> the immigration issue that clearly is forefront on the minds of such AFD voters,

Let's be real: this "issue" is a strawman. It doesn't really exist, especially in that part of Germany. Just like pretty much everywhere else, the German anti-immigrant far right is strongest in the areas with the fewest immigrants.

This is not to say that the wave of immigration that is now more than 10 years past didn't have its challenges, and they were downplayed by some.

But at its core, the immigration scare is just the classic playbook of offering simple but wrong explanations to distract from the class warfare that's being waged by the wealthy.

Ideally, we'd turn down the temperature and have patient conversations, but the media environment was made very counterproductive over the last few decades.