why some first gen chinese immgrants support trump

Many of these points are common to indian immigrants too.
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Affirmative action: This is a topic so ubiquitous on these threads that it’s just abbreviated as “AA” and, as it would alphabetically, has to top the list. “We came here for one reason and one reason alone, and that is to get our kids into good schools,” the reasoning goes. “Now they’re unfairly raising the bar and imposing de facto quotas on Chinese and other East Asian students, and giving the places our kids deserve to less-qualified African-American and Latino kids. Our kids work hard, and we’ve sacrificed so much. Underrepresentation of black and Hispanic students is not our fault. Why should we suffer for it?” That opposition to “AA” would be so loud on a WeChat group for parents of students perhaps isn’t surprising, but this appears to be a top issue for many Chinese immigrants supporting Trump. Resentment at preferential treatment allegedly given to other underprivileged minorities easily elides into opposition to anything labeled “politically correct,” and they come to admire Trump’s open contempt for the whole liberal agenda of social justice.

Sexual conservatism: China may have come a long way since the days when homosexuality was criminal; it’s no longer even regarded as a form of mental illness in China, and attitudes among young people in China have certainly changed. But among immigrants in the groups we’ve been interacting with — mainly people aged 35 to 55, if I had to guess — attitudes are still profoundly conservative. You could drive a truck through the gap between this group’s mores and the cultural norms among American elites and among younger Americans when it comes to LGBTQ issues. Here in North Carolina, which passed the infamous HB2 “Bathroom Bill,” requiring people to use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex as listed on their birth certificates, many Chinese see this as simple common sense. Even some otherwise liberal Chinese I’ve spoken to in North Carolina think that making an issue of this law and fighting for its repeal is going too far.

Racism: Whatever its causes — and they are too numerous to get into here — Chinese racism is well attested, and many Americans would be shocked were they privy to conversations about race taking place in Chinese when participants think no one else is listening. The conflation of blackness with criminality among immigrant Chinese in America is appallingly commonplace. Anyone who pushes back on those assumptions is seen as simply denying the obvious, and is barraged by statistics on violent crime rates showing, of course, disproportionately high criminality among African Americans — devoid, of course, of any context. They are uninterested in hearing historical arguments: Invoking centuries of chattel slavery, or Jim Crow, or housing discrimination, or the grossly unequal sentencing standards for powder and crack cocaine makes no difference at all. All too often, there is this belief that it’s an American problem and that their only interest is to ensure the short-term safety of their own families.

Adding fuel to this is the so-called “Asian Lives Matter” movement, which focused initially on the manslaughter conviction of a Chinese-American NYPD officer named Peter Liang in the shooting death of an unarmed black man; similarly, an alleged surge in “Black-on-Asian” violence, in which African Americans are said to be deliberately targeting Asians, seeing them as cash rich and largely defenseless. A video by rapper YG for the track “Meet the Flockers,” the lyrics of which advise robbing Asian houses, has not helped the situation. It’s been a rallying cry for many Chinese Trump supporters, as was the bust, in August, of a Southern California robbery ring by Torrance, California police. The East Coast Crips-affiliated gang behind those robberies, police said, specifically targeted Asian-owned homes — discernible by the shoes left on the front porch — and was responsible for a reported 5,000 burglaries.

Schadenfreude: It’s astonishing to me how many Trump supporters among the first-generation immigrants acknowledge that a Trump presidency would actually do significant damage to the American economy, to the image of the U.S. abroad, or to democracy itself — and still either dismiss that damage as “not my problem” or even take some pleasure in the prospect of America being knocked down a peg or two. I would hope that these are the exception, and that most Chinese immigrants come to the U.S. and place the interests of their new country at least on a par with the one they’ve left. Regrettably, though, a distressingly high number understand that a Trump victory would take the wind out of America’s sanctimonious sails when it comes to pushing liberal democracy and would cherish just such an outcome.

Hillary’s hawkishness: This is related, of course, to the schadenfreude described above. The kind of blustering anti-trade talk coming out of Trump sounds, to the Chinese ear, like what they’ve heard from every American presidential candidate for the last 20 years or more. They’re accustomed to a quadrennial bout of China bashing that ends in early November and is followed, come late January, by business as usual. But among Chinese with very few exceptions, it’s an article of faith that Hillary Clinton is not only a liberal interventionist who is hawkish on China, but also someone entirely likely to aggressively pursue the so-called Rebalancing (née “Pivot”) — a policy that many if not indeed most Chinese see as a species of containment.

Zhen xiaoren and wei junzi: Chinese speak of their preference for “the genuine petty person” (真小人, zhēn xiaǒrén) over “the hypocritical gentleman” (伪君子, weí jūnzi). Not only do they see these two types reflected in the presidential candidates — Trump seeming to revel in his pettiness and in the willful ignorance of so many of his supporters, Clinton supposedly an unalloyed elite intoning moralistic homilies, as their leaders back home do, and feigning disgust with Trump’s conspicuous moral failings despite her own — but more than that, they feel free to give rein to their own pettiness, and to own it. Several first-generation immigrants supporting Trump on local WeChat groups have been totally up front about their self-interest, whether in voting for lower taxes, or to abolish “AA,” or to reduce competition by curtailing immigration. Can’t imagine where this zero-sum, hypercompetitive, amoral, and assertively selfish attitude could have come from!

Taxation: This one is relatively straightforward. No one actually likes paying higher taxes, but many pro-Trump Chinese immigrants don’t feel any obligation to contribute, and feel no long-term stake in America — despite their stated desire to give their children the benefit of an American university education.

Legal vs. illegal immigration: While the irony that members of a non-white immigrant community should be falling over one another to praise Donald “Build-a-Wall, Ban-the-Muslims” Trump might not be lost on most folks, it’s entirely so on many Trump-supporting first-generation Chinese immigrants. “We waited in line and did everything legally. Why should they get to jump the queue?” they ask, as yet more irony sails overhead.

http://supchina.com/2016/11/03/many-first-generation-chinese-immigrants-supporting-donald-trump/