alt Hacker NewsI'm not from the US, but isn't it like almost every country in the world? Reducing immigration when it's already too much does increase job availability for locals (which should always be priority imo). Immigration to a country is a privilege, not really a right, but again I don't really know about the US, I just know that like Emigrating to Japan permanently or like in Dubai getting citizenship is very difficult and it does sound normal to me, why should it be easy? You want ultra motivated potential citizens, not the ones that just want to come for a few years to improve their CV or just pile up savings and then bail, they don't bring anything to the country as they'll not spend in the long-term within the US and will not really assimilate as well.
I don't think this is "racist", even Europeans are in the same boat to apply as far as I know, those are mostly white, I don't think racist is the right term here. Isn't America already heavily mixed?
Newsflash: Many European countries are, in fact, racist.
The French are virulently racist against Arabs and Muslims. Most of Western Europe is racist against the Romani, as well as against most Eastern European ethnicities (yes, even though they would be considered "white" in the US). It hasn't historically come up quite as much as in the US because most European countries are more homogeneous than the US is, but with the increase in migration—and particularly in asylum-seeking emigration from war-torn areas—it has become much more salient in recent times.
Japan is also racist, varying from moderately to horrifically depending on what the target group is.
These forms of racism don't always look the same as racism does in the US: for instance, the Western European bias against Eastern Europeans, IME, largely shows up as a widespread belief that they're lazy, and the bias against Romani is that they're seen as dirty, smelly thieves.
90% of all anti-immigrant sentiment, anywhere, is rooted in racism of varying types. Plenty of studies have made very clear that immigrants contribute more to the community and the nation, and have lower rates of crime, than people born in the country.
It is true that when a wave of immigrants first arrives in a new country, they take up more government resources for a period of time, because they literally have not had a chance to find jobs. But once that happens, they are likely to be working at lower-status, lower-paying jobs that the locals mostly didn't want in the first place. And once they have jobs, they aren't just somehow "taking up jobs that locals could have": they also create demand in the local economy, which creates more jobs. Because "number of jobs" isn't a fixed quantity.
And finally, in case you have been hiding under a rock for the last decade of American politics, this anti-immigrant sentiment is explicitly aimed at nonwhite immigrants. To the point that ICE routinely targets people based on the color of their skin, wholly disregarding their victims' status (many are legal immigrants or even citizens), and Trump actively seeks out white South Africans who want to come to the US.