Both the Left and Right misunderstand migrant voters
Turns out migrants are much the same as other human beings. Who’d have thought?
Video summary
Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like “Defund the Police” or “From the River to the Sea” or LatinX. There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.
Democratic Congressman (NY) Ritchie Torres, 7/11/24
It’s easy to ask abstract questions like “Why does one group of people get to squat on a piece of land and declare it off-limits to others?”. But like it or not, nation-states are the only workable arrangement for providing public goods and political stability that humankind has discovered in the modern era. And borders are an essential, inalienable part of what it means to be a nation-state.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Bertolt Brecht
Working my way through the deluge of pundit fallacy-laden post-election commentary, I was struck by an offhand remark from a podcast guest. They proclaimed, “For about four weeks after an election like this, everyone can talk honestly about the issues. Then it’s back to business as usual.”
So, let me take advantage of this rare window of opportunity to share some observations about how both the “No human is illegal, man!” progressive Left and “They’re eating the cats and dogs” nativist Right have misunderstood migrants and, as a result, mispredicted their voting behaviour.
Away with the magical elves
Whenever I see a progressive paean to migrants and multiculturalism, I’m reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s frustration over the sanitised magical elves portrayal of gays in contemporary popular culture. Ellis argues gays usually aren’t portrayed as three-dimensional human beings capable of both good and evil but rather flawless creatures who spend their lives doing good deeds and (wittily) dispensing joy.
Other demographics perceived to be on the right side of the oppressor/oppressed binary also get the ‘magical elves’ treatment. In recent decades, the gentrified Left has glommed onto migrants and presented them in a favourable, often heroic, light.
The nativist Right portrayal of migrants is pretty much the opposite. In this telling, migrants are demonic invaders who spread disease and dissension, dilute the traditional culture, lower wages, commit crime, overburden public services, and generally go around making the native-borns feel uncomfortable and resentful.
Perhaps because I’ve spent a lot of time around migrants and am the son of one myself, I’ve never been convinced by either the unreservedly positive or negative portrayals of migrants.
Politically non-binary immigrants
Having given the matter some thought, I’ve come to the apparently outlandish conclusion that migrants are pretty much the same as non-migrants, leaving aside the fact that they moved from one country to another.
Given how ideological much of the research into immigration has been, I don’t put a lot of weight on it. Depending on what our American friends call “the priors” of the researcher involved, it’s straightforward to, for example, ‘prove’ that migrants are either exceptionally law-abiding or disproportionately inclined to a life of crime.
The only evidence I find convincing about the unique characteristics of migrants is that showing they are more entrepreneurial than native-borns. The research showing adjusting to a new society often makes migrants more resilient and adaptable also makes intuitive sense to me.
Given migrants are disproportionately likely to be businesspeople and have a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mindset, it could reasonably be assumed they would lean to the Right.
Even those on the Left will usually concede that migrants are socially conservative. A migrant from Bangladesh, China, India, Nepal, Pakistan or the Philippines is unlikely to believe there are 58 genders. Or that it’s a matter of urgency that the patriarchy be dismantled. Or that transphobia is the greatest threat currently facing humanity.
It’s also the case that all migrants are, to some extent, economic migrants, as evidenced by the propensity of migrants to migrate to countries with higher living standards. Most migrants are laser-focused on upward social mobility, at least for their children and ideally for themselves.
Given migrants are socially and often economically conservative – especially if they’ve emigrated from a socialist nation (e.g. migrants from Eastern Europe or South America) – you might expect them to be especially inclined to vote for the centre-right party in their new home.
But up until recently, that didn’t happen. Especially in the US, the natives have long skewed Right and the migrants have long skewed Left.
For decades, right-leaning politicians and intellectuals have insisted that such-and-such an ethnic group is socially conservative and pro-free enterprise and, therefore, a natural constituency. Be that as it may, those ethnic groups have usually continued to favour the centre-left party.
Many have accordingly argued centre-right parties could only win over more migrant voters by accepting openish borders and getting with the identity politics program.
Over on the Left, there was plenty of hubris about a glorious future where reliably Democrat/Labour/Labor-voting migrants would soon come to outnumber and outvote the reactionary nativists. It was often inferred, if rarely baldly stated, that obtuse, non-college-educated white people were the ones slow-walking the arrival of a glorious majority-minority multicultural utopia.
The Left’s hubris peaked following, first, the publication of 2002’s The Emerging Democratic Majority and, second, Obama’s success with minority/migrant voters in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
The Left optimistically believed, and the Right desperately feared, that a growing number of migrant voters would keep voting for centre-left parties championing a “progressive centrism” centred on high immigration (illegal as well as legal) and muscular multiculturalism.
Then 2016 happened.
Progressives idealise new arrivals, but the feeling isn’t mutual
Graph courtesy of Patrick Ruffini
Say what you will about Trump, but he can’t be accused of championing open borders and muscular multiculturalism. As you may have heard, he kicked off his 2016 campaign by declaring, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
So why did Trump do relatively well with Mexican-Americans and relatively poorly with White ones in 2016, 2020 and 2024?
The Left’s go-to move of attributing any unwelcome development to racism would seem to be unavailable in this instance. A few hardy progressive souls have been leaning extra hard into the sexism cope, but that’s also a stretch. If Hillary won the popular vote, doesn’t that suggest most American voters are willing to vote for a female president? And those now arguing machismo-deranged minority men would never cast their ballot for a woman need to explain why about 82 per cent of Black men and 63 per cent of Latino ones backed Hillary a mere eight years ago.
Surprise!
There are several widespread but mistaken assumptions non-migrants – especially those who are highly educated, culturally upper-middle-class types – make about migrants.
Perhaps the most common and erroneous assumption is that migrants love migration.
Legal migrants invariably take umbrage at illegal migration. This seems particularly difficult for progressive elites to fathom, even though it’s perfectly logical. Suppose you’ve been queuing to get into a fashionable nightclub for three hours only to see someone sneakily slip in through the fire exit. Is your reaction likely to be, “I’m happy to wait even longer in line, answer the bouncer’s questions about how much I’ve had to drink in my most sober voice, and pay the cover charge. But I’m overjoyed to see a fellow nightclubber realise his dreams without needing to go through all that unnecessary rigmarole.”
The situation is more nuanced with legal migration. Migrants may well want family members to be able to join them. But that fellow feeling rarely extends to all their erstwhile compatriots, let alone the rest of the world’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Some belated attention is now being paid to how mass migration disempowers the working class as a whole. But it’s somewhat established migrants, rather than natives, who are typically most disadvantaged by the newly arrived migrants. This is because they are the ones competing with them for jobs in industries such as agriculture and construction.
As well as not being as pro-migration as imagined, many migrants are also sceptical about creating a vibrantly diverse paradise on earth. Even if they don’t hail from Rwanda or the Balkans, many migrants come from nations where ethnic conflict goes far beyond microaggressions and where racial spoils systems have damaged both the economy and social harmony. Accordingly, they are often keener on meritocracy and much more cynical about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives than unworldly American/Australian/British/Canadian/Kiwi progressives.
Not living the dream
There’s been a lot of talk of the death of the American dream this election cycle. As is often lamented, the American (and Australian, British, Canadian, Kiwi) Dream of earning an income sufficient to facilitate home ownership, marriage and children has been slipping out of reach for a growing proportion of both native-borns and migrants. Neither the mainstream Left nor the mainstream Right paid much attention to this until about five seconds ago, preferring to engage in sundry how-many-angels-can-dance-on-head-of-a-pin culture war battles.
Then Donald the Swamp-Draining Disruptor appeared. Last week, he made inroads with every identifiable demographic barring childless cat ladies and overeducated surplus elites.
Given Trump’s spectacular success, many centre-right politicians will now adopt Trumpian policies and, presumably, attract support from both migrant and native-born voters who believe they’ve been thrown under the bus economically.
If I were Albo, I’d be making sure that $4 million beach shack is ready to move into no later than mid-2025.
The irony of this presumed solidarity of immigrant peoples is that liberals tend to assume, quite frankly racistly, that people in sharing the same national origin necessarily have the same basic interests. But this simply isn't any more true about the internal politics of any other country than it is the United States. And extending that to migrants, people with a low enough attachment to their country of origin they're willing to move to another country and have their kids subscribe to a different nationality entirely, is just as silly.
To the extent the Democrats could ever count on these votes, it was mainly because the Democrats supported policy that benefited poor people, and immigrant people tend to be poor. Now they're just coasting on branding alone. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Trump is getting more votes when he's at least pretending to care about issues that interest them instead of expecting people to be impressed that he listens to Ricky Martin and uses the word Latinx.