Michael Everett wrote:Immigration increases the demand for homes, school places, hospital beds etc etc. If a country has limited resources to provide such things, then cutting down on immigration is sensible since it buys more time to find ways of expanding said resources, increasing the chances of finding a solution.
This sounds like a fair point, but seems a bit bogus to me.
Not every immigrant needs a hospital bed or a place in a classroom immediately; since most immigration happens at somewhat steady rates (excluding wars or natural disasters for the moment), any momentary overflow can be mitigated over time.
In cases where people are fleeing exceptional circumstances (i.e. wars, natural disasters), your point is more valid, but in those cases (as happened with Syria), refugees can be channelled to a variety of countries; no single country needs to take in all refugees.
Immigrants themselves generally fall into one of four categories, although there can be and often is significant overlap.
The first is the War-zone Immigrant. Forced to leave their home due to violence, they seek a more peaceful place to settle down where they won't wake up dead simply because they were the wrong color/religion/ethnic minority.
The second is the Working Immigrant. These are the ones who seek to create a new life for themselves via their own efforts and abilities. A significant percentage of doctors and nurses in the NHS fall into this.
The third is the Family Immigrant. The husband/wife/child of the one moving, who comes along with them.
The fourth type is the one that unfortunately gives rise to the negative stereotype. The Parasitic Immigrant. Also sometimes called the Economic Migrant (a misnomer, the EM is actually a type 2), the Parasitic Immigrant is one that either claims money from the government because they can or engages in criminal activity detrimental to the country that they are in.
I wonder how many Type 4 immigrants actually do exist though. As far as I can tell from german studies of syrian refugees, there are almost none of those.
While the first three types are generally to be welcomed (barring significant resource-allocation issues as mentioned before), it is the fourth type that makes the news in ways that tars the whole concept of Immigration with the muck of theft, murder, rape and drug-dealing. As such, many people have come to equate the concept of Immigrant as being synonymous with the Parasitic Immigrant subgroup, which is wrong but sadly a very easy mistake to make.
Do they make the news, or do the news make them?
The closest I have to objective data on the issue seems to imply that outrage over immigrant crime is just like outrage over welfare parasites: A few statistical outliers that are overexaggerated, presented in the worst possible light and then disseminated over unchecked channels.
Overall, I stand by my point: In the absence of genuine issues of resource allocation (which aren't really a factor in first-world countries), being anti-immigrant carries within itself a seed of racism.