Yes you are right but put yourself in the shoes of the people who vote for these anti-immigration policies. Decade after decade of decline does not give them the freedom to care if some startup that they may never hear of gets created in one of them "coastal elite" cities.
All they see is probably what they watched on the TV show Silicon Valley or what they hear in the news. I fully believe that if things were improving for them, they would be welcoming immigrants with open arms (or at least not minding them). However that is not the case. So in an environment where there isn't abundance but scarcity, it is a zero sum game.
We know the root cause of the problem. It is very well defined. The elites of this country have essentially sold out the middle class by shipping their jobs overseas and depress wages in every industry by methods such as H1-B visas to further keep people from climbing the economic ladder. This has destroyed countless towns and cities and left millions in desperation with no hope for any dignified future for them or their kids.
The solution to this issue is not a "conversation", its action. Obama was elected in a massive landslide by these very people because he promised "Hope and Change". Instead he accelerated efforts to further destroy what little the middle class had left. So as a response, the people elected a populist who promised to stop the bleeding in an aggressive manner (ie. stop immigration). He did not fulfill any of his promises and now we are left with a population that is even more angry. The next step is going to be even worse.
No not propaganda and corporate media. A problem with how the elites run this country. They use tools such as immigration to depress wages and destroy towns and cities when whole industries are shipped overseas. As a result, a desperate population will cling to scapegoats such as immigrants and will be motivated to put a stop to it. Propaganda and corporate media are just tools used by opportunists to make money.
Your boss sets the wage. He also collaborates with "free trade" politicians to move whole industries overseas to places where human rights are not respected and labor organizers are regularly murdered. The elites use propaganda and corporate media to convince "a desperate population" that immigrants are the problem, not their collusion with capital.
Immigrants don't "destroy towns" they reinvigorate them[1].
All they see is probably what they watched on the TV show Silicon Valley or what they hear in the news. I fully believe that if things were improving for them, they would be welcoming immigrants with open arms (or at least not minding them). However that is not the case. So in an environment where there isn't abundance but scarcity, it is a zero sum game.