Dad is immigrant. Boy does he HATE immigrants.
Its the old "pull ladder up" thing I think.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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It's always baffled me. As the grandchild of an immigrant I've always felt it was only right to welcome in the folks who want so badly to be one of us.
...i work with mostly first and second-generation immigrants from all over the world, and a common pattern i've noticed among established first-generation immigrants is strong anti-immigrant sentiment; a little bit that they emmigrated to get away from those people, a little bit f*ck-you-i-got-mine...
Ugh, have you met my Mama?
(I'm joking of course, I dislike neither her nor immigrants generally)
Can I?
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.
And it should be noted that the benefits they're seeking can say a lot about their personality. I've met a fair number of people who came to America for education related reasons. They're typically curious people with liberal vents.
Your post and the one before together neatly summarize exactly the point I was trying to make.
Personally I think there's a strong difference in mindset between people who seek personal economic benefits when immigrating from those who seek other kinds of benefits (personal freedom, education, satisfying their wunderlust) and from there come differences in their general behavior, including being more leftwing or rightwing.
The very same thing exists in the population in general when it comes to their main drive in life, but for me it's even sharper in immigrants because emigrating is in my personal experience a huge change - you're literally choosing to leave a place were people behave, expect you to behave and judge each other in familiar predictable ways to go somewhere were all that is different and it's more so if they speak a different language, so it's a proper big change in one's life well beyond just merely changing cities in your own country - so I believe that what drives somebody to do something that big is a stronger indication of who they are as a person.
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.
The problem is you’ve created a false binary between refugee and economic migrant. In reality there’s a huge spectrum of economic and political conditions which drive people to leave their home country and seek opportunities elsewhere, none of which has anything to do with greed. In so doing you’ve painted vast swathes of people as greedy, the same thing the Trump admin has been doing to justify using ICE to break up families.
Real refugees are a very narrow class of migrants. They’re narrowly defined by the UN because their acceptance is controversial in international politics. Almost all migrants are economic but almost none of those I would classify as greedy (people travelling from wealthy liberal countries to the US to pay lower taxes and make more money). Many economic migrants are people travelling from poor countries with corrupt/oppressive governments to seek a better life in the US, Canada, or Western Europe. These folks end up working as cleaning staff for businesses, delivery/Uber drivers, or working on farms picking produce. Hard jobs that no one would accept out of greedy motivations alone.
The remaining are international students (or recent graduates), usually from Asia, who are classified as economic migrants but I would consider political/social migrants. I know A LOT of these folks. I wouldn’t call any of them greedy. They’re here for a better opportunity, yes, but also to get away from their parents and the social/political problems back home.
Almost everyone in the US had an ancestor that immigrated not that long ago, and if people didn't do it within at most a couple generations, you wouldn't see anti-immigrant sentiment.
Puck political cartoon, January 11, 1893, "Looking Backward":
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/3968c98b-d1ce-411d-9c96-7e8d9d81263f.jpeg
Caption:
They would close to the new-comer the bridge that carried them and their fathers over.
That's a really good piece of artwork, that's not an easy concept to pull off and look at how well the artist nailed the physical resemblances between the faces, live vs shadow.
Gotta love how far and comfy they look now that theyr native
I grew up in the Midwest as a child of a Mexican and American. By 16, I was regurgitating Ben Shapiro anti-immigration rhetoric. Why?
The same reason anyone is racist. I grew up around it. The people I knew and loved were white and that was reflected in the media I was exposed to. Subliminal messages and implied suggestions over entire childhood. They might claim they don't like the illegal, but the truth is that they've internalized the hatred of the culture they identify with.
I don't understand why this comment is so low. As an immigrant myself who migrated when I was very young, the answer of internalized racism is very obvious to me. It took me almost 25 years to fully open my eyes to the racist beliefs I had internalized growing up, and even being aware of it now, it takes an awful lot of self-work to unlearn certain things.
Cuban here, like many others have said "burning the ladder behind you"
but adding to it. In my opinion it has to do with seeing a reflection of your past self and associating the difference with positive progress then being disgusted by your own struggle and putting that emotion on your next of kin.
Yes it's frustrating to be born in a third world country and have to come legally in a raft and have to work for under minimum wage for multiple years to be able to afford even the most basic necessities .... but it's important to remember where you come from and to use that disgust to make the world a better place so that no one else has to go thru the same.
Same sentiment people have towards homeless people that were born in the US
Pulling the ladder up behind you is a fundamental and ugly part of human nature
But even the terminology suggests you're coming from a lower place. So wouldn't it make sense that the people from the place you're coming from have some responsibility for the state it was in. Like how right now we're seeing a decline in American culture and increase in corruption. It was voted in by Americans. So if Americans were to all of a sudden immigrate to say Canada to get away, wouldn't they fucking hate it if other Americans who voted for Republicans start following them because of the opportunity.
This is nothing more than a thought terminating cliche. As such, it's completely worthless.
Edit: lol...funny how y'all talking about...nothing at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I find the most thought terminating cliche is calling something a thought terminating cliche.
Yeah, but they think they're clever for saying it
I was merely pointing out that people suck
did you just...?
Did they terminate a thought with a cliché?
Are we in some Russian doll situation here..?
no u
Funny how it comes after your comment... 🤷🏻♂️
It could be a perspective thing. Children of immigrants possibly don’t see themselves as immigrants or even adjacent.
One other thought I had was about trust fund kids thinking they “worked as hard as anyone else” for their riches. For example, I remember when Bezos was building Amazon. He certainly did work hard to build that site, but the benefits of the loan his parents provided cannot be overlooked or forgotten. Same thing with Elon… most rich people, for that matter.
Because the real world doesn't operate on social media logic, so they actually respond with real human reactions.
I think immigrants should divorce themselves from the other immigrants.
Social media addicts are probably the only people in the whole world who don't already distinguish between different types of immigrants.
They feel they suffered more than the other ones do.