True. But they aren't as rioty.

To what degree? I'm sure migration is statistically responsible for some percentage of worsening life conditions, but I doubt it's the biggest cause for anything specific getting worse. The far bigger cause is the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent extraction by the powerful.

If migration is responsible for 5% of an issue, and other causes are responsible for 95%, it's far too easy to make the population imagine the numbers are swapped.

Except that most evidence points against that. The people who don't live next to immigrants are generally much more angry then those that do. And the general places where people are angry about living conditions are former industrial economic heartland that have de-industrialized for reasons that have literally zero to do immigration.

Even in Japan people claim immigrants are the problem even if they are a group that barley exists at all.

> One could make an argument in the direction that this is fueled by elites trying to distract from other issues.

Which elites, possibly? The anti-immigrant views are represented by fringe parties (albeit ones that are getting more votes than many would be comfortable with) and all sorts of mainstream political leaders are constantly condemning them. Social media is the only reason the stories spread, practically speaking; international news barely even cares about things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ceuta_migrant_crisis (where the number of people involved approximately matched the population of Ceuta itself).

At any rate, I can't say I particularly hear these protesters, or their representatives, talking about economic factors all that much. Certainly it comes up, but only with explicit reference to biased government policy and not as just some natural pie-sharing effect.

> hate anti-pollution measures (see the LEZ insanity)

Try this out. Have the government mandate that everyone buy a certain type of car/van. Tell them it's good for the environment and give them tax incentives to do it. Then, years after everyone's invested in that type of car/van, have the government ban that type of car/van in major urban centres. Tell them to throw the car/van away and buy another one.

And tell them that if they don't do that, you'll fine them every day, when they drive to the place they've been driving to all their adult lives for work, etc.

Announce that this applies to everyone at the same time, so there's near-zero resale value in the old type of car/van, and there's massive demand pushing the price up for the new type of car/van.

Most people don't have a spare £20,000 kicking about, and if they did, they wouldn't choose to spend it on that. Throwing away their existing car/van and buying another doesn't give them £20,000 of value. It gives them £0 of value. They already had a car/van. It might give some kids' lungs value, but not them.

Honestly, try it. Try forcing millions of people into spending a lot of money all at once, and see how popular you are. Bonus: now try blaming social media or some other fifth column for your unpopularity!

> And in some cases fairly obviously traceable foreign actors.

If they are "fairly obviously traceable" then surely you can name some and provide reasonable evidence?

> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.

It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.

Social media is a catalyst that only works because material conditions are bad. If everyone is happy, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they just laugh it off. If everyone is angry, and social media tells them there's a Muslim invasion, they burn down a mosque.

It's a pattern that's been repeated several times before in history, most famously in Germany: whenever capitalism creates bad times, society chooses one of two ways out: either socialism or fascism. Right now several countries are seeing surges in popularity of the far left and the far right, which is this exact pattern playing out in real time before our eyeballs. While the established capitalist politicians always promise nothing except more of the same decline, and thus become unpopular when everyone is feeling the decline and inequality, socialist candidates promise to directly fix the cause of the inequality, and fascism is propped up by the causes of the inequality to divert attention away from themselves. Again, this pattern has already played out many times and is pretty hard to refute at this point.