Since you point out types of immigrants people wouldn't object to, I also think no one would object to Saudi sheikhs if they were to immigrate. I increasingly feel religion and culture is just a proxy for wealth. A lot of people in Poland don't like Ukrainian immigrants either (of which we have plenty), even though they're culturally very close to us. I'm increasingly believing that it's all really about wealth, and the perception of being exploited.

Remember that Poland did largest immigration experiment in Europe's history in late Middle Ages and that was a failure. After 500 hundred years these migrants where still living in ghettos, speaking foreign language and preserving their religion. It is pretty much taken as a fact by Polish people that cultural and religious differences cannot be bridged in 500 years.

Edit: Although I do agree that there might be an effect similar to this, I think it was also present in Slovenia versus other Yugoslavian people. I wonder how much it has to do with the perception of wealth directly, and feeling threatened by "inferior" culture - there's probably a correlation, in addition a poor society is percieved as more likely to immigrate in larger numbers.

From polls I've seen, I think most of the UK is pro-immigration. The disagreement is over uncontrolled immigration, which is a bit different.

Edit - I'm also in London, and have definitely heard people complaining about rich Saudis buying everything up. (And rich Russians before that.) I suspect there's a useful comparison to be made with US anxieties wrt Japanese investment back in the 90s.

Considering the amount of distaste for anything Saudi in most people I see across several countries around here I very much dispute that.

I think you need the people to be a similar economic makeup as the destination country, otherwise all the rich people buy you all out and everything is too expensive or all of the poor people act like an influx of 'criminals' who screw up everything according to the perceptions of the receiving populace.

Plenty of people would complain more loudly about Saudi sheikhs than anyone else. There are a lot of people who want to live their lives without having their lives disrupted by large influxes of people with a completely different culture, and it has nothing to do with wealth. The populist backlash you have seen across the globe recently is largely a result of these people having nowhere else to go politically, because the neoliberal ruling class of the last 30 years refuses to acknowledge their legitimate concerns. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, and we in the western world will be able to have an open and legitimate debate about immigration and the right of a nation to decide who (and how many) people from starkly different cultures should be imported. Or the self-righteous can just keep calling them racists and bigots for voicing their legitimate concerns and stand by as the next wave of Trumps and Brexits roll across the western world.

That's not what happens at all. You've never been to Marbella, have you? I watched a TV show some months ago about how nicely they behave there. Huge tips, very discreet people, lavish mansions with many jobs for the service... Now in Spain there's a heated discussion about selling weapons to Arabia (about murder of Khasoggi) since our shipyards are a vital source of jobs near my hometown.

You're blaming Europeans for not forcing their culture onto immigrants. You're also making the naive assumption that a sizable proportion of immigrants WANTS to assimilate - the truth is that certain groups are simply not interested in assimilating. Why would they be? Foreign customs are hard to learn and - here's the part many proponents of immigration conveniently miss - directly opposed to Western customs.

When you are raised to believe that women are property, for example, and that your customs and culture are biblically justified, and some white idiot welcomes you into his country, provides you with free (to you) government assistance, while you live comfortably in your homogeneous ghetto, don't be surprised if you get laughed it at best, taken advantage of at worst.

And when one side not only denies that any of this is happening, but worse, slanders their countrymen as "xenophobes" for not wanting to accommodate the culture of their home and Homeland for that of ungrateful immigrants, populism suddenly has a very strong appeal.

In the U.S., for example, immigrants vote Democrat. You have millions of people who have called the U.S. their home for generations, and now you have a large group of people flowing into your communities and imposing their cultural values onto you via government. This is not xenophobia - people have a right to preserve their peaceful ways of life - otherwise you are arguing that one culture is superior to another.

I assume you must be talking about native americans and the large influx of white people who won't assimilate to their local Ute or Navajo or whatever culture. Because literally any other interpretation I have of this comment is less charitable because it would imply you have a staggering level of hypocrisy.

We live here now. Our families, our friends, our communities. We have every right to self preservation that they did-there is nothing hypocritical here.

The comparison is disingeneous. Ignoring the fact that most natives were wiped out by disease, European arrival in the U.S. was a clash of totally independent groups. There was no forced integration and little intermingling of communities-this was warfare, not simple immigration.

It wasn't right (through the lens of our Western culture) to uproot natives who had built their lives here, but that doesn't justify doing the same to generations who've similarly replaced them. In any case, land is finite, all current peoples have displaced others at some point. That doesn't mean their communities and countries suddenly have no right to cultural self preservation.

And I have no reason to believe that your Bavarian example is representative of other populist agendas. Limited immigration does not mean no immigration.

But the obvious solutions to this problem, regardless of who's fault it is, is to not import people if you can't offer them jobs/health/education/language courses.

Calling human individuals with similar heritages by monikers of worst and best is a gross overgeneralization.

The obvious solution is, there isn't one.

Yeah I know that's why I put it in quotes. But that's how they're commonly perceived in media and academic institutions.

efficiency in a systems problem is almost never easy, and it requires everyone who participates to put forth their fullest effort. It is telling to me that when people are unconstrained by space/cost/time, they don't tend to create extremely efficient situations, but in fact prefer those that intentionally less so.