Immigrant Positionality and American Citizenship: Understanding Chinese Immigrant Support for Trump through Nationalist Narratives

• In Event: The United States at 250: Neo-Patriotism, Propaganda, and History

Abstract

Democrats have been losing segments of their traditional base as more racial minorities shifted toward Donald Trump in the 2024 election (Cohn 2024). A growing number of Chinese American voters supported Trump, becoming increasingly vocal against “woke” politics and aligning with the Republican Party (Zarsadiaz 2024). This raises the question of why Chinese Americans lean toward the right and vote for Trump despite his anti-China and anti-immigrant positions—patterns that also contradict previous scholarship showing Asian Americans’ overall Democratic partisanship (Wong & Ramakrishnan 2023; Raychaudhuri 2020). As 56% of eligible Asian American voters are naturalized citizens (Budiman et al. 2024), it is important to understand the political values of first-generation immigrants.
Our research team conducted thirteen interviews with Chinese American immigrants who voted for Donald Trump. This paper outlines the primary reasons behind their support, the problems they identify in contemporary American society, and how their migration experiences shape their political attitudes. We argue that concerns about social order, economic insecurity, political nostalgia, and citizen-status anxieties draw respondents toward Trumpism, with nationalist narratives used to rationalize and legitimize these choices. By incorporating immigrant positionality, citizenship, and class as core political identities, this study also seeks to move beyond social theories such as the model minority and honorary white frameworks, which often center ethnoracial politics in explaining Asian American political behavior.

Authors

• Wendy Chao, Columbia University

• Jialiang Ling, Fudan University