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  • From my own experience as an immigrant, there are two kind of immigrants (well, three if you count refugees as immigrants, though those are a very special case), Economic Immigrants and Cultural/Wanderlust Immigrants.

    The first are self explanatory - they move somewhere to make more money than they could make in their homeland - whilst the second are the kind of people who go live elsewhere because they want to experience different ways of living.

    These have vastly different kinds of personality, with the Economic Immigrants being the kind that brings along a slice of their country with them and tends to live in neighborhoods with lots of others from the same country and even little stores and entertainment venues with products and in the style of their homeland, whilst the other ones tend to integrate more in their host country, at the very least living in mixed communities, and don't seek the venues of their homeland or even the company of their countrymen.

    Unsurprisingly, Economic Immigrants are often Right-wingers - they have been driven by Greed to immigrate, remain strongly wedded to the values common in their homeland when they left (so are naturally conservatives) and don't tend to be open-minded, whilst the others are pretty much by definition open-minded (after all, they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland) and hence tend to be Left-wingers.

    So, yeah, there's often a willingness to "pull up the ladder now that I'm in" from Economic Immigrants, but I haven't really seen that kind of posture from the other ones (maybe there is, but they were a lot rarer than the former kind in the countries I lived in so I never really had a large sample of those).

    • I'm not sure all of those generalisations hold up, but I think it's safe to say that some people immigrate to a country because they want to live there, and some immigrate because they want the benefits associated with living there.

    • That’s flat out wrong. You may be an immigrant but you have a warped picture of the landscape. Countless economic migrants are borderline refugees. They’re fleeing corrupt, crime-ridden, and low opportunity countries in the hopes of a better life. They aren’t qualified refugees because they aren’t fleeing imminent threats of violence but they’re definitely not doing so out of greed. They’re taking enormous personal risks with the dream of a better life. Many end up being economically exploited in their destination countries, hated, abused, and even arrested by ICE (in the case of many South and Central Americans moving to the US).

      You’re also wrong about refugees being left wing. The most conservative people I’ve ever met belong to refugee communities from Somalia. They have extremely tight knit families and they support every new family who arrives from Somalia. They are extremely warm and loving people but they are devoutly conservative Muslims in their beliefs and practices.

      • Clearly you didn't really read my post: nobody actually thinking about it whilst reading it could interpret "they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland" as being about refugees.

        I only mentioned refugees in passing at the very beginning because I don't think of them as immigrants at all (they're not leaving their country out of choice) but some people might, and I didn't expand on those at all on my post because you can't really deduce anything about a person's mindset based on what they're forced to do, but you can based on what they chose to do, especially something a big as emigrating which I know from personal experience is a big leap to take as you're not just leaving everything you know but even the familiarity of people behaving, expecting you to behave and thinking in certain ways which is one's country - moving countries is way bigger than just moving cities because from your point of view, in another country everybody around you acts strangely and speaks a strange language.

        My post is about the two main mindsets that drive people to chose to leave their country for another country: personal upside maximization (i.e. make more money, i.e. greed) or satisfaction of a psychological need for meeting different people and doing new things (i.e. wunderlust)

        I don't think you can tell anything at all about a person's personal drives from them being a refugee because the big change which is moving to another country was de facto forced upon them rather than them choosing to make such a big change.

    • Yeah this is some overly generalized blowhard sentiment. Real cute how Westerners are normalizing this soft us v. Them mentality to prep for more hard-line deportation campaigns. MMW, once Trump has "Amazon Prime but for people" up and running, Europe will suddenly forget it ever wanted multiculturalism and cash in.

    • I think it is a lot more of a continuous spectrum than the binary classification that you've characterized it as. I also don't see it as "greed" per se, more as seeking opportunities/escaping poverty.

      It is also important to recognize that "cultural/wanderlust immigrants" are likely vastly more privileged than the "economic immigrants". Most people in the global south do not have the resources to emigrate just to experience other cultures unless they are very lucky. It's also not easy to acquire work or immigrant visas in most countries as a person from Africa/Asia etc. While it may be possible for citizens of the EU/US/Canada etc to move between countries easily with their strong passports, it's simply not possible for the rest of the world. Immigrant blue collar workers are often either refugees, or have family in the countries they immigrate to willing to sponsor them. White collar workers either enter as students, or have intentionally acquired skills that will make it possible for them to get a job/visa.

      I do agree though that "economic immigrants" are often more wedded to their own values, though that is not always the case, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're right-wing. It doesn't completely explain why their children are conservative either, given that they have to necessarily integrate a lot more with their host country's culture. The "pulling up the ladder" phenomenon is very frustrating though, and I see it sometimes as a result of the precarious position that these people hold in their host country. They've likely spent a long arduous time and lot of resources immigrating, and likely will be the first ones who will be targeted by unfavorable immigration policies, so they don't want anyone to "rock the boat" lest they lose the life they've built for themselves. I've seen this shift in mentality quite a few times, and it is very unfortunate.

      One thing about integration though, it really is a two way street. Immigrants very often don't make the effort to integrate, but on the other hand discrimination against certain races and cultures make it much harder for them to as well. It's a bit of a vicious cycle in that sense.

      • Absolutely, it's a spectrum rather then perfectly defined groups, just like pretty much everything else about humans not just psychological but even physiological.

        That said, looking at my own country, Portugal, which had people having to emigrate due to poverty during the Fascist times (which was well before the "strong" passport), then most people not really having the emigrate (80s, 90s, 00s) unless they wanted to, then people once again having to emigrate due to poverty (the youth in the last decade and some, because of low salaries and an insane realestate bubble), most of those who went to live abroad were very different in different phases and it's almost a joke around here that those who emigrated during that first phase are more rightwing than those who stayed (and you see a similar phenomenon now with Brazilian immigrants in Portugal: the immigrant vote in Portugal for the Brazilian Presidential Elections is invariably far more to the Right than the vote in Brazil).

        I believe those with wunderlust always leave in more or less the same numbers, but during the hard times the number of those leaving because they have to rather than because of their desire for new experiences, is far larger and outstrips those driven by wunderlust (and, as you pointed out, when everybody is poor the ones with wunderlust both want to and need to leave).

        Although from this one might expect that immigrants from poorer countries will be more rightwing in average because of the higher fraction of economic relative to wunderlust immigrants, that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that in their host countries there are two kinds of behaviors of immigrants because there are two kinds of drives to leave one's homeland, which is as true for richer countries as for poorer countries, even if the ratio of one kind to the other kind is different because poverty makes more people leave for economic reasons.

        Basically people shouldn't be assuming shit about all immigrants because of effects like the one described in this article: whilst the aggregated numbers might project a certain impression, in reality there are different kinds of immigrants with different drives to emigrate and hence different behaviors in their host country, and the wunderlust ones who are the minority in the immigration from poorer countries shouldn't be tainted by the way the other kind behaves as they've very different and behave differently.

  • they got theirs, fuck everyone who comes after. literally pulling the ladder up behind themselves

  • Raised by immigrant grandparents here, parents were born here. They don’t care. My parents have zero concept of what immigrant challenges my grandparents faced.

  • Because they came in legally and those who didn’t should leave. Never mind that the folks who came legally were privileged, and those who didn’t, didn’t have that same flexibility of time and money to do it legally.

  • I suspect that it might be some form of hidden feeling of guilt.

    people immigrate here, and feel guilty for intruding. then, they take up some form of anti-immigrant sentiment as a form of self-punishment?

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