And by immigrants I really mean immigrants: you don’t have the nationality and live in the country = you’re an immigrant.
I keep reading about the plans of parties to kick out all immigrants, stop letting in any, and some parties even advocate to revoke dual-nationalities and kick those people out too. I’ve never really understood what the point of it is and have trouble imagining what the effects of such actions would be within the country.
There is no second step or “and then”. It’s just cheap rhetoric that gets people agitated, which yields votes. It’s called populism, among other things. The psychological dynamics behind it are similar to how the privileged never face their colonial history, either in formal education or in public discourse, since it’s awkward, unrelatable, but first and foremost unthinkable, that any culpability or responsibility for the state of society that the privileged deem inconvenient could lie with them.
Also it allows the government to be openly hostile to an out group to desensitize them to future violence against domestic groups that oppose fascism.
Definitely! A means of otherization/alienation/demonization.