alt Hacker NewsSadly Australia is very welcoming to foreigners until you get about 50km out of the major cities. Our xenophobe political party (One Nation) has had a significant rally in the last few years, to the point where by some measures it is the second largest party.
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To be fair, they're still welcoming to foreigners in the bush, just as long as they're white. Rural Australia has many towns that have a strong Italian or Greek heritage (for example).
One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.
And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
It’s the same in the US. Proximity to a city correlates strongly with all forms of openness. It holds nationwide. There aren’t really blue or red states, just predominantly urban or rural ones.
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
That's probably all that matters TBH. If you can attract top talent to major cities where top schools, research firms, and companies in general, what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
It's the same thing in every country.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television