Opinion of Xahar

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

9 ridiculous people so far. I guess I can see beep boop but who are these other 8?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Incredibly overrated, I mostly know him for silly takes like supporting the Conservatives in Canada or thinking Europe is full of racist xenophobes.

Have you ever talked to Europeans? Not the ones who went to international school and go the US for college, but like the townies there? Even in my super-lefty uni for many Europeans, if you got them drunk enough and start a conversation on the romani...

Incredibly overrated, I mostly know him for silly takes like supporting the Conservatives in Canada or thinking Europe is full of racist xenophobes.

you say that as if Europe isn't full of racist xenophobes.

This is rather tangential to the topic of this thread, but, no, I don’t think Europe is any more “full of racist xenophobes” than the United States is.

Does any country in Europe have virtually unrestricted jus soli citizenship and/or anything equivalent to the 1965 US Immigration and Nationality Act? 

As someone who lives in the SF Bay Area,  I recognize that most of the country is different, but then the US is a very large country with multiple large, distinct metropolitan and cultural centers, and these centers certainly play massive roles in our economy and overall culture. I dare say that the majority of Americans in these places are, if not outright supportive of more immigration and multiculturalism (which plenty are), at the very least tolerant of a level of national and cultural diversity that I’m really not sure is true of many Europeans.

This isn’t to absolve the US of racism, obviously; the experience of black Americans is more than enough to disprove any attempts to do that. But that’s not “racist xenophobia”—that’s just racism, period. And anti-black racism is certainly something that pervades the US in a way that is pretty much foreign (heh) to Europeans.

On the other hand, the US took in very few Syrian and Iraqi refugees compared to Europe, the second most recent successful American presidential campaign was centred to a large degree around virulent xenophobia and Islamophobia, and global values surveys show the citizens of several Western European countries to have noticeably more pro-immigration attitudes than Americans. I’d also point out that Europe contains the most liberal multinational immigration regime in the world, in the EU and EEA’s right to freedom of movement; I doubt Americans would take too kindly to a similar arrangement with Latin America, or even Canada.

I’m not saying that Europe is clearly less xenophobic than the US, but, equally, it doesn’t seem at all obvious to me that the opposite is true either. Your point about anti-black racism is of course well taken.

Actually I bet most Americans would be totally fine with such a thing with Canada. It's actually the Canadians who would by and large not be happy.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

One key difference I've noted in the US and Europe's xenophobia is that at least at first many Republicans condemned Trump and his rhetoric and tried to distance from him even if they eventually sold out once he was nominated/President, while in Europe even many mainstream center-right parties use Trump-y style rhetoric or ally with such parties themselves. Merkel was an obvious exception which I think being the most prominent center-right European leader led to misconceptions that all were like her, but that is obviously not the case.

Now Euro center-right parties and leaders may not be as authoritarian or self-centered narcissistic as Trump is, but it's more about general culture instead of specific figures. Trump is a pretty special case.