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Notes -
Obviously there are different tiers of the anti-immigration position that include various forms of nativism and not-nativism.
What is likely, though, is that most Western Europeans would probably have quietly acquiesced to mass immigration and demographic change without any major drama if the migrants had been, say, all Vietnamese or Filipino. Not because the nativist position would have been ‘disproven’, but because there would be none of these extreme staccato incidents of terrorist violence, things like Rotherham, Charlie Hebdo etc that draw a great deal of public attention.
In the US the majority of the public are still relatively torn on mass immigration, and the large scale deportation of most legal immigrants, let alone actually stripping naturalised migrants of citizenship, is an extreme fringe position. In Canada the public only really turned after they started importing pretty much the entirety of the Punjab at like 2% of the whole population per year.
There isn’t a huge (foreign) religion/race-neutral nativist constituency in most Western countries, meaning the population that wants everyone gone regardless of who they are, how they act and what they believe. Even in Iberia where there’s been huge legal immigration (often of people who are rather far from being of pure euro descent) from Latin America almost all anti-immigrant hostility is directed towards migrants from the Islamic world.
Counterpoint: there seems to be a massive backlash to migration in Canada from Indian immigrants, and that is not caused by crime or terrorism by Indian migrants.
What's happening is the European groups, too, take the political playbook from US Conservatives. "We're not racist (that would be evil!) we just think radical Islam is bad mmkaay." But that is downstream of the political pressures of liberal hegemony, there's a practical reason it centers on a religious critique of migration rather than a racial critique of migration.
Remigration strikes a more nativist cord than it does a purely anti-Islamic cord.
I think in the counterfactual where the majority of recent non-European migrants to Europe aren’t from the Islamic world is one in which anti immigration sentiment is far lower. As far as Canada goes, they did the equivalent of the US importing like 7m Indians a year several years in a row, which is very unusual even by Western mass immigration standards.
Before 2020, Canadians didn’t seem to care much about immigration, Trudeau won a landslide, and there had been mass immigration of Chinese and Indians for at least 25 years.
Depending on whether you think they are Europeans or not, you have a non-counterfactual point of comparison: Spain has had tons of immigration from Latin America, and while there has obviously been some backlash, it doesn't seem to be as strong as in the rest of Europe.
Latin Americans are already Spanish-speaking Catholics, so you'd expect them to be more culturally similar and willing to integrate when they're not.
They are also themselves largely Spanish, so immigrants with actual Spanish ancestry causing less trouble than purely non-European immigrants is proof of the DR perspective, not the other way around.
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Counter counterpoint- they're Indian. Mexican and Ukrainian and Vietnamese immigrants would have gotten away with it.
Minor counter counter counterpoint
There is some minor hostility to Ukrainians in Poland. But it is far from widespread and that is after massive shock migration due to war.
Though if 4% of country would be imported from Syria/Libya/Turkey/Nigeria/Russia/China/etc within months then reaction would be much poorer then welcoming then minor hostility months/years later.
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