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Personally I think it’s partly just that young women are more empathetic and so they tend to put themselves into the perspective of someone who is facing difficult circumstances.
My tendency is to be in their camp, so I feel like I kind of understand, but also I do think there are other deeper motivators in my psychology too, and maybe listing these out might be helpful here. Here’s my theory. Young unmarried women have:
High empathy with a wide circle. Ease of which you put yourself in someone else’s shoes when hearing about hardship. The opposite of this is “I got mine”, which not at all to vilify that, I think there’s a relationship with maturity here, where young people have a starry eyed “help everyone in the world” attitude, and mature people with families have a “help my immediate circle who I’m deeply connected to” attitude.
High exploration and openness. Personally, my exploration and openness settings are dialed all the way up. Like, I’m not content in one place, I want to see and experience everything the world has to offer, my friends settle in with work that’s well paid and meanwhile I choose things that are less stable and lower paid but have more possibility for excitement. This is aligned with a sort of interest and fascination with experiencing other cultures than my own, which in turn fuels the attitude of “more languages being spoken in my city? More exotic foods? Heck yeah”. In fact this is my theory for part of why cities are liberal and rural areas are conservative. The kids who have high openness and exploration drive leave rural areas, they’d never be content there. Whereas the people who want more stability and predictability can withstand the life of being a rural farmer or living in a small town. And again, young and unmarried people want to explore, whereas older and/or married people want stability and predictability.
Naiveness. I’ll admit I learned over time that I do think right wingers have a point when they point out specific dangers in completely open immigration. Having large influxes of people from countries with different cultures can fuel problems. There can be value clashes, you can wipe out the character of a place, you can import approaches to governance that are not compatible. I’ve grown to recognize that, and of course, it’s the classic thing about having a “bleeding heart” kind of attitude. You think empathetically and other calculations don’t enter the picture as much. This is also something which changes with maturity.
In all three cases, I think these are points which both women and young people tend to have more than men and older people. And I think the psychological changes that come from having children and starting a family dampen all three.
Having children narrows your circle of concern, lowers your exploration drive while heightening your stability drive, and cuts naivety in favor of colder calculus of what will best benefit your offspring.
Thus, young unmarried women prefer immigration, followed by young unmarried men, then those who prefer less immigration are married men followed by married women.
Addendum: people with the attributes above probably are often sexually attracted to foreign people, so your earlier comment likely has a good point embedded in it.
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