Joanna
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>Based on my own experience, I think this is over-generalization that is
>mostly false. Most Eastern European immigrants are not political but
>economic - they come here to strike it rich and babble anti-communist
>mantras because these are the magic words that get them their I-94s and
>green cards. Most of them plan to stay here for a few years, make a
>boat load of money and come back as rich and respected men. I use the
>word men deliberately, because women have a somewhat different
>experience (more about it in a moment).
>
>The virulent anti-communism many of them develop is result of several
>factors. First immigrant communities are often already reactionary, so
>the stuff is already in the air. But more importantly, many of those
>fellows left quite comfortable lives behind, jobs, houses, farms etc.
>which they gave up with immigration. So if their dream of the American
>riches does not come true, and they end cleaning toilets or flipping
>burgers at minimum wages - they cannot go back because they would loose
>status and respect of their former neighbors - for they would come
>defeated. Virulent anti-communism saves their faces - they may be
>cleaning toilets here but they will not go back, they say, because of
>"political oppression" which btw they never experienced. But after
>telling that story many times, they actually believe it.
>
> Women, however, are often an exception. They genuinely want to stay
>here even doing menial jobs because they genuinely fear repression if
>they return. Not political, though, but social. EE tends to be fairly
>patriarchal, especially outside major urban centers. If these women
>returned, they would have to give a lot of freedoms that here are taken
>for granted: freedom to dress any way they want, freedom to spend their
>own money and time any way they want, freedom not be married and sleep
>with whoever they want, or freedom to call the cops on their abusive
>husbands. Although this changed quite considerably during the past
>30-50 years , mainly as a result of socialist policies, this patriarchal
>crap is deeply ingrained in EE social fabric and right now is being dug
>up by fascist and clerical elements as a reaction to socialism.
>
>Another important aspect is that immigration offers a very interesting
>experiment that reveals something about the nature of political and
>ideological preferences. Often ardent supported of the communist
>regimes in EE, ex-party apparatchiks etc, become ardent supporters of
>GOP and right wing here. My explanation of that "switch" is that
>political ideology is not a matter of rational choice but a cognitive
>process of "sense making." The cognitive process of sense making is
>organizing various experiences into meaningful wholes (there is a ton of
>literature on that under the rubric of cognitive psychology and
>sociology), or creating order in the chaos, if you will. Cognitive
>psychologists talk about two different styles in so doing - one is the
>rigid adherence to the conventional norms of the society and the status
>quo, the other one based on a flexible application of principles.
>
>People who have a natural inclination toward the first cognitive style
>will adhere to whatever conventional norms and political structures
>surround them - they are devout communists under the Soviet regime,
>ardent GOPniks in the US, staunch Afrikaners in the apartheid South
>Africa - in a word, pro-establishment in any country or society in
>which they find themselves. Again, this has nothing to do with their
>status as immigrants but with their natural cognitive predisposition -
>immigration merely reveal their chameleon-like ability to blend in with
>the status quo.
>
>Wojtek
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