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Notes -
Fine by me.
I mean, I could nitpick and claim that considering previous citizenship of your parents irrespective of their particular ethnicity is less bad than simply deciding that you generally prefer your main ethnicity even if there is no particular link to your country in an applicants ancestry. I would certainly consider China more racist if their law was peculiar to Han Chinese rather than applying equally to Zhuang. Hoping that it would also apply to Uyghur would be beyond optimistic.
Another difference is how impactful the various return laws are. Poland or Ireland are traditionally seen as countries from which people emigrated. Not a lot of Americans either with or without Polish ancestry want to emigrate to Poland. By contrast, Israel has been heavily dependent on immigration since their law of return was passed. To a good approximation, everyone there is either a recent immigrant or an Arab (or possibly both).
From what I understand, China goes by ethnicity; Liberia goes by race; Poland goes by descent (so yes, in theory this means that if you are not ethnically Polish you might have a shot; in practice this means that you have to be either ethnically Polish or one of a small minority of Polish-descended Jews for whom records are available. But as has been pointed out, facially neutral laws can discriminate.)
I am pretty confident that a LOT of people from the Arab world (and the rest of the Third World) would LOVE to immigrate to Poland, probably even more than to Israel.
Well, Jewish Israelis see Israel as a country from which their ancestors emigrated.
More importantly, none of this is relevant to your definition of "racism." You agree that all these countries are "racist."
If you want to argue over whether Israel's immigration policy is fair or just, fine. But that's a completely different question.
If you want to say that sometimes "racism" is okay or more excusable, fine.
But in that case, I would want clear criteria for deciding whether "racism" is more excusable and justifications for those criteria.
If your claim is that discrimination is more excusable for countries which were emigration countries in the 19th and 20th century, I would want justification for this criterion. Because to me it seems like a gerrymander criterion to me.
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