Decades of talkings heads offering an explanation for rural decline, that’s how. Look back to Rush Limbaugh and his predecessors.

The irony is rampant immigration (and our tolerance to it) was an economic miracle for the US, an envy of the world. We’d be facing a population cliff like S Korea, Japan, China or Russia without it. But now that’s coming for us too :(

Because any kind of minority is inferior to white straight people and they're the reason for every ill in the world today.

It's truly just racism. It's worked for 4000 years, since the establishment of civilizations.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - LBJ

Well you see, they are coming here to steal all our jobs but they are also jobless losers stealing all our welfare

Easy.

There is a huge portion of the country, about 1/3, that knows they aren't living the American dream, but they work hard and don't understand why.

Then, someone tells them something slightly true. That there's not enough pie to go around (semi-true), and that the reason there's not enough pie is all the immigrants and freeloaders who aren't working and are taking handouts (false).

What they aren't told is there could be enough pie to go around, if the top 1% was willing to share. They aren't. And they now control ~35% of wealth in the USA.

And then the top 1% uses that extra capital to tell that 1/3 of people that their Hispanic neighbor is the problem.

Racism

My favorite is when MAGAts claim immigrants are taking our jobs, while also claiming immigrants are sucking off the government teat getting free rent, healthcare ect because they are too lazy to work. Schrödinger's immigrant.

You can't think of a single thing an immigrant has made worse?

Then you must not heard of Elon Musk.

Racism.

It puts downward pressure on wages. That pressure is way overblown by Republicans and there are plenty of solutions to address it that don't involve sending icestapo in to break up families though.

Pretending that this pressure doesn't exist just makes people like us who want to stop this seem out of touch to the normal person who has concerns about immigration, which the election showed is a very large chunk of Americans and westerners in general.

These concerns should be addressed by showing the relative magnitude of the problem compared to benefits gained from immigration along with solutions for stagnating wages, not outright dismissal.

How has immigration affected the average voter?

Tasty ethnic food. There are tasty tacos around, some good Pho, there was an Ethiopian place around here, and tabouli with BBQ.

The remaining Caribbean place around here is really disappointing and the pulled pork is dry, so there is that.

People hardly ever bring up how any company that knowingly hires illegal immigrants should be fined out of business. But of course it’s the workers that must face the consequences.

The explanation is racism.

Illegals are KILLING People!

-Supporters of ICE!

I live in Canada. While it is not the fault of individual immigrants, even the Government of Canada and big banks have admitted that abuse of the International Student and TFW programs has put a lot of strain of public infrastructure and housing supply and has suppressed wages. These issues have absolutely objectively affected the average Canadian.

Every now and then you get someone on social media try to be smart and smugly say something like, "International Students can't afford to buy a house. Explain to me how they're driving up the cost of housing." But they fail to realise it increases demand for rentals, and people buy single family homes to rent the rooms to those students, and so the demand for those rentals drives up the cost of houses.

You can acknowledge that not all immigration is good without blaming individual immigrants themselves. I'm always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don't understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy.

They have to look at brown people

1. They are willing to work for less than a normal American living wage. This reduces the amount that an American can work for for the same job. Globalists love this.
2. They bring and establish a different culture eroding a way of life that is considered American.

Those are two things I think someone might say about immigrants. Additionally, there's general disdain for the poor and many immigrants come here to escape worse poverty.

there are several immigrants that made things worst: melania, THIEL, musk, cruz, . just not the ones that came with no money.

Theoretically, it decreases the value of labor, but there's so many better solutions to that problem.

The main thing immigrants bring is change. Change to the culture, the language and all of that. In general, people don't like change. But it is well established that not changing means a culture will be left behind.

My brother, who dropped out of school, lays carpet. He is very mad about immigrants "takin' our jerbs". He is also not a very good employee and miserably failed when he tried to start his own business...he wanted to be the boss without doing any work himeself... I imagine most people have made poor life choices and just need someone to blame.

I had a pretty funny discussion where someone was like "they're bussing them in so they vote democrat!" And I was like, but they're not registered to vote. "Well the democrats want to change that." But most immigrants lean heavily republican, and are anti immigration as well, sort of a pull up the ladder behind you thing. "Well because even they know what the democrats are doing is stupid!"

And then 5 minutes later they're saying the first line, when they just agreed the exact opposite is true... it's like the facts are only true if it supports the argument that they're making at that exact instant

Most of the things people listed in this comment section isn't a problem with immigration, but a problem with greedy rich people. Immigrants just get falsely labeled with these problems. Chop off the heads of the rich along with their entire bloodline and we'd have a lot less issues.

All my favorite food and culture comes from regions I am not native.

Well, large tech corporations often cut costs by falsely listing impossible to meet job descriptions and then use that to ask the government for an excuse to hire a foreign worker, who they will hire despite not meeting the job descriptions either, but is willing to work for a fraction of what the domestic worker can afford to live on.

So there is that

But that's not the fault of those immigrants, who are just looking for a better opportunity; that's on the corporations abusing a system that is supposed to improve the domestic economy by bringing in top talent to American industry, not by displacing domestic employees and depressing wages.

And uh, also, the conservative wing and the administration isn't really upset about that at all, either.

They and their families are operating convenience stores 24/7 for about $5/hr because existing Americans refuse to experience this thankless task!
Oh noes!

Surpressed wages. Immigration is just a consequence of the bourgeoisie war against the proletariat. It works double for them because they can blame the immigrants that they bring in for people's problems and can use them to make those problems worse.

You aren't going to find pro immigrant leftists. You will find humanitarian leftists that think the people the right bring here should be treated like people.

They're wrongfully attributing to the immigrants what should be attributed to corporations, businesses and the extremely wealthy who are exploiting and trafficking immigrants.

Rich people said poor people have no health care because poorer people get sick sometimes.

There is a TON of anti-immigrant propaganda. Whenever the economy is shit -- which it often is now, because of the massive disparity between rich and poor -- immigration is an easy target.

It's easy to say things like market rates for labor are lowered due to an influx of immigrant labor, or that immigrants are taking jobs. There is a good case to be made that things like the H1-B program do artificially lower wages and do mean that there are fewer jobs for citizens -- but the spin is always against the immigrants and never against the companies exploiting them.

Having to hear foreign languages and smell cuisine I'm not used to in my own country is basically a violation of my human rights. Like, isn't that in The Geneva Convention?

Their eyes are offended by the very sight of someone different from them.

Many people, when they look out at the world, all they want to see is themselves reflected back at them. When they see something else, they feel afraid.

My personal explanation:

These are people who weren't here when those voters were children and a large part of the population are voting to stop time, not policies or anything.

Elon Musk immigrated from South Africa to the US, so I can think of at least one thing that made things distinctly worse in the US at least.