I agree with everything you said, and as a Brit living in Texas, I’ve seen what happens when irrational arguments, fallacies and lies are used to stoke the fear of immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic.

The problem is that even if you could reduce all immigration to zero, it wouldn’t solve the plight of those who believe it is destroying their livelihood. Automation, globalization and rampant inequality back home are going to limit job opportunities and keep wages suppressed no matter how many illegal immigrants we toss out of the country. In the UK, Brexit is likely to make the economic situation of those who voted for it worse, not better. In the US, are hundreds of thousands of low income Americans going to flock to the fields for $12/hour instead of $8/hour? I highly doubt it.

Meanwhile I have a teacher friend whose class is full of (legal) immigrant kids living in fear of the day their older (undocumented) siblings are rounded up and taken away. I have a friend whose husband (with four US citizen kids) was told by an immigration lawyer to give up his efforts to become legal when Trump won the election because he has a DUI from 20 years ago when he was a teenager.

And it’s all so pointless. My sister has two sons. One married to a second generation British Indian woman, the other married to a third generation British Polish woman, and their wives couldn’t be more British if they tried. The same has happened to previous waves of immigrants to the United States since the nation began.

As for figuring out how to stop the fear-mongering. It’s probably not possible. Being on the left politically, I would certainly argue that an economy with strong workers rights, a national healthcare system, a fairer tax system, and a stronger safety net would reduce the circumstance that allows such fear-mongering to bear fruit, but I am not hopeful we can achieve any of those things while the increasingly far right maintains its structural advantage in the US state and federal electoral system.

I agree with everything you said, and as a Brit living in Texas, I’ve seen what happens when irrational arguments, fallacies and lies are used to stoke the fear of immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic.

The problem is that even if you could reduce all immigration to zero, it wouldn’t solve the plight of those who believe it is destroying their livelihood. Automation, globalization and rampant inequality back home are going to limit job opportunities and keep wages suppressed no matter how many illegal immigrants we toss out of the country. In the UK, Brexit is likely to make the economic situation of those who voted for it worse, not better. In the US, are hundreds of thousands of low income Americans going to flock to the fields for $12/hour instead of $8/hour? I highly doubt it.

Meanwhile I have a teacher friend whose class is full of (legal) immigrant kids living in fear of the day their older (undocumented) siblings are rounded up and taken away. I have a friend whose husband (with four US citizen kids) was told by an immigration lawyer to give up his efforts to become legal when Trump won the election because he has a DUI from 20 years ago when he was a teenager.

And it’s all so pointless. My sister has two sons. One married to a second generation British Indian woman, the other married to a third generation British Polish woman, and their wives couldn’t be more British if they tried. The same has happened to previous waves of immigrants to the United States since the nation began.

As for figuring out how to stop the fear-mongering. It’s probably not possible. Being on the left politically, I would certainly argue that an economy with strong workers rights, a national healthcare system, a fairer tax system, and a stronger safety net would reduce the circumstance that allows such fear-mongering to bear fruit, but I am not hopeful we can achieve any of those things while the increasingly far right maintains its structural advantage in the US state and federal electoral system.

Don’t be an idiot (if that’s even possible). The United States, as a signatory of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other international treaties concerning asylum seekers and refugees, has a responsibility to grant those people a fair hearing, and grant refuge for those who are genuinely in need.

Now do you see why your false equivalence is so idiotic? (Probably not, since you’re too busy up-voting your own comments.)

Seeing analogies that don’t exist is a fun strategy to hide behind when self-serving relativism is one’s guiding gospel of fear, fear-mongering, and xenophobia. Not unlike U.S. White Evangelical and Pastor Paula White who is again displaying her biblical illiteracy on a national stage.