• ArchRecord@lemm.ee
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    28 days ago

    A few things.

    1. Fear of the “other,” with the “other” being people who don’t look like they do (with them usually being insulated within their non ethnically diverse social groups) and the fact that they’ve repeatedly seen these “other” people associated with traits that are undesirable through media.
    2. False history, primarily a belief that stems from the prior point, with the assumption that white people are more “moral” or “civilized,” and that the nation was better before things like racial integration, something that they’ve repeatedly been made to believe through, again, heavily biased media, and inaccurate historical portrayals of different cultures.
    3. Misdirected blame for negative factors in our society, primarily by right wing media and talking heads like Trump, that casts blame for issues specifically on certain racial groups. (i.e. it’s not that we don’t fund our welfare programs enough, it’s that “they are taking welfare payments and being lazy!”)
    4. “Efficiency,” in the sense that they believe having less of these “freeloaders” will allow us to broadly spend more of our money/time/resources on what “matters” (white people) without understanding things like, y’know, the fact immigrants provide more in taxes than the average American overall since they don’t receive the same amount of benefits back from things like our welfare system.
    5. Race-based nationalism that leads them to believe that they are the only people that are “supposed” to live here in America, or the only ones that “deserve” it. If you look at how they often classify immigration, or even black people simply moving in to traditionally white areas as an “invasion,” you can see how they don’t exactly view these people as members of their own nation, but rather, some outside group.
    • AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
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      28 days ago

      OK but I mean, I grew up in a Reaganite republican household. I’ve heard lots of crazy stuff for decades. Widespread deportation is a pretty new policy goal and a few people in the party seem obsessed with it. It’s like the wall, insofar as it’s a big dramatic thing that’s largely unworkable. However, it’s pretty fucking cruel.

      So like where did this come from? Because I think if you talked to a Republican in 2012 and asked about mass-deporting people, it’d seem like a very fringe idea. 2004? They’d say “maybe people from terrorist countries”, which is at least based on some real stuff going on.

      2000? They’d think you were making fun of them