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Comment by nextaccountic | Hacker News Reader

All I hear is that there's a subset of people that don't want immigrants at all. And for some godforsaken reason they got hold of the executive, legislative and supreme court

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>a subset of people that don't want immigrants at all.

Does anyone have data on what this percentage is? Seems like it could be 55%:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i...

“Do you want Johny Stinking Foreigner coming to this country, stealing your job while collecting welfare and raping your daughters or would you like how America used to be when there were no immigrants?”

The problem at this point (and not just the US, throughout the west), I don’t think a pollster even needs to slant their question. So many people have been taught that lens over 100+ years of politics.

It’s why I am happy to be Irish American: we never forget a slight, so I am a living vessel for the stories of every time one of my great-grandparents was treated poorly for being a dirty, non-white papist piece of jetsam.

The chain goes ever on. My Italian-Canadian aunts and uncles never forgot the Irish-Canadians who threw rocks at them on the way to school and called them wops.

For sure. I grew up in Southern New England, so Irish v Italian was a “steel sharpens steel” sort of thing.

I'd be willing to bet at least 10% of those 55% are married to or in relationships with immigrants and are going to say "Not like that!" when their loved ones are forced to leave the country. FAFO is coming for them.

And then the overwhelming remainder of those 55% very likely love talking about their Italian/Irish/Polish/Cuban/whatever heritage and see no sense of contradiction.

We’re going for round 3 of jingoist isolationist Americans not understanding how the world or their own culture and government works.

Wonder if we’ll get a third world war that we stay out of until halfway through and then pile on at the end.

That's the only conclusion I can see.

That’s a strawman. There’s wide gulfs between “I want very permissive immigration à la Canada” to “I want the US immigration system as it was under previous administrations” to “I want no immigrants”. For example, I personally want the standards for H1-Bs to be a lot higher, but would willingly grant substantially more immigrant visas to top academics and workers under EB1, EB2 and EB3 visas.

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