This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
After I voted for Kamala Harris, I felt hopeful for a moment. While I’d been sharply critical of both Donald Trump and her support of the genocide in Gaza, it was hard not to feel excited for her historic victory. “This daughter of Shyamala, this daughter of the American story, is ready to lead us forward,” actress Viola Davis narrated in a campaign ad the day prior.
Harris’ campaign rooted itself in a narrative of progress, a story I know well. My parents won the lottery when they secured a student and H1-B visa in the 90s, catapulting directly into the American middle class. Harris campaigned on an uplifting personal history intertwined with that of America’s, an arc towards empowerment that includes a hard-working immigrant mother who saved up for a house, education at integrated public schools and a historically Black university, and a lifetime of civil service. Her ascendance to the highest office of the land was going to be the culmination of this shining American Dream.
Then Harris suffered a crushing defeat. Fifty-five percent of White voters chose a candidate who openly embraces White supremacy, but many Democrats were surprised by the underwhelming support for Harris from certain communities of color. Some communities’ voting patterns seemingly defied reason, such as the crossover voters between AOC and Trump.
We’ll analyze the failures of her campaign for years to come, but to me, one thing was clear: Harris ran a particularly immigrant campaign: wildly optimistic, meritocratic to a fault, urging voters to believe — despite startling evidence to the contrary — in an American Dream that does not feel achievable, asking us to trust the process, and chastising us for demanding better, as though rocking the boat would tip us towards a Trump victory.
Harris’ failure to build a strong immigrant voter coalition shows the frictions and discontents in the communities she expected to believe in her American Dream, and it’s worth asking why.
I’ve been watching the American Dream erode in my own lifetime. I’m a 23-year-old woman coming of age amid abortion bans that relegate all people with uteri to second-class citizenship, and in a nation where I cannot imagine one day buying a house.
My friends fear it is unconscionable to have children due to climate change, and I have internal grocery aisle debates about whether I really need to buy milk at that price. On top of that, there’s our government’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine, the defining moral issue of our time.
The house is on fire: it’s been on fire for as long as I can remember. And against the racist demagogue reaching for unfettered power, the Democrats served up a center-right candidate and set her up for failure.
We rarely discuss the reasons we’re leaving our looted, underdeveloped, or war-torn home countries. That amnesia becomes a mindset of exceptionalism, buying into America’s shiny vision of multiculturalism, diversity, and pluralistic inclusion.
Harris, like me, is a daughter of the 1965 Immigration Act, which accelerated immigration for skilled workers, to the point that America will be majority-minority in 2045. Two things are true: American politics is being transformed by immigrants, and the American Dream that promised them upward mobility is crumbling.
While immigrant Americans aren’t a monolithic voting bloc, in his latest stand-up special, comedian Hasan Minhaj poked fun at the collective priorities of what he calls “Beigistan” — the vast numbers of Americans who are not Black or White, but beige in-between: “Indians, Latinos, Filipinos, whatever the fuck Bruno Mars is from.”
Minhaj went on to skewer beige voters for being conservative, and largely motivated by only four concerns: immigration, religion, tax cuts, and not having their home countries bombed. Exit poll numbers proved him right: beige people became a potent addition to Trump’s right-wing base, throwing a wrench in the “American Dream” narrative that undergirds the Democratic coalition.
I’ve often felt that the American Dream instills a certain historical amnesia in many of its immigrant communities, as though we fell out of a coconut tree straight into a better life – we rarely discuss the reasons we’re leaving our looted, underdeveloped, or war-torn home countries. That amnesia becomes a mindset of exceptionalism, buying into America’s shiny vision of multiculturalism, diversity, and pluralistic inclusion. This can in turn create dangerous blindspots.
In the coming months, important conversations must happen within immigrant communities about the delusions that fueled their conservatism. While it is important to understand that immigrant Americans, like all Americans, feel abandoned by the American Dream and sought alternatives, they did not reject Trumpism with the same urgency as Black Americans, who have lived through generations under American fascism.
By and large, Black Americans have no delusions about how bad this country can get, what their intended place is in the racial hierarchy of White supremacy, even as other people of color receive offers of provisional or incomplete privileges to keep them at the bottom. Exceptionalism leads many immigrants I know to view tax cuts and racism as separate issues. As a result, they are less alarmed by Trump’s open xenophobia, and swayed by the promises of conservative rhetoric.
Earlier this week, the Black feminist scholar Tressie McMillan-Cottom argued that Harris’ campaign was one of “stasis,” often downplaying her race and gender to avoid identity politics accusations. “[Harris’] promise was that nothing much would change about the country but the race and gender of the one in charge — and she didn’t even lean into a history-making narrative about her race and gender because it felt like a promise she could not keep,” she wrote. “A promise of a more audacious America.”
An audacious challenger cannot have a centrist, status quo platform, and they cannot rely on moral appeals to abstractions like the American Dream, fairness, or democracy. A younger, overlooked, but remarkably similar candidate learned the same lesson: Ashwin Ramaswami, a 25-year-old Indian American, ran for state senate in Georgia because he felt his largely Indian community deserved better than the Republican incumbent, who’d been indicted alongside Trump for election interference.
To overcome the fiscally conservative streak in his community, Ramaswami’s campaign strategy included spreading his opponent’s mugshots and emphasizing his own Indian American identity. His opponent wasn’t concerned: “The Democrats will lose because they stereotype minorities and assume that race means more to immigrants than values,” he told the New York Times. He proved right: Ramaswami, like Harris, lost.
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The first generation of immigrants, it’s often said, keeps its head down and builds roots in order to survive; the second generation stakes a claim in America, entering culture, politics, and leadership. As the country changes, the face of that leadership will too — and we can’t assume that they will get behind a failing status quo.
“If you are someone who was able to overlook the genocide and cast a vote for Kamala Harris, then you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him,” tweeted the writer Meg Indurti, and she’s right. The American Dream isn’t working as promised, so some immigrants chose violence — they picked Trump’s extremism over another four years of stasis.
In a way, I imagine that voting for Trump over Harris feels like jumping off of a burning lifeboat into the open sea itself. Most likely, sharks will eat you, but maybe you’ll get ahead. Is there anything more immigrant, more delusional, more American, than this blind-faith leap?
The duty, now, of ordinary second-generation immigrant Americans is to call in our parents, uncles, aunties, and cousins, to unpack why they voted for the shark. But it’s up to the immigrant politicians to provide a viable political alternative: bolder offerings, courageous investment in policies that address Americans’ daily struggles. We don’t get many tries to get this right. We also can’t help but take the plunge.
