Humanizing the immigrant brain

Why do immigrants and minorities vote for Trump and AfD?

One of the most bewildering personal challenges in recent times, my second gen immigrant friends and I agree, has been to grapple with the fact that our first gen parents and immigrant communities do not seem to interpret the current state of the world and their place in it in the way that people expect them to.

By people I mean the intellectual and political elite that has taught us, the immigrant children, on pristinely maintained college campuses that we attended on scholarships that those same immigrant parents whipped us into attaining, in that frenzied existential attempt of trying to achieve social mobility on behalf of the whole family, and all those generations who stayed behind — who couldn’t make it, who died before they were able to escape from famine, war and totalitarianism to the promised free land.

It is already a somewhat schizophrenic experience to try to talk demurely to your immigrant parents about Hobbes’ state of nature or the need for a Rawlsian overlapping consensus at the dinner table, when their bodies are still so traumatized by eating habits during the Cultural Revolution that each meal feels like a matter of life or death. Yes, they have a bone-deep understanding of societal chaos and the need to find consensus with others who can help them survive, but it’s not the kind that we, their children who have been spared the brutalization of the immigrant home country, are taught to speak politely about in our new one. I always felt that my German civic and UK/US college education did not prepare me to speak ideologically or even just linguistically to my parents’ generation in a way that would make sense to them.

Trump has been able to garner the immigrant vote — from Arab Americans to Asian Americans, Latinos and beyond — both in 2020 (the Black and Latino vote rose for him already then, but this was mostly ignored) and this time in 2024 in a way that no liberal or Left theory can adequately explain. Indeed, if you look around amongst the post-election analyses, you see people either subconsciously applying the classic Marxist concept of “false consciousness”, meaning that they assume that people vote against their own interest because they lack enlightenment about the “true” nature of economic and political oppression, and, if only they’d be given the necessary information, they would turn against their oppressor and vote the “right” way;

or you see outright disdain and condescension for pro-Trump immigrants and minorities, in which the New York intelligentsia in the form of a pathetically out-of-touch Joseph O’Neill explains the phenomenon away as “nihilistic consumerism” and the desire for “violent entertainment” in his recent NYRB interview. What the hell does he even mean? I guess that when you’ve fried your brain long enough with sleek word gibberish from second class 20th century French philosophers and their American heirs sitting in Ivy League universities, who are so utterly divorced from the actual materialist and economic conditions that Americans, including immigrants, live in, that’s the kind of embarrassing expert opinion that comes out of your mouth.

But I know, I know, you’re here for the brain. So am I. Let’s shift our focus then. In order to do so, we also have to shift the argument. I will argue something now that will be seen as very controversial. I can because my experience of the origin of the anti-immigrant immigrant vote and sentiment is also bone-deep. It comes from a painfully intimate place of humanization, disappointment and care.

I believe that the immigrant experience of traumatic upheaval, biographical ruptures, war, hardship, exile and survival is not ideal for wanting or being able to pursue a liberal brain with ease. What does it even mean, to have a liberal brain?

Political neuroscientists have recently been able to distinguish neurocognitive differences between self-professed liberals and conservatives. Liberals are more cooperative and trusting, especially towards strangers (Romano et al, 2021); liberal brains are better at dealing with uncertainty, both in terms of future time (Haas et al, 2021) and racial ambiguity (Krosch, Jost, Van Bavel, 2021), and there is a liberal preference towards less structured and more encompassing entities (e.g. universalist concepts such as human rights) vs. a conservative preference for more parochial and well-defined entities (e.g. nationalism and ethnocentrism) (Waytz et al. 2019). At the brain level, neuroscientist were able to show enlarged grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex for liberals, a brain area chiefly concerned with the processing of ambiguity (Kanai et al, 2011). Conservative cognition patterns were more centered around the insula, for example in the context of “just world theory”, where humans choose to defend the status quo and existing inequalities instead of questioning them (Denke et al, 2014).

In the social neuroscience research on dehumanization, it has been shown that the experience of feeling dehumanized leads to dehumanization in return, a phenomenon called metadehumanization (Kteily, Bruneau et al, 2016). This study and others by the late Emile Bruneau and his colleagues looked at metadehumanization between Palestinians and Israelis, discovering that if they felt dehumanized by the other out-group, they would retaliate much more harshly than if they just felt disliked.

One of the few social scientists (a fellow Columbia University colleague) who tried to understand why the Black and Latino Trump vote rose back in 2020 (when in hindsight people should have started to pay much more attention to this prior to 2024), despite four years of anti-immigrant and racially charged rhetoric, was sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. He found out that one reason why minorities voted for Trump in 2020 was that they believed that Trump could represent their interest best against other minorities. If you are an immigrant yourself and have actually sat in the living rooms of ordinary immigrants, then you will know that the most expletive and blunt stuff against other racial and immigrant groups will be uttered there. This ain't the decorum-conscious white racist movie set of Get Out, it’s PG-R rated Ali Wong with zero irony.

What white people, or Biodeutsche as they call themselves in Germany, don’t understand is that immigrants often come from countries that they left for a good reason. Those countries were illiberal, conservative, socially backward, oppressive, brutally patriarchal or at the shaky cusp of modernization. The liberal spark that made these immigrants want to leave these conditions might not necessarily translate into a sustained cognitive liberal effort once they’ve arrived in their new home country. In fact, the dehumanizing experiences of exile, foreignness and assimilation can actually lead to conservative and parochial neurocognitive preferences.

We, those survivors’ children, carry that cultural battle between illiberal and liberal values, pre-modern and modern customs inside of our bodies like a powderkeg of conflicted identities and interests. For me as an Chinese German woman, the life-long challenge is to transform the battle into a liberation that can be communicated to both worlds. But it is tedious and exhausting, and understandably not everyone wants to commit to the effort that this liberation requires.

I have tried to open up some new perspectives on immigrants’ neurocognitive susceptibilities, in light of their growing numbers supporting not just Trump, but also the European far-right. Yes, there are immigrant AfD supporters, and immigrant supporters of hard immigration and culture war policies pushed by the CDU. More about this closer to the German snap election in February, for which there hopefully will be enough ballot paper. If you were still living with the myth of German efficiency, this is the moment to truly abandon it. Everything gets messed up here all the time.

For now, what I wanted to achieve in this post was a humanization of the immigrant experience and political interest. Democrats have been quick to chide immigrant and minority groups who voted for Trump like misbehaving children. That is dehumanizing, arrogant and will backfire — it already has in this election. Apart from immigrants voting out of economic despair and fears around inflation, I tried to highlight a neuropolitical aspect of the immigrant political experience in their new home countries that is unfortunately barely discussed.

Partly because there is too much shame around it, and partly because no one likes a victim that does not behave in the grateful and submissive way they should. The sad thing is that immigrants and minorities can be clear victims of systemic oppression, and at the same time, their illiberal brains can contribute to upholding this oppression. Nietzsche already understood that for many, a Sklavenmoral where suffering is morally glorified is actually not an attractive option, especially, I would say, a proud and deluded immigrant. The issue will only become more relevant, as the populations in Western democracies continue to diversify through war, climate and economic refugees and immigrants. We desperately need a new political theory and language to address them. In my opinion, it needs to be rooted in the basis of our universally shared brain vulnerabilities.

I also wanted to bring in Kanye’s jaw-dropping meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in 2018, where Kanye’s comments about superman and slavery were even too much for Trump, but I think I have to leave that and a post about the male brain, Sklavenmoral and victimhood for another time…

In neuropolitical solidarity,

Liya Ragnhild Yu

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