We’re great apes. We’re wired to take social hierarchy seriously. We still have our alpha individuals and our submissives. That’s the legacy of natural selection.
While we love a good story about someone who shows pluck in the face of rejection, our love of pluck only goes so far. Most undocumented immigrants are people who refuse to knuckle under. These are people who on the face of it should be losers in the hierarchy game. But they refuse to just roll over. You could probably even say the same of some gang members. Well, it turns out that we can’t tolerate pluck so well when it doesn’t play out according to our socially approved scripts. Everybody likes pluck until it threatens their place in the hierarchy, or the hierarchy itself.