Don’t Let The Door Hit You On Your Way In!
I am an immigrant who has been in the United States for twenty years. I am not a citizen, and therefore, I cannot vote. I have cognitive dissonance when I see recent and newly minted citizens turning a blind eye to or even supporting the draconian, xenophobic views on immigration propagated by the likes of President Trump and Stephen Miller.
The Illegal immigration threat serves as an excellent red herring to reduce immigration and rile up the Republican base. Most Immigrants who can vote don’t get impacted by how other immigrants are treated and will support Republican policies, as evidenced by the 2020 election.
While it is generally believed that Democratic presidents are “easy” on illegal immigration, the numbers do not bear this out. There have been more removals of illegal immigrants under Democratic presidents in the last twenty years. Similarly, more asylums have been granted in absolute terms under Republican administrations in the previous twenty years. Let’s not get sucked into the xenophobic rhetoric that works great to rile up a nationalist agenda but is not based on reality.
Isn’t everyone an immigrant in the United States? While that may be a logical deduction based on this country’s origins, I am considering immigrants who have moved in the last 2–3 decades for purposes of this article. The last significant immigration reform was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. It abolished an earlier quota system based on national origin and established a new immigration policy based on reuniting immigrant families and attracting skilled labor to the United States. This change formed the basis of the immigration narrative of the last fifty years.
Foreign-born first-time voters played a significant role in increasing President Trump’s immigrant vote in 2020. Immigrant neighborhoods across the country shifted red while other suburbs and large cities turned blue. President Trump made gains among Vietnamese Asians in Orange County, California, Chinese Americans in Silicon Valley and Brooklyn, South Asians, and Arabs in Chicago’s northern suburbs. This data was derived from multiple exit polls and therefore is not be thoroughly vetted. (source: New York Times “Immigrant Neighborhoods Shifted Red as the Country Chose Blue: Dec 20th, 2020). More Latinos, Chinese, Indian, Arab immigrants voted for President Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016.
Over 10 million immigrants gained citizenship between 2000 and 2018 and became eligible to vote. Among Asian and Hispanic voters, the gap between foreign-born and US-born eligible voters widened between 2020 and 2018.
Asians & Hispanics born outside the United States with foreign attitudes and opinions towards education, work, opportunity, and family values played a more significant role in how these bases voted in 2020.
Many of these immigrants support policies today that would have prevented them from making this country their home. So, what gives? Is it really that these immigrants are cold-hearted human beings who have forgotten their origin story? Do they think that the boat service was terminated after their journey!
I realize that Immigration is not the only issue that Immigrants care about when they cast their votes. Many vote based on how their pocketbooks are impacted and prefer the fiscally conservative policies of the Republicans. Some vote based on their religious beliefs and what the party platform means for their position. Many found their identities in this country. That identity may have been based on their professional success or maybe even finding their faith. I know of some of my Christian friends and family who believe that their entire religious identity was because they managed to make it to this country founded on Christian principles. We can debate if the founding fathers modeled this country on Christian principles or some romantic view that the early pilgrims were likes the Israelites going to the promised land. That is for another article.
I assert that there is more to life than just your pocketbook and how your fellow new immigrants are treated should matter if you plan to call this country your home. It is a matter of basic human decency and empathy. For my fellow Christian immigrant friends and family, news flash for you, there are devout Christians all over the world.
James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “The American Dream” in his 1931 bestseller The Epic of America.
“a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
When you live the American dream as many Asian Americans are, they see their circumstances as a direct result of their hard work and risk-taking. They feel like they have made it against all the odds. At the dinner table, parents tell stories of how hard they had it and how their kids are so lucky. The fact that the nearest Asian grocery store was fifty miles away. I have had conversations with Indians who came here in the ’70s and ’80s as professionals and through chain migration. They begrudge how the “technology people” have it so easy over the last thirty years. They refer to people’s higher salaries in the Information Technology field and the influx of South Asians in the previous twenty-five years. It is almost as if the new immigrants took their exclusivity away from them. You will not get a lot of sympathy for immigration issues from them.
However, that does not explain the attitudes recent immigrants have towards immigration. Older immigrants dealt with challenges associated with going to a new country, language, lack of ethnic food, new accents, etc. Recent immigrants deal with a whole different set of issues that may explain their indifference to other immigrants. Recent immigrants, especially those in white-collar professions, don’t want to be labeled into any particular group. They want to be mainstream. They don’t want your help; they are fine on their own, thank you. They don’t want to show up on some social media group, showing Haitian refugees swimming ashore. They don’t want to be a statistic in an article discussing immigration, legal or otherwise. When you are Asian American, it is hard for you not to stand out as an immigrant. Your physical features are like your personal ID card screaming out your identity to your fellow Americans. European immigrants don’t have to deal with this; they blend in. The last thing these immigrants want is someone taking away their mainstream status because of some immigration issue!
Mainstream media tends to group all non-white people originating from countries south of the US-Mexican border as Latinos. That is a gross generalization. Latinos are multi-racial with very diverse backgrounds. People from Portuguese speaking countries are quite different from Spanish speakers. People from countries with communist or socialists governments such as Cuba see the United States as everything their home country was not. As is evident from the beating the Democrats got in Miami Dade County in Florida among Cuban Americans, the fear of socialism is real. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may get your teenager excited about equality and social justice, not El Tío sipping coffee talking about how bad things were in Havana. To them, AOC comes across as someone who wants to take away everything they cherish, capitalism, hard work, and free enterprise. Much like the Indian uncle who laments about how easy the new generation has it, this group wants people to pay the American Dream price. Just like they did.
There are parallels between the older generation of Asian immigrants and older Latino immigrants. Many have conservative values and are more religious than the next generation.
No party has a monopoly on immigrants anymore. The Democrats will do well not to treat immigrants as one group. They should have learned their lesson in 2020. Fellow immigrants who are living the American dream, spare a thought for the plight of new immigrants. It is okay to support policies that help you financially; it is okay to support candidates who align with your religious beliefs. But spare a thought for the immigrant trying to come to this country to live the dream you are enjoying. Educate yourself about both legal and illegal immigration. Never forget your origin story.
