I question to what degree people are riled up over economic difficulty being scapegoated onto immigrants like the comment chains below seem to claim.

This explanation seems to ignore much more obvious motivations. Most of the recent violent protests were triggered by concerns about immigrants committing violent crime and sexual offenses or harassment, often following concrete incidents.

Public safety seems like the clear primary motivation here.

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

However, I think that glossing over the primary concern to claim that the outrage is essentially engineered or purely driven by economic factors and living standard, will not convince the public. At least that's my opinion.

> 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.