Lead and propaganda.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
346 points (96.8% liked)
No Stupid Questions
43554 readers
664 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Oh we've been fighting about this for centuries
Once we stopped needing cheap labor to build the railroads and mine ore and occupy native lands and farm crops and roof houses and paint walls and run the cash register at the gas station. Actually we still need immigrants for some of that in order to sustain the level of growth required to fund our retirement plans and do the jobs that we would rather not do for wages that we would rather not work for. It looks like Republicans are hoping to fuel that growth internally through reproduction among existing citizens (under the theory that kids will work for lower wages), while the democrats want to rely on immigrants. That's my theory anyway.
The interesting thing is that the US economy (in fact, even the economy worldwide) is probably gonna face a steep decline in demand of human labor in the next few decades.
The reasons include the limits to growth (i.e. the economy can't grow anymore due to natural constraints, but growth is what causes the majority of demand for human labor) and automation and AI.
Having a higher number of people in the country when there's a low demand for human labor (a.k.a. few jobs) means higher unemployment numbers, and that in turn is more expensive for the country, because the people still need resources so the country has to pay out unemployment money if it wants to avoid revolts. Now, companies face higher taxation, and everyone is worse off. If people make fewer children today and there's less immigration, both companies and citizens will be better off in 20 years from now, because they face lower unemployment rates. This insight is relatively new (because until now, supply of human labor was the constraining factor for economic growth), but interesting.
The Statue of Liberty wasn't something commissioned by the USA. It was just how one French guy saw us. The New Colossus is not law, it's a poem.
We've never really been proud of immigration. The only President with a reasonable take on immigrants was Teddy Roosevelt - and his belief was that the only path forward is full assimilation.
This was done to keep our Catholic roots in check. I'm no longer a Catholic-aligned guy as a result. My producer was Catholic-aligned and Jesuit-associated for his entire life until he started making changes he felt was right with his higher power.
They became anti-immigrant once they had kids and saw other people arriving to the boat. My sister in law's family are refugees from El Salvador. Now they are all raging Trumpers, despite half of them not being naturalized yet.
Distraction is the point.
Because immigrants don’t participate in politics. They are too busy to do actual work that creates value for the country instead of voting or being social butterflies and running campaigns.
They have always been anti-immigrant. Gor the longest time they simply tolerated it, but no more.
As for the the statue of liberty, a, it was built by the French not Americans, b, I can also happily say that I pride myself on being a great person, while in truth being a terrible peraon.
Historically, I'm quite certain that the "small" people (e.g. peasants, and such) had always had incredibly right-wing views, including tribalism (we're better than anyone else, for no reason, we just are), "hard-work" ethics, who doesn't work doesn't deserve to eat, and such.
The landlords couldn't care less about immigration. As long as the immigrants pay their taxes, the landlord is happy. Why would they bother?
It's the peasants who see their land occupied (sothat their own land's relative share decreases) who get furious at the foreigners who take their jobs and eat their food, while also possibly bringing infectious diseases and an inferior way of life.
Once we took everything from the natives fully to the west coast we stopped being keen on it.
Whenever hate can be used to divide the masses. We must be divided lest we decide that a system that protects unethically gained wealth is unethical, even if it protects ethically gained wealth.
So it turns out that the Statue of Liberty never represented the opinions of all Americans to begin with
Easier communication. Thousands of people each living far apart had no way to amplify each other. Immigrants were mostly centered around cities, thus the rural divide.
I have a take no one else has talked about. I think much of the recent hate is down to there being too many damned people, and suddenly it seems a lot of them are brown.
Young me honestly wasn't quite sure what Hispanic meant because there weren't any around. LOL, imagine my culture shock when I moved to Chicago! Then I came down to Florida, and once again, no Hispanics. They were so rare it was kinda freaky. Then Hurricane Ivan flattened us, loads of immigrants showed up to build and never left.
Now people are looking around and seeing America on the first downward trajectory since the Great Depression. They're casting about to lay blame. Know what's different? Well lookee here, millions of new brown people that weren't here before!
I don't think liberals understand just how many immigrants came across the southern border in the last 20 years. When I brought up that there was indeed a crisis at the border during the Biden admin, I got beat up here and on reddit. Y'all can stick your fingers in your collective ear, but shitloads of people were piling up to get it. It was a humanitarian crisis.
Not saying the hate is logical, but I can at least understand where it's coming from. It's a little more nuanced that screaming RACIST at everyone.
The us has always been anti illegal immigration and accepting of legal immigration. Its incredibly harmful that the 2 concepts are being combined and treated the same now.
The us has always been anti illegal immigration
The US actually made it almost the first hundred years of its history without many meaningful immigration laws
I'm sure someone will argue otherwise, but one thing commonly cited as the first US immigration law was the steerage act of 1819, which was pretty much just "you can't overcrowd your ships, you have to have enough food and water for everyone, you have to have a list of your passengers and account for anyone who died on the way"
So not really limiting immigration, more making sure that the ships bringing immigrants here were providing at least basic livable conditions for the trip.
Immigration overland was totally unregulated.
And with some minor alterations here and there, that was pretty much the state of things until the 1870s and 80s with the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Until then there really wasn't such a thing as "illegal immigration" and borders were pretty much wide-open.
To be thorough, between 1776 and the Page Act, we did have the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies acts to allow the US to deport non-citizen immigrants under certain circumstances, and we took a few steps forwards and backwards at times regarding the naturalization process, but we also had the 14th amendment and "An Act to Encourage Immigration" in there as well.
And of course after that, shit went downhill pretty damn quickly.
So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but again for almost half of US history there really wasn't any such thing as "illegal" immigration for anyone to be against (general anti-immigrant sentiments are another story)
When said immigration switched from primarily being Europeans emigrating from a post WW2 Europe, and instead became primarily brown folk coming from all the countries that the U.S. itself bombed to shit.
It's not immigration that they hate. It's brown immigration.
Never forget that.
load more comments
(2 replies)