Ethnic/religious groups very conservative in one city but very liberal in another?
It seems like when people talk about whether ethnic/religious groups are more left or right wing, it's spoken as if it is consistent across cities (eg. Black Americans are more Democrat in almost all cities etc., Orthodox Jews are more conservative than secular Jews in almost all cities). But are there cases where in one city, one ethnic group is heavily left but in another city, that "same" ethnic group is heavily right wing? It's the case probably mostly for "assimilated" Americans (not immigrant or recent family immigrant roots) that long-standing white Americans are "driving" the political differences. But it is true for other groups?
Like say Vietnamese Americans in LA being very Democratic but the same Vietnamese in Houston being very Republican. What's the largest contrast where one group is extremely polarized on political lines depending on which city they reside in? Also, from my older thread about places where minorities could be more conservative than whites, I questioned if Canadian cities are more left than American ones, it is mostly just white Canadians driving the trend or if minorities and ethnic groups in Canadian cities are also more left than their US counterparts. Quote:
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Jewish NYC is trending different politically than Jewish USA, because NYC-area Jews (especially those in Brooklyn, Queens and certain suburban enclaves) are much more observant than those nationally.
What's happening locally is not unlike what has happened in Israel over the last generation. Of course the difference is that Jews in U.S. are a minority, even in the NYC area, and one can always disappear into a pluralistic society. |
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A lot of the variance in Vietnamese communities in the U.S. comes down to whether they are Catholic or not, with the Catholic Vietnamese neighborhoods being much, much more conservative. I think there are similar splits in the Korean community, depending upon if the Koreans are more secular or evangelical (although second-generation Korean Americans don't tend to be that religious regardless). Elsewhere, Hudson County, New Jersey (particularly Union City and West New York) has a relatively large Cuban community (which predates Castro). It's hard to tell, because the Cuban population is only around 1/5th of the area, but I have heard that New Jersey Cubans are pretty strongly Democratic. Native Americans in Oklahoma are much, much more conservative than elsewhere. That said, it's not like they are all one ethnic group, and a lot of the enrolled members of say the Cherokee are only 1/8th or 1/16th and for all intents and purposes are white. |
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Years ago there were protests in Westminster over a Vietnamese video store proprietor who chose to display the Vietnamese flag---the current one, not the one of the former South Vietnam. When you do go to Westminster, you see a lot of South Vietnamese flags displayed during various occasions. Anyway, the video store owner insisted on displaying the current Vietnamese flag, and there was even violence directed at him and death threats. I assume because of the whole right wing/left wing thing, the Vietnamese who settled in Orange County tend to be Republican because they are anti-Communist. Kind of like the Cubans in Miami, I guess. Incidentally, in Los Angeles' Little Tehran, many fly the flag from the Shah era, not the current Iranian flag. Quote:
As an aside, Catholics in the US, at least in years past, have generally been on the more liberal side and have gotten involved in issues of social justice, I assume because historically, Catholics have been a discriminated-against minority in Protestant-majority US. |
I don't know if Chinese Americans are "more liberal" than Chinese Canadians because they overwhelmingly vote Democrat but more likely it reflects a different context.
I think a less xenophobic or "red state Christian" GOP would appeal to Chinese and Indian American voters in larger numbers. |
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https://www.yorkregion.com/news-stor...der-crossers-/ In the US, Chinese and other Asian-Americans would probably more likely think of themselves as "one of the immigrants" who show solidarity to the other immigrants, rather than the "locals" opposing the immigrants. Also, in Canada, you see things like Chinese and Pakistani immigrants uniting with white conservative Christians against (back in the 2000s) same sex marriage, and now more close to the present day, legalizing weed, and sex-ed. I can't imagine say, a conservative Muslim Michigander, Chinese Californian, Orthodox Jewish New Yorker and white Baptist southerner in say Alabama, all uniting on the whole "we're all social conservatives here" tack. |
Toronto has the most "diverse" far right in North America.
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My hypothesis is that Canadian-born conservative Christians and anti-immigrant recognize they are too small a group not to have to find allies.
In the US there are enough white evangelicals and hyper nationalists and natives in the so-called red states that they don't. Another possibility is there isn't really an "Asian umbrella" in Canada to the degree there is in the US. |
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Many years ago, around 2000-2003, I used to participate in another online message board where Canadians and Americans (myself sometimes included) would get into these really long arguments (flame wars... haha, remember that term?) about the differences between the US and Canada, etc. etc. Anyway, many of the Canadians would talk about how Canada is "multi-cultural" as opposed to the "US' melting pot model"; according to a lot of Canadians who posted on the board, Canada is more of a tossed salad vs. the US being a place where everyone sort of assimilates into one American culture. A lot of Canadians would make it out (or try to make it out) that people in Canada basically keep their own culture whereas in the US, people are somehow forced to assimilate. And of course I would argue that that isn't the case, at least not in the big cities, and definitely not in Los Angeles. I basically told some Canadians that Canada seems to have an "official" stance of being multi-cultural, whereas the US is pretty much de facto multicultural. So, Capsicum, I think it's interesting that it seems that you're saying that many American ethnic groups *don't* assimilate into the larger culture but somehow certain Canadian ethnic groups assimilate into conservative Canadian culture. |
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The multiculturalism vs melting pot thing is very much overblown and doesn't have much of a discernible difference on the ground. That said, the existence of Conservative-voting immigrants in Canada wouldn't really contradict that even if it weren't. These aren't immigrants assimilating into conservative Canadian culture anymore than immigrants Stateside might assimilate into Democrat American culture - they're coming from places that are already conservative in their own way, and are simply transposing those politics into their Canadian equivalent. Whether they're going to Canada or the US, immigrants from a given place aren't going to be too politically divergent. But given the binary, polarized political landscape of the US - and the fact that the right-wing party is often outright racist - immigrants and ethnic minorities be tend to become Democrats by default. In Canada, it's just a bit easier for right-leaning immigrants to vote along ideological lines than ethnic ones. |
NYC and California are more mosaic than melting pot.
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Issues like health care, subsidized post secondary tuition, fair trade etc while may appear to be very liberal in the United States are non issues here in Canada as they are the accepted norm. Gay marriage for example has been in place for almost 20 years in Canada with the most conservative PM in recent memory Steven Harper, being in power for over 10 years in that time frame, made no attempt to reverse it. Single Payer Health came to Canada in the 1960's and no attempt has been made by all political parties at all levels have tried to scrap it. Higher income taxation levels to pay for social services etc AKA wealth redistribution is accepted. Immigration is at much higher levels than in the United States, however they are more likely to be accepted based on merit (points system) than family reunification. In Canada no political parties mention stopping immigration from any region of the world but how many more immigrants we take in. The issue of illegals in Canada vs the US is one where a Canadian would be very much a conservative in the United States as they each get a hearing for asylum and depending on the outcome can stay or get deported (economic migrants are gone). No political party in Canada would accept granting illegals citizenship. On this issue a liberal in Canada would be considered a conservative in the US. Therefore what constitutes a conservative in a Canadian context could very well be a Bernie supporter and left wing in the United States when looking at it based on these issues. Just something to keep in mind when we make cross border comparisons. |
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I don't even know if you can call those Chinese Markham residents claiming to "defend" their town from refugees nativists since a lot of them sound like they didn't grow up there to begin with. If native born multi-generational American minorities like African Americans don't really often express anti-refugee sentiment, how is it that these Chinese Markham residents, who might be targets of nativism literally not even a generation ago, already start acting like nativists towards "their town" (oh, I guess Markham's big enough to be a city now, not just a town) so quickly. Those Chinese in Markham holding the banners telling refugees to go home are more like Italian or Irish Americans who argue "we were the good immigrants who assimilated, came legally etc." when discussing illegal immigrants, but would the Chinese in California, in NYC act that way towards say the central American refugees? Quote:
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In the US, the new immigrants "assimilate" to the idea of the "ethnic bloc" or voting along ethnic lines because they pick up the ideas about identity politics from the locals. They might not have had to think too much about identity politics in their homelands where they might have been the demographic majorities. In Canada, they might pick up on other cues. But there's still some "learning" from the locals as to what the political talking points are. |
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That said, you can still get a very large contrast in the assimilationist vs. multicultural feel only a short distance away from one another in Canada -- in the diverse GTA for instance filled with ethnoburbs, not that long a drive away, you get small town Ontario where you get people who may not have met or grown up with black, Arab, Asian people or whose first exposure to them were going into the GTA say as an adult. |
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Most Middle Eastern and North African diaspora communities in Europe vote centre-left despite a broad lack of sympathy, to put it mildly, for the social innovations favoured by these parties.
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the heavily orthodox community that i live in i feel is fairly conservative (although conservative in ways that don't reflect within the standard american political context), even though the university-suburb i live in is fairly left leaning. the adjacent business-oriented municipality leans far more towards reform judaism, who seem to be much more standard liberal.
another way to confuse this is one is bernie territory and one is hardcore hillary territory, which is a funny geographical split i've seen over and over in american regions. edit: i didn't read the op comment but this thing with orthodox vs reform seems to have been covered already. |
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