SoapZone Community: Politics Message Board

Even as I still feel nauseous about the election, I’m starting to try to understand some of what happened. I do not want to believe that every American who voted for Trump is a racist white supremecist. I know that there are a variety of reasons why this happened.

Two of my personal main coping mechanisms are my sense of humor and my tendency to over-intellectualize things. So, trying to understand the anger toward immigrants, there is this:

In NYC, migrant families of 4 being sheltered in hotels here, receive debit cards so they can buy food and baby items while they are waiting for their asylum applications to be processed. The average amount a migrant family of 4 receives is $350/week or $1400 a month.

By comparison, a family of 4 poor American citizens receives an average of $713/month in SNAP benefits (food stamps). That means that the migrant family, who may or may not be illegal, is receiving at least twice as much as poor American citizen families.

I can understand why struggling Americans who need help feeding their families are angry that migrant families are receiving so much more help than US citizens are.

It’s not all just blind, raging hate. We need to be identifying and looking at the things that fed into this election’s outcome on Tuesday.

Newsweek: