It also shifts with time. 30 years back the prejudice would have been flipped. As a white immigrant you would've probably been a low educated russian or polish worker, while with a taint you would've been Italian and much more respected.
It's the general bad practice of putting individuals into larger groups with a stigma based on visual appearance.
I think a lot of the resentment about bad German skills in my generation (80s/90s) comes from 10+ year residents and 2nd generation immigrants not capable of speaking our language correctly.
I mean in the seventies and eighties there was a lot of racism against Spaniards and Italians. Nowadays this is gone. They are allowed to be proud of their heritage.
We also had a lot of highly educated migrants from Yugoslavia back in the seventies and they were appreciated back then. But after the Balkan wars they were suddenly the bad guys despite some of them being perfectly integrated in our society and sometimes being the third generation to live here.
It's funny how fast the perception shifts and how quickly we are to judge on the prejudices we have of a group of people and not on the individual.
I would say, in the US it is at the same time "not a thing" and "an even bigger thing". I guess it is easier to be seen as American, but on the other hand, those Americans claim they are Irish/German/Italian (and the corresponding percentages), because of some great-grandfather. Germany historically also has had immigrants (e.g. Ruhr area with it's mines) but those people don't think they are Polish/Romanian, because of their ancestors.
It's the general bad practice of putting individuals into larger groups with a stigma based on visual appearance.
I think a lot of the resentment about bad German skills in my generation (80s/90s) comes from 10+ year residents and 2nd generation immigrants not capable of speaking our language correctly.