Research shows that immigrants tend to bring their prejudices with them, adopting the anti-immigrant sentiments of their new hosts. Middle-class immigrants may fear a loss of status. Others simply seek to distinguish themselves from a stigmatised group.
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).
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’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.
You seem to be coming at what I wrote and the whole subject starting from a political ideology and then trying to force reality to comply with your political views.
Immigrants and refugees are a lot more than just political slogans that either American political party uses in their Theater Of Democracy to bait and enrage the local muppets, and any genuine and honest thinking about immigration must be hard-nosed and principled and certainly not in any way form or shape influenced by the hyper-simplistic portraying of immigrants, side taking and baiting-slogans from the deeply fucked up American politics.
As for your personal definition of where the border in the scale of “need” between “immigrant” and “refugee” is, it’s entirely subjective and down to personal preference, hence as irrelevant and valid as your taste in food: there is really no right or wrong, but yours is no better than anybody else’s.
I’ll go with the legal definition, because I expect it was thought through by several people trying to find a good balance and it’s widely accepted.
That said, I misused the word “Greed” since I meant it in the sense of “personal upside maximization” - just the normal general want to have more stuff that drives most people, immigrant or not - whilst the dictionary definition of Greed is “excessive want”, which is not at all what I meant when I used it. So my bad on that.
I don’t think Economic Immigrants are worse or better than the native population, I just think that the normal want to have more shit in somebody wanting to go live in another country isn’t something that makes them deserving of special treatment whilst I do think having a level of need that qualifies one for refugee status is something that makes that person deserving of special treatment.