This is happening everywhere. General public is unable to fact check things on social media and political interests take full advantage of it.

Not even a uniquely Anglo thing tbh. During the great refugee crisis of whatever the fuck year, Estonians got all riled up too. It spawned our very own ultranationalist conservative party (which of course spouts all the same nonsense as Trump for some reason), which was very popular for a while - until they got enough seats in the parliament and some government positions, and everyone figured out they're not improving this - now they're no longer the most popular party at least, but still more popular than I'd like. People were truly hateful, because tens of thousands of Muslims were going to overflow our tiny country!

So the only real data I can find on how many refugees we've received is from a non-profit called the Estonian Refugee Council, which says that between 1997 and 2021, 603 people were given refugee status, with the biggest countries of origin being Syria (199), Ukraine (93), Russia (66) and Iraq (42). This is over the course of 24 years, so not even just the refugee crisis itself, which was something like 2015-2016 I think? Even if all 603 actually came in one year, that's not a lot of people even for our tiny country of 1.3 million. We actually have a much bigger problem with Russians than Muslims (by which I don't mean that Russians in general are a problem, but that there is a sizable subsection of Russians who think we still live in the Soviet Union, only consume Russian state media, refuse to learn the Estonian language, etc. Of course this group is shrinking because younger people tend to be more integrated.)

But people are always gonna hate. Conservatives just gotta throw bait and their voters eat it up :/

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