It's same everywhere. Fear of the unknown, coping with own failure via blaming someone weaker, different language and of course at least in EU a lot of hatred due to desinformations.

Of course more descriptive word would be just xenophobia combined with copium addiction.

Using empty words like disinformation, xenophobia and othet short cuts wont help here. Build bridges, listen opposite opinions and do not judge.

Ideally don't use rethoric that you fight against. It's not consturctive.

It's also the fact that if you bought a house and they build a refugee center near it, your house immediately loses value. For many that might mean negative equity and losing a chunk of their main life investment while still having to pay the mortgage.

Italians weren't "white" when they first came to the US, either.

> Italians weren't "white" when they first came to the US, either.

Italians have been "white" since the dawn of the construction of "race" in which "white" was even one of the options.

(They've been othered as "ethnic" in a way which closely mirrors othering on race-qua-race, and we use "racism" to describe both racial and ethnic bigotry, but while similar and sharing some features, the two things were not the same in the US.)

> Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said the lynching was indeed "a rather good thing".[15] John M. Parker helped organize the lynch mob, and in 1911 was elected as governor of Louisiana. He described Italians as "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism

Haiti codified "whiteness" into law way before then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Haiti

Slavs have been discriminated against quite terribly over history.

‘White’ is just a category invented by Anglos and other Germanics (including Scandis, Franks, excluding Slavs and Jews) to lump together the ‘good sort’ of light skinned people away from dark skinned people and the ‘bad sort’ of light skinned people.

If you want to get deeper into ethnic speculation, I suspect it’s because Slavs have historically absorbed non-negligible amounts of ‘other’ groups such as Turkic, Iranic and Mongol; and this sets them apart from the more insulated Germanic groups who perhaps feel it makes them superior. Look at Nazi views on Aryanism and how Slavs were considered impure (funnily enough, except Bohemians, Croats and Ukrainians for political reasons… there was a war on)

It's not about the Ukrainians directly. On the more 'civil' side of this discourse it's mostly claims that this will become a general asylum or registration center (which it won't) and/or that there'll be a lot of crime, often accompanied by sources featuring African people.

This flows directly into the less civil side of the discussion, which ranges from conspiracy theories of EU or WEF-planned repopulation to all out etno-nationalism. Our city has a rich history of voting literal nazis into the council. There's talk of storming the city council and all that.

Sometimes, a better word for racism is tribalism, since it does not always stem from skin color. Tribes delineate among infinite lines, but common ones are wealth, religion (or customs), lineage, education, etc, and some of those might even overlap.

Thinking that racism has to do (only) with skin colour is a typical American misconception.

Hitler considered the Slavs the be a "race" (an inferior one that ought to be enslaved).