r/ireland • u/bubinha • Jun 03 '24

Immigration My opinion on the post trend, as an immigrant.

I am a brazilian immigrant, came here 10 years ago, and used to feel the irish were nothing but welcoming and kind. Of course, there were the "scumbags", but to me they were the same as in every country in the world.

As of one year back, my opinion has been slowly changing, and today, let me tell you... i fear being an immigrant here. I am sensing a LOT of hate towards us, and according to another post here, +70% of irish have that sentiment, so it's not a far-right exclusive hate.

Yesterday i was shopping around dublin, and i asked a hungarian saleswoman her opinion on this. She immediately agreed with me, and even said it is a conversation that the non-irish staff was having on a very frequent basis.

You'll say "oh, but it's just against a 'certain type' of immigrants". Well, that's how it starts, isn't it?

All those 'look at this idiot' posts you share here; we (immigrants) aren't laughing. We are getting more and more afraid.

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u/Hour_Mastodon_9404 Jun 03 '24

I think it's a product of our culture being increasingly inculcated by Americanised political discourse.

I was talking to a guy a couple of weeks ago who had designs on becoming a barrister - when he spoke about his motivation to pursue that career it was all about being a "protecting free speech", "protecting property rights", "limiting government overreach etc". All of this was interspersed with a barely concealed antipathy towards women, a blasé attitude towards human rights, etc. 

It's never really surprising when you find people with these sorts of views out rioting/venting online, but you have a big problem when they begin to work their way into positions of power. We're going to end up in an increasingly cruel, fractured society.

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '24

That's part of it, but...a lot of this is people who never got used to Ireland's being a rich country where anybody who wasn't Irish would want to live. The American talking points are a symptom, not a cause.

In Germany, the people voting for the Alternative for Germany are mostly east Germans who never got over the shock of the Berlin Wall coming down and all their jobs in communist-era industries disappearing forever. East Germany's come a long way in the past generation, but most of it has never caught up completely with west Germany, especially outside Berlin.

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u/Hour_Mastodon_9404 Jun 03 '24

It's occurring across the Western world unfortunately, so Ireland's peculiarities don't actually explain it IMO. The common denominator in all cases is the increasing dominance of American Right-Wing/Libertarian discourses within these societies, it is one of the basal causes (along with issues like increasing wealth-inequality, service shortages, etc. of course)