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From my own experience as an immigrant, there are two kind of immigrants (well, three if you count refugees as immigrants, though those are a very special case), Economic Immigrants and Cultural/Wanderlust Immigrants.

The first are self explanatory - they move somewhere to make more money than they could make in their homeland - whilst the second are the kind of people who go live elsewhere because they want to experience different ways of living.

These have vastly different kinds of personality, with the Economic Immigrants being the kind that brings along a slice of their country with them and tends to live in neighborhoods with lots of others from the same country and even little stores and entertainment venues with products and in the style of their homeland, whilst the other ones tend to integrate more in their host country, at the very least living in mixed communities, and don't seek the venues of their homeland or even the company of their countrymen.

Unsurprisingly, Economic Immigrants are often Right-wingers - they have been driven by Greed to immigrate, remain strongly wedded to the values common in their homeland when they left (so are naturally conservatives) and don't tend to be open-minded, whilst the others are pretty much by definition open-minded (after all, they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland) and hence tend to be Left-wingers.

So, yeah, there's often a willingness to "pull up the ladder now that I'm in" from Economic Immigrants, but I haven't really seen that kind of posture from the other ones (maybe there is, but they were a lot rarer than the former kind in the countries I lived in so I never really had a large sample of those).

Almost everyone in the US had an ancestor that immigrated not that long ago, and if people didn't do it within at most a couple generations, you wouldn't see anti-immigrant sentiment.

Puck political cartoon, January 11, 1893, "Looking Backward":

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/3968c98b-d1ce-411d-9c96-7e8d9d81263f.jpeg

Caption:

They would close to the new-comer the bridge that carried them and their fathers over.

I grew up in the Midwest as a child of a Mexican and American. By 16, I was regurgitating Ben Shapiro anti-immigration rhetoric. Why?

The same reason anyone is racist. I grew up around it. The people I knew and loved were white and that was reflected in the media I was exposed to. Subliminal messages and implied suggestions over entire childhood. They might claim they don't like the illegal, but the truth is that they've internalized the hatred of the culture they identify with.

Cuban here, like many others have said "burning the ladder behind you"

but adding to it. In my opinion it has to do with seeing a reflection of your past self and associating the difference with positive progress then being disgusted by your own struggle and putting that emotion on your next of kin.

Yes it's frustrating to be born in a third world country and have to come legally in a raft and have to work for under minimum wage for multiple years to be able to afford even the most basic necessities .... but it's important to remember where you come from and to use that disgust to make the world a better place so that no one else has to go thru the same.

Pulling the ladder up behind you is a fundamental and ugly part of human nature

It could be a perspective thing. Children of immigrants possibly don’t see themselves as immigrants or even adjacent.

One other thought I had was about trust fund kids thinking they “worked as hard as anyone else” for their riches. For example, I remember when Bezos was building Amazon. He certainly did work hard to build that site, but the benefits of the loan his parents provided cannot be overlooked or forgotten. Same thing with Elon… most rich people, for that matter.

They feel they suffered more than the other ones do.

Because the real world doesn't operate on social media logic, so they actually respond with real human reactions.