> Shallow dismissals and low-effort responses are not in the spirit of this site; please try to better substantiate your ideas.

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50070743)

There is nothing racist about it whatsoever. Race is a canard here; it has nothing to do with the objection to mass immigration, nor is it a basis for identifying illegal immigrants, nor does it even describe what the bulk of the immigrants have in common, either in the American case or the British case. When it's clear that illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly arriving from a specific set of countries (and there are clear reasons why it would happen that way), it's nonsense to assert that there is some kind of moral failing in pointing this fact out.

Even the most "ethno-nationalist" voices in the UK are not actually saying racist things. They object to a religion because of specific cited religious tenets; and they object to some cultures and ethnicities (which don't add up to a "race" in the British construction of race, which doesn't match the American construction at all) because of specific cited cultural practices. If anyone else did or advocated for the same sorts of things, they would be opposed to it too. Further, they absolutely do not imagine some kind of solidarity of "white" people against everyone else; for heavens' sake, they don't even like the French and will happily bring up grudges from the Norman conquest era.

But even if you insist on making that out to be "racist", the English (not the "British") have a point. For all intents and purposes they are the indigenous people of the island; the Picts are long gone and they are the longest-standing survivors. The Angles and Saxons arrived approximately twice as long ago as the Maori arrived in New Zealand. They could not plausibly go back; they are not in any meaningful sense ethnically Nordic or German. They have established their own culture across over a millenium (again, the fact that they know where the "two-finger salute" comes from); and if we are applying the rules in any way that remotely resembles fair or equitable, they should have a right to preserve that culture, just like for example the Sami or Inuit. Those rights don't disappear just because one has pale skin.

As for "fear and propaganda", the harms are well documented and statistics abundant.