Does Anybody Know How New White Immigrants Vote?
11/13/2012
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My late father's favorite grocery store was Jon's in Valley Village in the southeast San Fernando Valley. It now carries a whole lot of weird products like Bulgarian soda pop and Georgian stuff in little glass jars: comfort food from home, if your home is somewhere in the ex-Warsaw Pact. I've been to Moscow and I've been to Istanbul, and the clientele of Jon's looks like a cross between the two. 

My vague impression is that liberated Eastern Europeans take their lead in choosing where to immigrate to from Armenians. They don't necessarily like Armenians per se, but you've gotta admit that Armenians aren't stupid, so if Armenians have been moving to the northern part of the southeast San Fernando Valley (i.e, not the rich parts south of Ventura Blvd., but the more marginal parts where the homeowners are mostly white and the apartment dwellers mostly Hispanic), we ought to look into it. (It's like how lots of newly rich oil sheiks in the 1970s immediately decided to move to Beverly Hills.) Also, a lot of ultra-Orthodox Jews now live in this area (there were zero when I was a kid), although they don't shop at Jon's.

By the way, the phrase "flatheads" that is used to describe the hired muscle who escort ex-Soviet oligarchs to nightclubs (think Viggo Mortensen as the pimp in Eastern Promises) and which inevitably comes to mind while standing in the checkout line at Jon's—does that just come from their favored haircuts or do they really have flatter heads? What did Carleton Coon and the other caliper boys have to say? Or is it a recent Human Growth Hormone thing?

I've never seen anybody talk about how these newcomers and their kids (if any) are likely to eventually vote. The only evidence I have is that I knew a Ukrainian lady who arrived in Valley Village with some multi-syllabic Ludmilla Tourischeva-like name and immediately had her last name legally changed to Reagan.

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