“You racist bastard!” said once a stand-up comedian named Jeff Dunham in the form of a terrorist puppet called Achmed.

Whereas immigration once was a surplus for the population, bringing knowledge and manpower, it is now the largest disgrace a nation faces. These “other” people, with their different cultures, alternative ways of thinking and behaving, think they can move to a country, just like that, and settle to live there, taking advantage of the country’s resources and welfare.

When countries couldn’t afford to teach these additions to the population the primary language, making the immigrants outcasts of the society, misunderstood and discriminated, the immigrants, those who were desperate and destructive enough, turned to the underground, illegal activities and so forth. This did not at all help their situation, but make it worse, giving an overall image of people from a certain culture to be more crime-prone than others, further undermining their chances to fit into society.

This again, was used by politicians and other pseudo-intellectuals to advocate for lesser immigration and harder control. What people failed to realise was that the argument is an argument from ignorance, building on the fact that, because the situation was handled badly from the beginning, and gave negative results, the situation should be handled even worse, rather than improved.

One of the older arguments from xenophobes is that immigrants take the local population’s jobs. If this was true, there is no problem with it at all. If people from other countries work better, they are better workers and thus deserve the places better. That is how the system works. If you then call for limitations on immigration on these grounds, you are only to save yourself, and your argument is really that because you’re a local, even though you are a worse worker, you should get the job.

However, it is generally untrue, which makes the immigration itself a bit worse. There is, in these post-recession times, still an elevated level of unemployment, and this is not because immigrants have stolen all jobs, but simply because there aren’t a sufficient amount of jobs in the correct sectors. There are, arguably, workplaces with lack of workers, because of the unpopularity of the kind of work. Taking immigrants to boost the workforce then is suicide. However, rather than closing people out, efforts should be made to create more jobs. This way the economy gets a boost, rather than further developing the xenophobia.

Racism is being scared of the different. It is intolerance in its purest forms and has no place in a modern country.