I’ve never been to a naturalization ceremony but I imagine that they are quite moving and inspiring events. It’s a dream come true for a lot of people to receive their American citizenship. All of us have some ancestors who went through the process. But I think the Republicans view naturalization ceremonies through a political lens. They assume, probably correctly, that nearly every newly created citizen is a vote against them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Swede, a Honduran, or someone from Sudan, it’s highly unlikely that anyone who isn’t a white, male, Christian, established American is going to want to vote for a conservative nativist party. Why would they?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I s’pose I’d have to ask Anchor Baby Malkin (Michelle) at the very least. Probably my (maybe soon-to-be-ex) wife, too…Filipinos seem to be more politically conservative than I’d originally thought. Might Religion be the determining factor? Upbringing?(we are inculcated from an early age that we’re better than everybody else)… Beyond these, I’m drawing a blank…
Traditionally, there has been a strand of anti-communist immigration. Polish and Greek immigrants, for example, have tended to be virulently anti-red, and tend to become Republicans. I think this may also be true of Filipinos.
Polish Catholics are also anti-abortion and I understand that this is the only way for the GOP to get Mexican votes (and a surprising number of them).
It’s funny you mention a naturalization ceremony and republicans. Did you know that OFA members attend these ceremonies to reach out to the new voters? They also regularly go to barber shops, and any where locals congregate.
And they never will if the GOP continues disregard this population. You have to at least try to reach out to those folks who may not automatically agree with you, but I never see the GOP doing that. They hunker down with “their own kind” and hope that if they damage their opponenet enough with manufactured memes, that they will seem like the lesser of 2 evils.
I wouldn’t assume this. There are still plenty of white immigrants, and plenty of people of means who move here for greater economic opportunity.
Unrepresentative (maybe) anecdote: I have a cousin who’s a doctor who came here specifically because she wanted to make more money. It took her over a decade to get her legal status squared, and she rails about illegal immigrants (aka “The Invaders”) who are brown and couldn’t afford pricy immigration attorneys to do it the right way like she could. Republican through and through, and now just another loyal Limbaugh fan in suburban Atlanta.
and she’s not a white Christian?
I did say ‘nearly’ all immigrants.
If memory serves (too lazy to look it up…), immigration from Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. to the US is still fairly robust, and numbers from developing countries, while still large, are off somewhat in the last few years – a combination of the US economy and post 9-11 xenophobia has made Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. more attractive than the US for many of them. Not that those countries don’t all have their anti-immigrant strains in their politics as well.
Well, maybe Canada but it still has less than half the annual immigration as China. No European countries are in the top ten.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who remember where they came from and those that don’t.
Today’s Republican party is made up largely of the latter.