Quickie: It’s Victim Blaming and It’s Racist

The comment that influx of migrants and refugees disproportionately affects the poor is actually and demonstrably false. The biggest increase I saw to my ODSP came around when Canada accepted a large contingent of Syrian and Somali refugees.

In addition, historically, forced improvements to social safety nets to deal with the sudden influx of new users actually strengthen those safety nets and tend to improve services for existing citizens and users of those services.

Where it does affect the poor is when conservatives make cuts to those social safety nets, then blame it on refugees. It’s literally them taking food out of our mouths, then blaming it on the person starving next to us. It’s a diversionary tactic that allows politicians to redirect the anger legitimately directed at them [the service cutting politicians] towards a more vulnerable population by playing on existing, unacknowledged, ignored, and normalized social racism.

It’s practically a political cartoon of someone physically stealing something from you in front of you then pointing at another person saying, “hey, they look different than you, clearly they must have stolen it.” without even bothering to hide what they’re doing.

To blame an influx of refugees for a rise in white supremacist sentiments is literally to blame the victims of racism for the existence of racism. That racism was already present, it just wasn’t talked about or more accurately was claimed to no longer be a problem despite all evidence to the contrary, making it easy for anyone to harness those sentiments for political gain.

It’s victim blaming, and it’s racist.

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Quickie: It’s Victim Blaming and It’s Racist
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2 thoughts on “Quickie: It’s Victim Blaming and It’s Racist

  1. 1

    The real problem is the world is overpopulated, and migration is happening, flow is from dense populated to less dense populated, but still overpopulated. When we consider Co2 rise as the limiting long term factor, the earth will withstand 1960’s level of Co2 output long term. We are so far above that level that we humans are screwed. Long term, our population level must be about 1/2 of today’s. The sixth extinction is coming; the remaining humans will found the next population, maybe. So these issues of immigration do not give me concern. It is nothing to that which is coming.

    1. 1.1

      So I used to believe this overpopulation myth, but after several years of seeing the argument deconstructed both in university classes and several articles, I was forced to re-evaluate my opinion.

      The idea behind overpopulation is that our planet doesn’t have enough resources to keep alive the population of the globe. That because of this resources are lacking and so people starve or can’t get access to what they need to survive.

      Various analyses though of global resources actually show that we are quite far from that state. Take for example food as a resource. The amount of perfectly edible food being thrown away on a daily basis would be enough to feed every starving person on the planet and then some. This food isn’t thrown away because there is anything wrong with it, but because it wasn’t sold. The lacking resources isn’t food, or the stuff necessary to survival provided by the earth, but rather certain people lacking an item to which we’ve arbitrarily assigned a value to to allow for exchange towards those necessities.

      Consider housing. Currently in the United States there are enough unoccupied, vacant, and otherwise currently not being used by anyone else homes to give every single homeless person, 6 houses. Again, the housing shortage is not because of a lack of housing, but a lack of ability to afford housing.

      Many of the countries with the highest rates of starvation actually have good farm land, but that land isn’t accessible to the citizenry but is instead appropriated for corporate use. Take Bananas for example. Banana plantations take over the majority of good land for growing bananas for Europe and North America. The people who live in these countries have no land for use for their own food growth. The cost of imported foods, and those being sold by the same plantations, are much more expensive and not affordable to the people being underpaid by those companies, so they starve. In most places like this, the government is often paid by these corporations to maintain this system.

      A major environmental disaster is more likely, but once again this isn’t because of overcrowding but because we literally have many different governments, basically globally, to prevent them imposing mandatory environmental standards that would actually help stop, slow down, and eventually potentially start to reverse some of the effects. The people involved in helping keep these legislations in place know they can afford to survive or avoid most of the consequences of the eventual effects, or that they won’t likely be alive anymore once they hit. In order to continue getting to take advantage of the massive accumulation of wealth this affords them, they need people to believe the problem is actually overpopulation, because this creates a psychological receptiveness towards racist, ableist, and other supremacist type biases. It literally creates a sense that everyone else on this planet is a threat to your own long-term survival and so it’s a little easier to ignore when our governments commit war crimes against refugees and our own citizenry. When our governments gut social safety systems that literally kill hundreds of people every year in our own countries.

      And your own comment proves it because you say yourself:
      “So these issues of immigration do not give me concern. It is nothing to that which is coming.”

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