AinderS

As much as I appreciate the article trying to stem the tide of racism by pointing out the El Paso shooting, I don't think such arguments are fruitful.

Firstly, that shooting doesn't mean immigration is good for the US (or, let's be blunt, for whites in the US), just as the lack of such a shooting wouldn't mean immigration is bad.

Secondly, an opponent could simply point to (anecdotal) murders perpetrated by immigrants as a counter-argument (well, counter-ad-hominem, since the El Paso shooting isn't really an argument for or against immigration). And in fact many publications do just that - the Daily Mail, NY Post, and Fox News to a lesser extent.

In the end it boils down to who can shout the loudest, regardless of the underlying truth. This might not be the case if they used statistics, but they prefer emotionally-resonating anecdotes, which, in a country of 330 million, are meaningless - you can find anecdotes to fit any preconception.

So what I would suggest is using arguments where truth, not just volume, provides an advantage. Instead of merely calling replacement theory "false", substantiate that with demographic statistics, showing that nobody is being "replaced". Anything less is simply yelling "nu-uh" - completely unpersuasive, and much more ineffective than manipulating people with cherry-picked crimes.

Unfortunately journalists are notoriously allergic to statistics, so we have little hope of laying this "debate" to rest.

> British colonial rule

Keep going. What makes "colonial rule" different from rule by an aristocrat that inherited lands, if people have no concept of nationhood, and one aristocrat is as good as another?

> Back then there was no concept of nations and nation-states, which only evolved a couple of centuries later.

Just because the power structures didn't perfectly reflect nations, doesn't mean nations didn't exist. Look at, for example, Catalonia, that still has a concept of its own nationhood despite being ruled by Spain.

Or look at the British Raj, for that matter. Britain and India were both ruled by the same royal family, yet no-one pretends their people's identities weren't distinct.

> Its pretty explicit in the agreement terms that you need to separately click to agree on every purchase:

It's okay to lie everywhere else, as long as they tell the truth somewhere inside the small print nobody reads? And we are supposed to know which parts are lies and which the truth?

It's like a bad joke, isn't it? Ask for less immigration, get an expansion of the surveillance state instead.

> Europeans typically are not racialized and do not identify as white, instead as Italian, German, etc.

This is obviously false, as shown by the different reactions in Europe to immigration from countries within Europe, to those outside of Europe.

> The following has no place.

I don't follow. Why do the results of their study have no place in the abstract?

And merely sarcastically re-stating the findings of the study is not a counter-argument.