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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:

Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).

Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.

We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!