this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

My own experience as an immigrant from a country - Portugal - which both is the source of lots of economic emigrants and nowadays takes in lots of economic immigrants, is that unlike the wunderlust kind of migrant (which tends to be open minded and hence to the left of the political spectrum), the economic kind tend to be significantly more to the right.

You can see that for Portugal in both how the traditional center-right (and in the last elections the far-right) gets a higher percentage of votes from emmigrants than they get in Portugal itself and amongst Brasilians (the largest foreign group by far) living in Portugal Bolsonaro got a signiticantly higher vote percentage in the last two elections than he did in Brasil.

I don't fully understand why it so. My theory is that it's a mix of the heightened nationalism that one gets when living abroad (worse for economic immigrants who felt forced to leave and miss a lot more all that they grew up with), the way many poor or working class people who never actually seen real wealth up close think they're "rich" when they make a bit more than their average countryman (same effect as how moderatelly successful shop owners with little formal education with modest background tend to turn into rightwingers) and that economic migrantes tend to be overwhelmingly be the ones with less formal education who feel much more pressure to leave their country due to low income that more highly educated countrymen.