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Easy.
There is a huge portion of the country, about 1/3, that knows they aren’t living the American dream, but they work hard and don’t understand why.
Then, someone tells them something slightly true. That there’s not enough pie to go around (semi-true), and that the reason there’s not enough pie is all the immigrants and freeloaders who aren’t working and are taking handouts (false).
What they aren’t told is there could be enough pie to go around, if the top 1% was willing to share. They aren’t. And they now control ~35% of wealth in the USA.
And then the top 1% uses that extra capital to tell that 1/3 of people that their Hispanic neighbor is the problem.
a big chunk of that bloc is first gen immigrants themselves.
all my 2nd gen immigrant friends have parents who hate new immigrants and support ICE type policies and are big Trump fans.
First gen immigrants are affected by new immigrants, they’re in direct competition with the new guys and many are quite happy to pull up the ladder.
If that was all that was going on, it would be pretty understandable for that subset.
What I don’t get are the white ones with first gen immigrant partners.
most of the immigrant women I have dated wanted a conservative white guy boyfriend. probably because they were looking for a guy like their dad.
I often give the benefit of the doubt towards minorities. My internal hope is that since they are a minority, they surely have experienced bigotry, reflected on it as victims, and rejected that spirit.
That mentality of mine has been completely shattered over the last couple years. The majority of the immigrants I have known have floored me with their bigotry towards so many others. It has made me curious: Are they attracted to that part of our culture? Is this the predominant spirit of the world? What the hell does it mean?
No. they are just people. everyone is like that.
the issue is you thought people were better than they are. they aren’t.
but we can’t make any progress until we are open about who and what we really are. the lefties and the righties are both in total denial about the complexity of the world and put forth this vague bullshit idealism about who and how people are suppose to be.
most the of the rich white enlightened liberal/leftie set are incredibly sexist, racist, and bigoted towards others who aren’t like themselves. their discourse and ideals are mostly about signally to each other they are part of the ‘good people’ and it’s all the ‘bad people’ who are those things. by forming and out-group you get to get to pretend you have ‘purged’ the ‘bad’ by projecting it onto ‘others’ who don’t share your views or lifestyle. but everyone does this. everyone hates some ‘other’ bad group of people in order to claim their group is ‘good’. every immigrant group thinks they are the ‘hard working’ group and the other are ‘lazy exploiters’.
the issue is you thought people were better than they are. they aren’t.
I am very cynical, but my hope is that we can collectively improve our situation. I pull my hair out when people keep playing their tribal games. All they have to do is reason it out.
people like it when collective improvement benefits people that look like them. they don’t when the people don’t look like them.
the scandanvian models works because of the lack of diveristy. it’s starting to break down due to the influx of immigration.
people are hardwired this way. it is incredibly difficult to change it.
Is it hardwired, or trained?
I have prejudices that are wrong. I know that they are wrong. I know the kind of futures that will never exist if I exercise them. I don’t know, if it’s nature or nurture.
hardwired and trained.
for someone to not be that way takes decades of specific training and a life of abundance. most people are never going to have that. most people don’t perceive their life as being abundant, even if it objectively is.
Before you judge too harshly, remember that they can’t physically vote and probably don’t know as much about politics. It is very easy to fall into right-wing pipeline under these conditons.
More importantly, them not being able to vote means they don’t effect you as much as some people want you to believe.
A lot of democrats blamed immigrants for the 2024 election results and there was a tiktok trend of reporting the unrelated immigrant neighbors to ICE.
A lot of democrats blamed immigrants for the 2024 election results
No Democrats blamed illegal immigrants, if that’s what you mean. That just did not happen because it makes no sense.
They DID blame the people who voted for Trump, even if they were from a community with a lot of immigration. Rightfully so.
Naturalized citizens can vote. First generations can vote, and children mostly align with their parents’ beliefs.
I am not anti-immigration. At all. I am against intolerance. I am against anyone who would abuse a country’s asylum system, because it will lead to end of such lifelines.
I’m becoming more curious about whether there are biases in the type of person who chooses to immigrate (excluding refugees) to the US.
This is how it plays out locally: I live in a low cost of living town in Northeast PA. Our area has historically not been very diverse. Over the past 20 years they’ve ben building a lot of huge warehouses and distribution centers in our area to take advantage of the low cast of living. The industrial parks in the area all competed with each other to land these “job-creating” warehouses, and they competed by offering tax-free deals for x number of years.
So they build these warehouses, and when they hire, everybody apart from the 4 managers are hired part time, and can only work up to max of 28-30 hrs per week, to prevent the company from owing them any kind of health care retirement. Mostly, the only people desperate enough to move here for those jobs are immigrants, and since there’s no attachment to one warehouse or another, as soon as there’s slightly better offer, they move right on out. Our schools are getting hammered because their tax revenue hasn’t increased, but instead of of 1-2 new students per year in a grade level, they’re dealing with 5-6 new kids per WEEK, and a good number them come in with little to no English. Frequently, the families have to separate to get here, and that just makes everything even harder.
Now, if you’re not paying too close attention, you look at the area compared to 20 years ago, and think,
- There are more immigrants
- The school have less money and test scores are down
- Crime is worse
- Wages are unliveably low …
- Immigrants did it
The “nice” thing is if you own a warehouse, you don’t even need to spend any money “convincing” people to blame immigrants, you just make a bunch of money, pay them as little as possible, and watch the nightly news talk about all the danger and crime in the area.
If magas could read a post this long they might get it
Not a chance.
You are now banned from Piefed. Please lay down while the death squadron comes for you.
This pretty much
Once you get down to the bottom half they are all together possessed of only a single digit share of wealth between them
My brother, who dropped out of school, lays carpet. He is very mad about immigrants “takin’ our jerbs”. He is also not a very good employee and miserably failed when he tried to start his own business…he wanted to be the boss without doing any work himeself… I imagine most people have made poor life choices and just need someone to blame.
How has immigration affected the average voter?
Tasty ethnic food. There are tasty tacos around, some good Pho, there was an Ethiopian place around here, and tabouli with BBQ.
The remaining Caribbean place around here is really disappointing and the pulled pork is dry, so there is that.
It’s not just ethnic food. It’s all food. Did your food come from a farm? An immigrant worked on that farm.
Fuck the taco vote might break elections if people realize
The average American eats tacos with pre shred cheddar and sour cream. And it’s not bad, I like some Americanized foods, I liked Taco Bell before it became more expensive than getting the real thing. Most haven’t had a Mexican taco.
For anyone here, who isn’t satisfied with “white people taco night” and wants something better, I found a wonderful woman who is sharing her cooking knowledge from her beautiful outdoor Mexican kitchen:
A few years ago, she posted a recipe for her Nana’s sopa de tortilla Sopa de Tortilla and it’s so good I’ve made it twice in the last few weeks.
I’ve been watching her cook for years, and I’ve learned a lot. Great recipes! You don’t need to know much Spanish to follow either!
Sounds like a good way to practice cooking Mexican food and Spanish at the same time, thanks!
How has immigration affected the average voter?
More competition on the job market, housing market and so on? Especially visible in big companies and big cities?
And immigrants famously will work longer hours for less, thus the capitalists are using them to keep wages low.
Seems like a good reason for unions and worker protection. Let’s have a good highly visible corp prosecution as a lesson
Seems like a good reason for unions and worker protection
Yes. There’s not enough unions in the EU and the power is overwhelmingly favouring the employers (interestingly that is the effect of allowing mass immigration into the EU: more workers who didn’t unionise and were willing to work more hours for less money tends to weaker the worker class power; I have no idea how to give us more power short of literally eating the rich). I don’t even want to think how shit the worker situation is in the USA.
our shit wouldn’t be as cheap however and nothing is stopping people from building enough housing save the desire to keep prices artificially high. Lacking demand they could have just built less to maximize their gain. Given more demand yet they could have built more but little enough to again maximize gain. Seeing a pattern here?
nothing is stopping people from building enough housing save the desire to keep prices artificially high
I don’t know where you’re located. I live in a big European city. The space here is limited. The new housing is mostly being built outside of the city really, and it will take years for it to get the proper treatment (like buses, trams, metro line). The immigrants are directly competing with me for the in-city apartments. This could be different if you’re located in, IDK, Iceland, where the space is not really a problem, or in USA where you don’t have public services.
our shit wouldn’t be as cheap
Our cheap shit is imported from cheap countries though?
Given more demand yet they could have built more but little enough to again maximize gain
In 10 to 20 years. But the problem of competing for limited resources is now. Seeing a problem here?
Seeing a problem here?
Not really. This is not a new problem. This is not a surprise. This is the result of putting off change until it becomes a more serious issue.
Given the nature of politics, of people, problems will always be ignored until they become critical
The space here is limited… The immigrants are directly competing with me for the in-city apartments.
More desirable locations will be too expensive for many, or most, people to afford. As local economies change, and different locations become desirable, people will be priced out and forced to move. Good city planning decisions can slow this down to allow people to adapt, but trying to freeze things in place is futile.
It’s not really possible to set up city planning regulations so the population stays exactly the same. If a city were successful in making itself an undesirable place to live so that no one new would move there, it would probably start losing its population, which (like growth) forces its own hard planning decisions.
Thank you captain obvious. What’s your point in the discussion, as you havent made one in that comment.
No, not at all. Most Americans aren’t being threatened by immigrants. There are a few places where the uber rich immigrants flock to, but people in Average America, Iowa aren’t competing with immigrants.
Immigrants create more jobs due to an increased need for services. Immigrants are a net positive to an area, and they can fill in skill gaps.
Capitalists can keep wages low by rigging the game via bribing politicians to reduce social programs. They don’t need immigrants to do that. They need immigrants as scapegoats. They need people to buy into their warped view of the world, and they need people to turn against each other, like you’re doing here.
Capitalists use sticks, live poverty, homelessness, and healthcare, to keep people inline and eating up their bullshit. Without the sticks, the capitalist have no power, and they know this.
I was thinking on this just the other day. Without immigration, and native people alike, we wouldn’t have such good food. How can’t you hate people with such good food!?
there are several immigrants that made things worst: melania, THIEL, musk, cruz, . just not the ones that came with no money.
If ICE went after them instead, I would be okay with ICE.
I live in Canada. While it is not the fault of individual immigrants, even the Government of Canada and big banks have admitted that abuse of the International Student and TFW programs has put a lot of strain of public infrastructure and housing supply and has suppressed wages. These issues have absolutely objectively affected the average Canadian.
Every now and then you get someone on social media try to be smart and smugly say something like, “International Students can’t afford to buy a house. Explain to me how they’re driving up the cost of housing.” But they fail to realise it increases demand for rentals, and people buy single family homes to rent the rooms to those students, and so the demand for those rentals drives up the cost of houses.
You can acknowledge that not all immigration is good without blaming individual immigrants themselves. I’m always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don’t understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy.
Yeah this is so accurate or hurts that people don’t get it, or go the opposite way and blame the migrant.
I was teaching in a college from 2021-2024 and by the time I left my classes were at least 95% international students. The greed of our higher education institutions has caused a massive problem.
It’s a lack of nuance. Higher rates of population growth can be good, if pressure points like housing are planned for with zoning and permitting systems that promote densification in popular locations. The badness is neither the additional people nor the housing regulations individually, but instead is that they don’t match.
Also, there’s a lot of racism in the mix. The people with legitimate concerns about growth planning (or the lack thereof) end up mixed in with the people who are horrified at the idea of their racial group becoming a minority of the country’s population.
You:
Higher rates of population growth can be good
Commenter before you:
I’m always shocked when people who understand infinite growth is a fallacy when it comes to the corporate world, don’t understand that trying to grow the population into infinity year after year is just the government equivalent of that fallacy
Sure “the higher rates of population growth” can be good. Usually for the wealthy and or privileged classes though, and ultimately always they don’t solve the underlying issue causing the original problem.
Equating advocacy for planning for projected near- and middle-term population changes with advocacy for “infinite” growth is exactly the lack of nuance that frustrates me.
Yaaay nuanced opinion!! Thank you for posting :)
Well, how many international students do you get?
Immigration in my area is heavily used for wage suppression.
That’s Capitalism you’re mad at, not immigrants…
Not really, you’re mad at capitalism, I personally hold no rage to ‘immigrants’. I hold rage towards the lazy ignorant selfish citizens in our world that sit by as we get sold out. I feel rage towards people that don’t care as the free-world dies.
Where I live we have democracy. We have the ability to invoke change. We have the ability to stand up and defend the rights, and the futures of others. We have the ability to progress as a society. I think blaming Capitalism is absurd. If people can’t come together to agree on positive change, it’s not about ‘the system’ it’s fundamentally about the people in the system.
Well I encourage you to look into why it is that people don’t actually have the ability to stand up and defend the rights, and the futures of others.
Hint: the answer begins with C, ends in M, and the former USA is a textbook perfect example of how it ends.
To be fair, capitalism itself isn’t exactly it. It’s unbridled capitalism. But because the people who benefit most from unbridled capitalism will spend a bunch of their excess money convincing people like you unbridled capitalism is just the best…we end up here.
They’re wrongfully attributing to the immigrants what should be attributed to corporations, businesses and the extremely wealthy who are exploiting and trafficking immigrants.
And the wealthy help conservatives get elected, and conservatives demonize immigrants, and on and on it goes with half the country being mad at the wrong people.
All my favorite food and culture comes from regions I am not native.
Many people, when they look out at the world, all they want to see is themselves reflected back at them. When they see something else, they feel afraid.
Rich people said poor people have no health care because poorer people get sick sometimes.
And then the rich just belied this nonsense
No reasonable person has an issue with legal immigration, though plenty of unreasonable ones do. As far as illegal immigration goes, even Bernie Sanders said that a country without borders is not a country and that open borders is a Koch bothers idea.
Their eyes are offended by the very sight of someone different from them.
My personal explanation:
These are people who weren’t here when those voters were children and a large part of the population are voting to stop time, not policies or anything.
Surpressed wages. Immigration is just a consequence of the bourgeoisie war against the proletariat. It works double for them because they can blame the immigrants that they bring in for people’s problems and can use them to make those problems worse.
You aren’t going to find pro immigrant leftists. You will find humanitarian leftists that think the people the right bring here should be treated like people.
even by that logic, it is not the immigrant who is suppressing wages, but the capitalist. and he is so giddy about cunts blaming the immigrant with suppressed wages.
That’s what I said.
sorry,if I misread it.
Also a slight tangent, leftists don’t believe in borders, so “immigrant” is a nonsensical term.
why is someone considered less of they aren’t living in their birth country??? such an irrational hierarchies.
leftists don’t believe in borders
Uh yeah, we do. Every country on Earth recognizes borders. That doesn’t mean a person in one country is valued less than a person in another.
but should people be free to live/travel/work where they please or should they be locked within the state they were born in and beg other states to live in them?
Borders have a purpose, if we try removing them then we just become colonizers.
Rather than removing borders it’s better to invest to bring up the status of their home country.
Why should someone have to leave home to be more?
borders should be nothing more than tools to help manage regions, not as restrictions for people, no one should need to move, but everyone should be able to do so if they wish to.
borders are literally a colonial invention.
You will find your lack of fight against oppressers just more readily allows them to oppress.
Borders aren’t a colonial invention, your reference is to the idea that common people are subject to borders. Lords had their realms, and even with that common people had security checks. Let us not forget the military checkpoints that Guan Yu was stopped at as he fled Cao Cao. Historical accuracy of the account aside; it shows military checkpoints in traveling roads.
If you want to say Rome was colonialist then I’d agree but you’re going back three thousand years and refusing to acknowledge a system to prevent military incursions.
Regular people would get their wares checked and weapons confiscated when entering cities. Sometimes their wares would be held until they leave or they’d be denied entry.
The biggest change which you seem confused on is the scale of the states involved. Going from city state to country is more of a logistical hurdle we overcame than a colonialist expansion.
modern borders, as a fence where people aren’t allowed to cross is a colonial invention.
and honestly, arguing semantics and history is a fun tangent but not what I care about.
everyone should be free to travel and live/work/study wherever they please. and an immigrant and a local should have the same rights and opportunities.
that is separate to the point of “we should make their places better so they don’t need to migrate” which I agree, but need to note the western chauvinism in that statements. it would be enough if the west stopped messing and exploiting those nations, forcing them into poverty.
So then you support this “colonial invention”?
Borders exist everywhere, not just countries that were historically colonized.
?
I’m saying borders are bad, and you somehow read that as the opposite?
cancer also exists everywhere, does that make it good?
It’s a little more complex than this. Wage suppression does occur but only at the very bottom strata of employment, specifically those producing use-values that are directly consumed within the country where the labour is performed. Employment in industries producing globalised/exported commodities tend not to see wage suppression and often sees an opposite effect as the higher concentration of highly-qualified labour attracts more investment. All this is to say that the overall effect doesn’t tell the whole story, and different sections of the bourgeois may have differing reasons for supporting/opposing immigration.
dude, HB-1 visas lower wages in the tech sector, and there is a reason big tech corpos are so desperate to increase how many there are, so they can bring immigrant programmers to the USA and pay them 50K a year instead of a 150K a year a American programmer might get. They can also exploit them to work 80hour weeks or more because the visa is dependent on the companies sponsorship.
It’s also a reason the AMA doesn’t let foreign doctors practice in America w/o a crazy certification process that takes years to go through. They know it would lower physicians wages if doctors for eastern Europe could immigrate here and would glad to work for 80K.
Nobody likes to talk about these things because they are politically incorrect. Bring them up and people will tell you you’re being an asshole.
Immigration is a complex problem at all bands of the economic spectrum. On the rich end, countries have national programs to actively court rich people to become citizens and expedite the process… because they want their money and assets in country. And on the flip side, nobody wants poor people because they are economic burdens who often use a lot of public resources.
Correct, but this more a case of qualifications chasing investment rather than vice-versa. It’s not the kind of immigration that tends to get ‘debated’ in terms of how much of it should be allowed, though the H1Bs were kind of in the news cycle a few months ago.
I live in a big tech city and it’s a very hot topic here on both sides. A lot of HB-1 visa holders are basically ghettoized in their companies and socially from the ‘tech bro’ workers who are from upper middle class white/asian families. They do a lot of the same work, but their wage differential is like a factor of 2-4x for the same job.
But true that it’s not a big deal nationally, which seems to mostly focus on latin american emigration of uneducated low wage laborers.
That’s fair. I didn’t realise how socially divisive the H1Bs were, though it makes sense now that you mention it.
one of my friends rents out his spare bedroom to hb-1 holders and people flip out at him for it. he’s just a nice guy looking to give someone a leg up in this shitty world. and the people who shit on him the most are the ones who got houses paid for by their parents.
That’s not an immigration issue, it’s worker exploitation. We allow companies to hire unprotected workers and exploit their situation without consequences.
And yes, same is true of h1-b. As written, it theoretically would not reduce wages, but in reality it does because employers exploit their situation without system and the “trapped worker.
In both cases, wjilynarenwenletting corps get away with this?
Is it ok to be against immigration that lets people be exploited, such as h1-b without sufficient enforcement, or undocumented aliens where the person is at risk but the employer is not. We can fix it by better support of employee rights regardless of immigration status
I think that means you’re against exploitation, not immigration…
How is H1B people exploitation? All of my colleagues at the same position as me (a US citizen) make the same amount of money.
can be. People do choose and do benefit but
- artificially lowers wages. Supposed to be skills you can’t find but usually just cheaper pay
- employee has to leave the country if they lose their job.
- some employers will leverage that to exploit their situation with the employee
Clearly it’s not like undocumented aliens but it can still be exploitive and it’s something I think more people here are familiar with.
There may be millions of exploited undocumented aliens in jobs like construction and farm work that I’ll never meet. I know they exist but may never have direct experience. While work visas are less of an issue they are still an issue and throughout fields like technology where I’m assuming more lemmings are likely to meet them
They can’t get lower wages though. It is required by the department of labor. Have you ever talked to someone on H1-B? It makes sense that they have to leave the country if they lose their job. It makes no sense to live in a country with a work visa if you aren’t working.
Even if it was exploitative, how is that a good case for “to be against immigration that lets people be exploited”? That should be a good case for making it less exploitative. Not stopping immigration just for more American jobs to go overseas.
Yes, I’ve known many people on H1-B, including fighting for a few to be paid decently. Legally they aren’t supposed to be paid less but realistically many are, even at “good” employers. All it takes is categorizing them differently than someone else doing the same work.
While it makes sense that a work visa expires if you’re not working for a sponsoring company, it doesn’t have to be so disruptive to life. The expiration is way shorter than typical time to find another job - was it 30 days? Plus what about families? Is it reasonable to make a kid, say, leave school, leave friends, leave the only country they’ve ever known, with almost no notice? While you may claim that was the parents decision, what’s the alternative? Would you really ask them to give up their family to work in the us?
I’ve know people on H1-B ….
- who left family behind and only saw them once per year
- who put up with abusive employers just so their kid could complete the school year
- who’ve had to consider leaving their children with family so the could stay in the only country they’ve ever known
It’s also something they willingly apply for and clearly want. OP is acting like they’re forced into it.
