I think we're genuinely witnessing the final desperate death rattles of race/ethnicity based nationalism, but it's a long and annoying and violent death rattle.
Technology has made the ability to physically change which place you live (transport), access information about how to speak a language used in a place (language-learning resources), communicate with people in a place even before speaking a common language (translation resources), communicate with anyone in any place (social media, e-mail, calling), set up a new place to live (IKEA, flatpack furniture, new homebuilding tech), and more all significantly quicker, cheaper, and accessible!
More than any argument about "ethnicity" and "people who look different", the core thing that creates race is that for thousands of years, you usually lived nearby to the person who shot you out of their uterus, other people shot out of the same uterus, etc. This creates ethnicity, race, nationality, etc. Now that's not as true anymore. Certainly, race will continue to exist for a few hundred years, but more than that? I'm a half-korean, quarter white australian, one eighth latvian one eighth polish person. What race do I belong to? If I have genetic progeny, what about them?
I think genuinely, housing is the only material fact about the world that lets ethnic nationalism hang on. If a place is good, and people want to go there, if we can't house them all we have to come up with some method of deciding who gets to stay and who has to leave/stay out (which ethnic nationalism is a very efficient way of doing).
That technology kind of racketed up to 100 from my perspective when people were building quarantine housing as quickly as possible during the pandemic. Unfortunately, racism will continue to exist until it gets good enough to basically render "er durr housing" arguments obsolete. (and for a good while after, but it'll lose most of its steam by then, in my opinion).
hmm housing is definitely a big problem, but borders seem a bigger issue; so many people are emotionally invested in stopping people from moving.
It makes sense, though, that people would oppose immigration. There are a lot of things the typical uninformed voter “knows” without actually knowing anything about it (like education, transport policy, energy and housing policy etc). However, anti-immigration is one that when you strip out the emotional investment in their arguments, you still have a pragmatic point underneath.
Immigration drives down wages, and I’m a bit tired of people pretending it doesn’t. If we expand immigration to include departmental outsourcing to other countries* (as is enabled by technology) you lose whole departments of businesses. Immigration has deleterious effects on the average person in the way the current economy is structured.
It only makes sense for the average worker (acting in a self serving manner) to support immigration when they own the means of production and aren’t working in wage labour (and hence don’t form competition for a wage).
I will say we have an ethical duty to accept immigration, including but not limited to those fleeing conflict zones caused by wealthier nations. I don’t think that makes a good argument to the regular working class person skeevy about immigration who has seen their real terms living standard go down significantly over the last 20 years (even if it is much above those who are trying to come here).
I would LOVE for us to be witnessing the death rattle of ethnic nationalism, but I don’t think we are. Not until immigration becomes a net positive for the average person again.
*If we strip out the emotional angle of “they’re coming here to take our jobs and women” we end up with more simple questions of labour supply, and so I feel justified bringing up outsourcing.
I think the link between immigration and wages is not simple: it’s going to differ by industry (immigration drives up demand!) and we see examples of countries with low immigration (China) that still have wages suppressed below countries with high immigration (Australia); one might equally say that high birthrates drive down wages, but that is something nobody opposed to immigration ever says.