When reactionaries say: “Why do we always have to put ourselves and our cultures last by not serving pork in school canteens because of muslims or allowing underage girls to wear a hijab in school, to let their families oppress them? Why do we let people immigrants live off our government benefits when they haven’t paid a single euro in taxes before they came here?”
How do you respond to it? I honestly don’t know because these thoughts are so stupid they never even cross my mind so I never thought about it much.


There’s two approaches, you can try to slowly break down to them why those things are fallacies, or you can skip to the point and say that they’re being manipulated by the rich to hate people who do no material harm to them, when we should be unified against the ruling class who create the scarcity they’re reacting to in the first place.
Since the former is hard and the latter is easy, I’ll just contribute some ideas for the former here:
Note that this is a liberal argument; it fundamentally relies on the assumption that the “economy” is something that a) exists neutrally for all its participants i.e. it can improve for all people simultaneously, regardless of their relation to the means of production b) stands to actually employ labor and use an expansion of labor to benefit all members of society. But the flaws in the argument actually work in favor of a full, socialist answer: these assumptions which aren’t true in the present capitalist society, which seeks to disposses, racialize, and exploit immigrants as a reserve army of labor can be made true by taking the power to keep immigrant workers down out the hands of capitalists; the issues can also be remedied with social democratic programs that give benefits to immigrants because it gives them a better position to bargain from, instead of having absolutely nothing and thus bringing wages down for everyone. The TLDR of this is that the native citizens who are workers should support giving immigrants benefits, because immigrants who don’t get any benefits will serve as the reserve army of labor and make it harder for all workers to get higher wages. ↩︎