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Comment by roundandround | Hacker News Reader

It sounds to me like you've got some kind of self loathing thing going on. Political arguments are mostly about whether illegal immigrants should get at best a gradual path to citizenship which doesn't mean they will be a tool to win the electoral college.

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Quite the opposite: as I have become more established in this country, I’m less inclined to reject my parents’ values. E.g. JD Vance and my dad are kind of on the same page about childless people. That was never politically motivating for my parents, because they could just tell me “you can’t do what your white friends do.” I can’t realistically tell my own kids that. I have to care about the direction of American culture in a way my parents didn’t.

Almost 10% of the potential electorate is foreign born naturalized citizens like me and my parents. Most of these folks aren’t liberal. They are in a political alliance which is based on white liberals supporting immigration and certain welfare systems, and non-white immigrants looking the other way on cultural issues.

As a foreign born naturalized citizen I have the default position that you are extremely wrong on the cultural front.

I've attempted to find evidence, and found this study, which indicates that first generation immigrants are actually very close to 4th+ in terms of welfare and taxation : https://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulle...

At the same time, I found other studies showing that second generation immigrants support many left wing social policies, such as gay marriage and multiculturalism, but that recent first generation were slightly less inclined to support gay marriage.

It would seem that on the balance, naturalized immigrants (many of which are considered second generation in that study) are on the left socially but not necessarily economically.

> At the same time, I found other studies showing that second generation immigrants support many left wing social policies, such as gay marriage and multiculturalism, but that recent first generation were slightly less inclined to support gay marriage.

What country are you originally from? I’m a first generation immigrant from South Asia, and in my experience, support for socially liberal policies in these communities is often based on compartmentalization. For example, Hindu Americans may support multiculturalism, insofar as they are religious minorities in a Christian majority country. But 70% also support Modi, who definitely doesn’t have a multicultural vision of India: https://theprint.in/india/49-of-indian-americans-back-pm-mod.... One rule for their own country, different rule for someone else’s country. Similarly, most Muslim Americans support gay marriage. But not in their own families: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres....

That’s why liberals like immigrants. When they seek to change American culture, immigrants like my parents think “well let the Americans do what they want.”

I don't see how it is a criticism of a rainbow coalition that they are able to redirect people away from intolerance even if the only motivator is self interest.

This is in fact why the republic is structured as it is, should we pretend people are inherently good and switch to a simple democracy that can vote for its first genocide next week?

In a democracy, it absolutely is a criticism of a political party that it can’t win elections among an electorate that is securely rooted in the country, and must instead rely on newcomers who will put aside their own values because of their precarious circumstances. Democracy is about allowing people to create the society they want to live in, not maximizing individual freedom from moral regulation. Using immigration to enact social change that is undesired among both the people already here and people coming here undermines democracy.

So at what point did immigration become unacceptable instead of part of our system with natural political consequences? Do we need to take the vote away from Irish Americans and re-examine whether the Know Nothings should have won elections and controlled the shape of America so that it might please the majority of white rural Americans? Of course not the portion that would be dragged behind pickups for seeming too queer or having a possibly black grandfather.. But the majority.

> In a democracy, it absolutely is a criticism of a political party that it can’t win elections among an electorate that is securely rooted in the country, and must instead rely on newcomers who will put aside their own values because of their precarious circumstances.

It can be useful to think of immigration as a species of (or perhaps just analogous to) the Monte Carlo method [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

I'm from MENA. I can't speak to South Asians, but the immigrants I know overwhelmingly support secularism, multiculturalism and other progressive policies in their original countries. In fact, the biggest reason why they tell me they wouldn't go back is because they take issue with cultural attitudes and politics there, not because of economics as most feel they might be more prosperous back home.

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