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Research shows that immigrants tend to bring their prejudices with them, adopting the anti-immigrant sentiments of their new hosts. Middle-class immigrants may fear a loss of status. Others simply seek to distinguish themselves from a stigmatised group.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 hours ago

    Absolutely, it’s a spectrum rather then perfectly defined groups, just like pretty much everything else about humans not just psychological but even physiological.

    That said, looking at my own country, Portugal, which had people having to emigrate due to poverty during the Fascist times (which was well before the “strong” passport), then most people not really having the emigrate (80s, 90s, 00s) unless they wanted to, then people once again having to emigrate due to poverty (the youth in the last decade and some, because of low salaries and an insane realestate bubble), most of those who went to live abroad were very different in different phases and it’s almost a joke around here that those who emigrated during that first phase are more rightwing than those who stayed (and you see a similar phenomenon now with Brazilian immigrants in Portugal: the immigrant vote in Portugal for the Brazilian Presidential Elections is invariably far more to the Right than the vote in Brazil).

    I believe those with wunderlust always leave in more or less the same numbers, but during the hard times the number of those leaving because they have to rather than because of their desire for new experiences, is far larger and outstrips those driven by wunderlust (and, as you pointed out, when everybody is poor the ones with wunderlust both want to and need to leave).

    Although from this one might expect that immigrants from poorer countries will be more rightwing in average because of the higher fraction of economic relative to wunderlust immigrants, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point I’m trying to make is that in their host countries there are two kinds of behaviors of immigrants because there are two kinds of drives to leave one’s homeland, which is as true for richer countries as for poorer countries, even if the ratio of one kind to the other kind is different because poverty makes more people leave for economic reasons.

    Basically people shouldn’t be assuming shit about all immigrants because of effects like the one described in this article: whilst the aggregated numbers might project a certain impression, in reality there are different kinds of immigrants with different drives to emigrate and hence different behaviors in their host country, and the wunderlust ones who are the minority in the immigration from poorer countries shouldn’t be tainted by the way the other kind behaves as they’ve very different and behave differently.