Dear DU: Please stop echoing the European far right when it comes to immigration.

[pampango]

14. Found a good article at Deutsche Welle with some insight from social scientists.

The motivation for the current anti-Merkel sentiment, Wagner said, is both rational and irrational. On the one hand, she is the political figurehead and thus accountable for government policy; however, the reactionary way in which her public perception has changed suggests social psychological processes are at work. "Human beings strive for simplicity - simple answers - in times of crisis where collective fear is rife. Instead of weighing the complexity of a situation, the answer most often found by the mob is that some entity - this can be a leader like Merkel or even a group of people like the refugees - is to blame, and as soon as the crowd is convinced of this guilt, that entity has to go."

This is all the more proof, according to Steve Reicher, one of Europe's most prolific writers on social psychology, that these fears harken back to deep-seated fantasies regarding immigrants. "What happened in Cologne has turned migrants into the quintessential Other," Reicher told DW. "If you look back to 19th century colonial views, in all cultures there were these really strong notions of the invasive, the dangerous, the rampantly sexual and lascivious migrant. And that is precisely the horrifying and extremely striking image invoked by what happened on NYE in Cologne."

Reicher, who teaches at St Andrews, juxtaposed the current atmosphere in the wake of the Cologne attacks with the way people reacted to the image of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who washed up on a beach in Turkey, to show the extent to which collective views can vacillate. "Back then, it wasn't that our opinion of migrants had suddenly changed. It was much rather that we saw people as migrants - or not. The migrant is by definition an outsider, the Other. But when we saw the image of Aylan Kurdi, we saw the little boy and not the migrant. Things have switched back now, and we are faced with a representation of the migrant as a profound danger, a faceless horde."

As the refugee crisis intensified over the past half year, the tone in the German media with regard to Merkel gradually became more critical, but after the NYE attacks, it changed fundamentally. "Public opinion with regard to immigrants and refugees right now is completely influenced by how the situation is reported: over the past few months, many people have changed their minds about refugees because when they read negative reports in the paper they begin to believe that the people around them feel this way too."

http://www.dw.com/en/has-mob-mentality-taken-hold-in-germany-after-cologne-attacks/a-18994429

This insight into a German view of immigrants and "others" is quite similar to what is going on with the American right. Trump's appeal rests largely on &quot h)uman beings strive for simplicity - simple answers - in times of crisis where collective fear is rife." Demagogues are good at providing simple answers (usually blaming some group of 'others' - in his case, Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese, etc.) for complex problems. And the fear of the majority population of "the rampantly sexual and lascivious migrant" (or minorities in general) used to be a part of white culture in the US, perhaps still is.

Anyway, it is useful to see how some social scientists look at the anti-refugee backlash in Germany.