go away because there are many criminals. Sure, he says, there are fine people like you, but they are an exception.
I object that there are plenty of Italian criminals, and I even try to find data to debunk his claims that more than half of Italian jails are filled up with immigrants (he claims he got those facts from the aforementioned newspapers).
But then he just drops his "get out of jail card" and says "ok, sure, we also have plenty of criminals, thieves, rapists, etc; but they are OUR criminals, OUR thieves, OUR rapists; we have to keep them, they are OUR people; I don't want those OTHER people coming here and doing those bad things, we already have our own to deal with".
It's all about the absolute certainty that most of the immigrants are here with the explicit intent of doing harm. Normal laws shouldn't apply to them, he says. If you're an immigrant and it looks like you may have done something bad, immediate deportation; the current laws are too lax, he says. they are good for italians, of course, because God forbid his daughter gets arrested just because she superficially looks like somebody who committed a crime, but it's ok for THEM to be treated like that ...
... Because ....
because he doesn't know them. He never met THEM. Every time he met an immigrant that immigrant became a PERSON and once that became a person it no longer became one of THEM.
That's why he's perfectly fine with the Albanian housekeeper, the Croatian son in law, the Turkish mechanic, ....
They all are fine people who are not the dirty criminals the newspapers he reads keep talking about