It’s past time to start seeing voters the way they see themselves.

Op-ed by Jay Caspian Kang @ NYTimes.com/Sunday Review, Nov. 20

Every immigrant arrives in this country with an implied debt. This country was nice enough to let you in, handed you a bag of rights and will now leave you alone to make your fortune. Left and right might disagree on how many people to let into the country or how to treat them when they’re here, but both sides expect a return on their good will.

They agree that America is enough — as long as you meet opportunity with hard work, you can secure ownership in this country. In exchange, both sides expect loyalty, whether complaint-free allegiance to the country’s ideals or the acknowledgment that very open-minded and generous people worked hard to fight off the racists and the xenophobes and that you, downtrodden immigrant, should never forget those who protect your freedom to pursue the American dream.

In the wake of the election, there has been a concerted call to stop treating Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans as a monolith. Such a reckoning is long overdue and certainly necessary. It’s fundamentally true that a Cuban-American in South Florida shares very little in common with a Guatemalan fishery worker in New Bedford, Mass. — who, in turn, does not identify in any real way with fifth-generation Texans along the Rio Grande Valley.

Similarly, former Vietnamese refugees in Orange County, Calif., will have a different level of sensitivity toward charges of “Communism” than a second-generation Ivy League-educated Indian-American just up the freeway in suburban Los Angeles. Though the full picture of the electorate is not yet clear, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of these populations ended up ignoring or even championing the xenophobia of the first Trump administration while others found it abhorrent and against their particular interests [....]