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Comment by ericras | Hacker News Reader

I'm a white Trump voter in flyover country. You belong in America as do all Americans. This was a push back against an out of touch corrupt elite in Washington and mass immigration. Not all immigration, but the massive increases of the past several decades. Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture. I fully expect that Trump will reach out and moderate. If not, there's always another election that's just two years away.

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Illegal immigrants ballooned under Bush and decreased under Obama... thanks Obama.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/03/5-facts-abou...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/why-is-t...

I was referring to legal immigration since 1965.

I'm a third-generation American, with family that immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1900s to escape anti-semitism. I'm Jewish, my wife isn't. Her family is Scottish, English and German. She had a Cuban-American step dad. Our wedding was equal parts Jewish, Cuban, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. A conga line and the Hava Nagila... why not?

We've lived in towns big and small, in FL, GA, CA, and NC. We have families all over the US. Relatives who are millionaires and relatives who live in trailer parks.

It goes w/o saying that our respective families have very different ideas of the American experience.

Besides our differing families, because this is a country of immigrants, every place I visit in the U.S. is a bit different. Even within NC we can't even agree on a single style of BBQ. At the state fair the other day, I had a Cuban egg-roll (the innards of a Cuban sandwich deep fried inside a Chinese egg-roll ... genius!)

I recently learned that literally within the Koreatown portion of L.A. has sprung up a Little Bangladesh. And you know what, those immigrants will only contribute to the great melting pot that is America.

So I'm really at a loss to describe a single American culture, much less one that is under threat from today's immigrants.

I'm reminded of this clip from Bridge of Spies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qI3SngYvUg

That, that to me, is what unites us. Not some abstract ill-defined concept of "American Culture".

I'm not just talking about what sports and music people like as being the foundation of culture.

Culture includes more important things. Just one example is casual corruption, like having to pay off the police for phony offensives. That's common in the western hemisphere south of the U.S. and many other places on the globe.

Individual immigrants as fellow human beings are fantastic and welcome. Problems arise when you try to integrate too many people as a large block from disparate societies too fast.

Problems arise when you try to integrate too many people as a large block from disparate societies too fast.

I grew up in Miami. I lived through the Mariel boatlift. And I just don't think that's what this election was about. The democratic party has ignored blue collar workers for too long. That's what this was mostly about.

I think many minorities are terrified this morning just because of your answer. Because when we peel back the rhetoric behind opposition to illegal immigration among many people (which is a legitimate position), we find opposition to the legal immigration that changed the racial fabric of America after 1965.

I'm Indian-American - my parents likely would not have ever been able to immigrate to America if the racist, pre-Hart-Cellar quota laws were still in effect.

You mean like your new first lady?

Why is 1965 the cutoff? Seems rather arbitrary.

Because that is when the immigration act of 1965 was passed.

Why is that particular act significant enough to be the line between "good" and "bad"?

Or to put it more personally, since I am taking it rather personally: why am I considered acceptable but my wife is not?

because you cant please everyone

What kind of non-answer is that? This particular threshold is correct, because people will be unhappy no matter what you do?

and if he does what he's said and re-implements stop and frisk and every non-white citizen has to frequently deal with the indignity of being searched all the time? Your sentiment while delightful isn't in line with the sort of policies Trump has been promoting during his campaign.

He doesn't have authority as President to impose stop and frisk on cities. That's why Federalism is wonderful.

But he wants that authority, and has tremendous power as a republican POTUS with 2 or even 3 SCOTUS picks, a republican congress, and a republican senate.

This is indicated by his repeated attacks on Clinton for having been a politician for 30 years and not fixing, well, everything. He is an autocrat.

Either our country's system of checks and balances works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, we need to replace it anyway.

(I realize how flippant this sounds in the short term, but in the long term, it's right)

If it's really as trivial as you say to turn us into a dictatorship, ...

One can only hope that he subsides his autocratic ambitions or that there are still some hurdles left in place that prevent him from becoming the American Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Hopefully they were simply campaign promises to get votes.

Ok, non-white writing here. I've never been stopped and frisked and neither have most of my non-white friends. And it certainly doesn't happen "all the time", at least to me in my part of town. Although anecdotal, admittedly.

I'm just reminded of a story shared in New York in the 80's where a teacher asked his mostly 14-15 year old African American class if they had been stopped and frisked and every single one of them held their hand up.

Well, me and my friends have different experiences then.

It sounded to me like they were suggesting that Trump is planning to implement stop-and-frisk, not that it is already occurring all the time.

> Yes, we do want to preserve the culture - not white culture but American culture.

I respect that that's how you think about it, and maybe that's even how Trump thinks about it; but I don't think you can credibly make such a blanket statement about Trump voters in general. There are still people in America who believe American culture is white American culture.

The arguments of the more moderate Brexit voters sounded similar to yours, but after the referendum they found out that an uncomfortably large number of their allies really are deeply bigoted. That in itself doesn't make their point invalid, but they can't claim that their opinion defines the whole movement.

I think that if you actually articulate in great detail what it is that you think comprises American culture, as something which is distinct from white culture and is threatened by immigration, you'll find that you are actually talking about white culture.

I am struggling to understand how "corrupt elite" isn't a good description of Donald Trump?

How, exactly, have immigrants negatively affected American culture?

When you say mass immigration, do you mean undocumented immigration, or even legal immigration?

Are you recommending we have less overall legal immigration?

But, aren't you also from an immigrant family? Isn't 99% of the country from immigrant families? I genuinely don't understand how a country that is built on and by immigration hates immigrants so much.

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