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Full Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/turns-out-white-millennials-are-just-as-conservative-as-their-parents_n_5ce856fee4b0512156f16939

I think the title is somewhat misleading (as the article goes on to say that white millennials are more liberal than their parents on some topics such as climate change and gay rights), but I wanted to share it because it matches my own observations over the last few years. The traditional wisdom is that younger people tend to be more liberal, with the debate being whether they become more conservative once they get older or whether each generation remains more liberal than the last. However, it seems to me that since the rise of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, many more white people my age and younger have identified as right-wing, conservative, and/or Republican (something that was actually very rare beforehand), and I think the article goes a long way in explaining why.

Donald Trump and the Republican party have done a great job of weaponizing immigration as a political issue, and the surveys the article points to show that it's one of the issues where white millennials are just as right-wing as their parents and grandparents, along with race. On those issues, based on those surveys, where you stand seems to depend more on your race than your age. Interestingly, the article goes on to suggest that according to preliminary data, the youngest white adults (18-24) may be even more to the right than the Millennial generation, my guess being that it's fueled by the immigration debate as well.

It's been well-known for some time now that the demographics in America are changing and at some point in the future the country will no longer be majority-white, but it's interesting to see that the issue has galvanized white people of all generations and ages to resist further immigration, culminating in the Trump Presidency and, at an extreme, a revival of many white supremacists movements that had long-been considered to be in decline.

I'm not sure that climate change can be considered a liberal vs conservative issue.  All the conservatives I know in university are in favor of combating climate change.  I think that is much more of a generational thing and an individual/collectivist issue.  Older individualists are going to not care, because they're going to be dead before they see the effects.  Younger individualists are forced to care because they will be affected.  So with that issue, I think that we're getting more support to take action as more selfish people have to join the side of taking on climate change, because they will personally suffer the consequences.  I wish I thought it was because people were more in favor of preserving the future of humanity/ interested in the greater good of Earth, but unfortunately I think its mostly just people beginning to realize they can't trash the planet and die right as shit hits the fan anymore. 

The more young people identifying as conservative phenomenon is interesting though.  I think that to a large extent the backlash is less against specifically against immigration as much as a skepticism towards globalism in general.  Germany, France, the UK, Poland, even Sweden are beginning to question pro- or at least neutral immigration policies as they've been overrun by large numbers of immigrants.  The backlash from this stems mostly (as far as I can tell) from the fact that the immigrant groups aren't assimilating into the cultures of these countries, and that is concerning for them.  And they have every right to be annoyed and concerned about this—the United States and the rest of the new world countries are almost exclusively countries of immigrants (because of a massive genocide, but shh!!)—Europe, Japan, Korea, etc are certainly not.  They are nation-states.  I think this is a standard knee-jerk evolutionary or cultural response to incursion to preserve a culture/demography in a region, so its not particularly easy to counter. 

This framework can sort of explain the anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, and though it could be sort of used to explain a bit of the hesitancy to accept immigrants from places with fundamentally different values, the backlash against Central and South American immigration does seem to stem more from historical prejudice/racism in the United States.  In terms of assimilation right now the US is on easy mode—all the immigrants are of the majority religion, have pretty much the same values as the United States, etc.  But still that explanation doesn't seem quite accurate.  The sort of real racism (I use this in the 1950s racism sense, with significant violence perpetrated against ethnic minorities, etc) was in a big decline, and a natural resurgence of that seems like a weak explanation/cop out answer for me to assume here.  It's possible that its a response to something else or resentment from a different source, but I can't think of something proportionally as big that could cause such a major backlash.

I do think that religion does play a part to some extent, while central american immigrants are Christian, they are Catholic Christians. To Protestants, especially Wasps, they may as well martian for the difference that makes. Though to be fair, the reverse holds true.

But in my view the main cause of the anti-immigrant backlash is the feeling that things are not good, they are getting worse and that more people means more mouths to feed and less for you. If you are poor, live in a run down part of town with few prospects and few opportunities what does immigration matter to you? More people coming to take the few jobs and resources I have left? If you looked at things like that of course you would want less immigration.