The Democratic Socialists of America are riding a new wave of momentum. Their candidates have scored notable victories in Democratic primaries in cities such as Denver, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Prominent DSA members are also advancing an extreme Marxist agenda on national television.
What stands out is that several of these rising figures are immigrants or the children of immigrants from countries that suffered under socialist policies or communist insurgencies.
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Nithya Raman, a Los Angeles city councilmember and 2026 mayoral candidate, came to the United States from India at age six. Melat Kiros, who recently defeated a long-serving incumbent to win the Democratic nomination in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, arrived from Ethiopia as an infant. Gustavo Gordillo, cochair of the DSA’s New York City chapter, was born in Peru and moved to the U.S. as a young child.
Their countries of origin — India, Ethiopia, and Peru — experienced socialist-oriented experiments or Maoist violence that produced severe economic and human costs.
India’s post-independence years under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi featured heavy state planning and widespread nationalization, contributing to decades of slow growth. Ethiopia under the Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam imposed forced collectivization and the Red Terror, aggravating a devastating famine.
Peru offers an especially stark case. In the late 1960s, Abimael Guzmán founded the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist guerrilla group inspired by China’s Cultural Revolution. Rejecting electoral politics, it pursued “people’s war” through massacres, public executions, and bombings that fell heavily on poor indigenous communities. The broader conflict claimed roughly 70,000 lives, inflicted tens of billions of dollars in economic damage, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, including Gordillo’s family.
Yet in his July 17, 2026, interview on Fox News’s The Story with Martha MacCallum, Gordillo attributed much of the poverty and instability in Peru and other Latin American countries to “the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism.” His hostility toward landlords and small businesses, and his enthusiasm for expanded public ownership, echoed the very ideology his family had fled.
Why do some children of immigrants from societies devastated by socialism later embrace versions of the same ideology and seek to reshape America in its image? External forces — campus culture, peer networks, media — certainly play large roles. But internal family dynamics matter as well.
Immigrants who arrived as young children often lack direct memory of the systems their parents escaped. Their parents, who lived through those hardships, carry knowledge that is harder to transmit than it first appears.
Many first-generation immigrants hold memories that remain raw. As a Chinese immigrant, I witness this firsthand in my own community. For some Chinese families, the Cultural Revolution is still difficult to discuss — not from indifference, but because the experiences were traumatic, the daily work of building a new life left little emotional room, or parents simply wished to shield their children from pain they themselves could barely process. Comparable patterns appear in other communities that fled socialist or communist rule.
These parents usually place great weight on education. They urge academic excellence and admission to selective universities because those credentials seem the surest route to security in a new country. That priority is understandable and often deeply loving. What is harder to recognize amid the pressures of immigrant life is that schools and universities cannot fully replace the lived knowledge only a family can provide. When the surrounding culture presents socialist ideas as compassionate and modern, the absence of personal counter-stories creates an opening that ideology readily fills.
As a result, some children of immigrants grow up without a concrete sense of what those systems produced. Like many of their American-born peers, they may associate “socialism” mainly with equity and expanded services rather than with shortages, coercion, and human cost. Recent voting patterns in places such as New York City show strong support for socialist candidates among young, college-educated voters, including some whose families came from countries that paid a heavy price for similar experiments.
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM IS A LIE — IT’S JUST COMMUNISM WITH BETTER BRANDING
This is not chiefly a story of parental failure. It is a story of competing pressures: the urgent need to survive and succeed, the natural desire to protect children from trauma, and an educational environment that often works against the hard-won lessons of the past. Even so, families remain the most effective place for those lessons to be passed on. Personal stories carry a weight that textbooks and lectures rarely match. When parents are able to share — even briefly, even imperfectly — what they witnessed and why they left, they equip their children with a form of intellectual and moral immunity no institution can reliably supply.
Those of us fortunate enough to have escaped and built better lives in the U.S. carry a quiet responsibility to the next generation. Not as a burden of guilt, but as an act of care: to ensure that the reasons for our flight are not lost, so our children and grandchildren do not have to rediscover them the hard way. If the ideas that once devastated the countries we left take root here, a practical question follows — where, then, would the next generation turn for refuge?
Helen Raleigh is a senior contributor at The Federalist.
