Others said the campaign had a darker side and stirred up fear of newcomers. Some backers of the Piddington referendum compared their fight against the asylum accommodation to the 1940 Battle of Britain against Nazi Germany.
Villager Herbert Owen, 76, said after voting on Tuesday that the independence referendum “isn’t just about Piddington,” adding: “It means everything our grandparents, our parents fought for. Today is the Battle of Britain.”
Comparing unauthorized immigration to an invasion has become increasingly common among politicians including Nigel Farage of Reform UK, and far-right groups that have been active in organizing and attending anti-immigrant protests.
What a bunch of assholes. From earlier in the article:
Residents of Piddington, which has a population of about 350…
That makes sense. Small town people need to have no say over issues pertaining to classes of people who are “different” from themselves. They’re too insulated and lack exposure to those who aren’t like them to properly recognize that they’re human beings in all the ways that they’d recognize if they knew someone from said class.
Brief story: decades ago, while I was on excellent drugs at a rave, my homophobia (thanks, Mom!) instantly disappeared when I realized the hilarious gay guy, in a group of us smoking cigarettes, was no different from me. “He just wants to take his drugs and have a good time on Saturday night,” I realized. He was no different from me!
Small town people need drugs and a good time with people unlike themselves.
What’s the problem exactly? Having immigrants at all?
Immigration is a complex social and economic problem.
And the problem is people dont’ want to acknowledge complexity because it’s hard. They’d rather vastly over simplify things, and call it bad or good. Without ever going into the policy details and their consequences.
And if you suggest that immigration is complex leftists call you racists, and rightoids think you want to exterminate the white race.
But it’s fine, it’s easier to grandstand on the internet and feel smug than actually discuss or examine the complexities of immigration, especially because it’s someone else’s problem.
But you simplified it to “the problem”. I was asking for specifics of what exactly the problem is.
the problem is how many/who immigration to allow in, and where they have to live, how much assistance/benefits will they get, etc.
then how to integrate them into your society, language learning etc.
and that’s legal immigration. and that already, has backlash, because why are these people getting so many social services that aren’t even available to your own citizens?
illegal immigration is a whole other thing. because by definition, that’s not-selective in either population, location, or anything else.
politically the problem the far left things open borders and infinite resources should exist, and the far right things immigration shoudl be disallowed entirely or only be for the rich, and no social services shoudl be given to immigrant.
Your reasoning is one of the worst thought ones I’ve read.
So your entire assertion above is assuming that everyone else doesn’t have to deal with the problem of immigration, so they can throw peanuts from afar without dealing with that problem?
I’m pretty sure everyone here lives somewhere with immigrants. So that’s a strange thing to accuse everyone else of.
There are special interest funds and help for all kinds of groups, private and public. Citizens have more social services that aren’t available to all immigrants by default. There has never been any data to support this assertion that immigrants receive the benefit of more social funds than citizens.
I’m pretty sure everyone here lives somewhere with immigrants.
That’s where youre’ totally wrong. immigrates tend to congregate in specific areas, often for their own normal reasons. They are not ‘evenly distributed’ across the country. Nor, should they be.
It’s a complex problem that everyone here is trying to reduce to moral issue, which tells me they have no clue what they are talking about and have never dealt with it. They just want to grandstand about it.
But having a large number of immigrants dumped in your town/city has lots of problems and acknowledign and protesting that isn’t horrible and racist.
Do they have a special private fund? In USA over here, we just pass a special budget and drop millions into housing and helping immigrants, meanwhile when it comes to providing social services for own citizens, all the sudden the money isn’t available… my own state does this all the time and people are rightfully outraged. But at least my state is competent enough to distribute immigration populations and not dump them all on a single town/city, or if there is a problem they will re-locate them to a more suitable area and there are areas that are more than happy to have them. Though… you’d quickly notice none of this areas are wealthy and white… it’s all the poorer cities/towns that are desperate for population growth because they’d be shrinking if it weren’t for immigration.
There is plenty of data for that in the USA. I can’t speak to the UK. But if you allocate a 10 million for special immigration funding… and then cut school health/budgets… what would you call that? why is that 10 million not going to help the school/healthcare budgets? also services… which will be used by the immigrants… that’s the issue. we only have so many resources and people naturally will be pissed off if you are cutting their budgets will giving money to immigrants who just got here and may or may not even end up part of the population.
So you’re refining your accusation to saying that people who looking down on this town for being excessively anti-immigrant are something like bumfuck rural types who don’t live anywhere near immigrants? You might have things backwards here.
How would it tell you that?
This town didn’t hold a protest, did they.
What state holds socialist policies for immigrants only and none for its citizens?
A right wing disinformation campaign.
It’s particularly illegal immigrants. Essentially once someone disregards the immigration system, then their likelihood of disregarding other laws is dramatically increased.
Legal immigrants also hate this happening as well, as they work hard to get a visa and then their reputation gets annihilated by freeloaders and possibly criminals or nuisances escaping repercussions abroad.
Gonna need some citations on the claim that illegal immigrants break the law more than legal immigrants or even natural-born citizens.
Another citation for most illegal immigrants being freeloaders too considering their illegal status makes freeloading much more difficult.
Illegal immigrants are given benefits such as an allowance and accommodation.
https://fullfact.org/immigration/asylum-seeker-support-faqs/#one
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/major-law-change-to-criminalise-small-boat-smuggler-ads
The ONS doesn’t collect statistics on crime and immigration status
So then there’s no basis to paint the entire group as criminals if there is no data to support that claim.
And that benefit says it’s for asylum seekers, not illegal immigrants.
I have anecdotal experience. People who pay human traffickers to illegally bring them from one safe country to another, and then abuse the asylum system should be treated like criminals, yes.
Anecdotal experience is not enough to make a sweeping statement on a whole population.
The logic is, though. Someone who abuses and exploits systems to get to where they are shouldn’t be trusted.