I often tell people to watch out for selection bias. Immigrants are a distinctly unique people. They're not just members of their foreign racial/national group, they're members of their foreign racial/national group with the ambitions/motivations to leave.
To make the abstract concrete. Canadians living in the US are often thought to be "just like" Canadians living in Canada. But they're often not. Often they're the Canadians that sufficiently didnt fit into Canadian culture, or found something immanently attractive about US life (at least the perception of US life)...
So this study is kind of saying "The children of ambitious and effortful parents have higher rates of upward mobility than the general populace of US people"
There's also significant selection bias on the entry side. U.S. immigration policies are heavily biased towards people with unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country, and biased against people who are likely to be a drain on public assistance. That means that most hyphenated-Americans have already passed two significant high-pass filters: they have to be willing to uproot their whole life to leave, and they have to bring enough to the table to convince U.S. immigration to let them in.
> There's also significant selection bias on the entry side. U.S. immigration policies are heavily biased towards people with unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country
Categorically false! Most of immigration to the US is family based; actually about two-third of them.
You take an initial immigrant who gets in because of the merit categories and then have them bring over all their family members, whose gene pool ends up in the U.S? Whose family values?
This article is about upward mobility in the children of immigrants. What traits do children get from their parents? Most people would say it's nature (their genes) and nurture (their upbringing). All of these are widely shared with the family members of the initial immigrant, so most immigration being family-based does not invalidate this conclusion.
It's hard to argue for nature when the immigrants come from among the most diverse ethnic groups. There is literally no homogeneity among them apart from the fact that their parents weren't American citizens.
While I definitely buy the nurture side of that argument more than the nature side, it's still possible to be selecting for a set of genetic traits across a diverse group as long as those traits are distributed pretty evenly.
Much like a randomized controlled trial, the high-pass filters tend to render the nature-nurture argument a moot point. In fact, raising it mostly makes me worry about the more racist aspects of anthropology leaking into the discussion.
I don't know if "motivation" per se is studied in this context, but the genetic links for at least "self-regulation"[1], "self-control"[2], and "political ambition"[3] have been studied:
A lot of what "motivation" is comes from being able and healthy, and a lot of that certainly comes from genetics, I'd say. If my family's health history didn't prevent me from sleeping more than a few hours a night, I'd certainly be much, much more motivated. No idea how it translates in statistics.
it is a whole constellation of genetic, epi-genetic, environmental factors, and experiences in concert. to say that there is no genetic predisposition for behavior is... not confirmed by the science.
As genetics leads to different body types, so does it lead to distinct individual cultures to adapt to genetically defined physiology. So genetics can directly inform culture that way.
The two are inextricably tied. How you think about yourself and your world is based on how you experience it, which is rooted in your genetics and how you were (and weren't) taught to experience it.
We at least learn to motivate ourselves based on how we're taught to do so through the cultures the people around us carry. If some of that is informed by genetics, then it's possible for you to learn to motivate yourself based on someone else's genetics.
That brings up a slightly different aspect in my mind, that children of immigrants might be more than likely to be surrounded by large amounts of family members which probably tends to have a positive effect?
I think that the classic "western" approach to family residences is becoming more obviously damaging to everyone involved as time goes by. Growing up in a multi-generational household is a significantly different experience compared to having either two parents - or having one primary parent and a bread earner. Being exposed to more diverse opinions on a regular basis is probably healthy - seeing authority as imbued and transferable instead of being the exclusive domain of a parent is probably healthy - living in a household with more access to people (less technology filling the gap) is probably healthy - and living in a household with lower overall stress (since there are more people to bear the burden) is probably healthy.
I think single children end up doing poorer for much the same reasons that older siblings serve to lessen the reliance on parents while also being imbued with trust and responsibility... but, I think having more adults present as "caretakers" is just a good thing. So, even if we keep nuclear families internally - it might be beneficial to children to open up more community trust for communal custody of children's development.
I grew up an only child[1] and I have a lot of pleasant memories but I especially treasure some times I went off with a random Aunt, or a random neighbor and got to watch them for a day do their art stuff, or go for hikes in a different way - it helped shake up my mental monoculture. I had friends that grew up in multi-generational households but didn't myself, and it was quite a different experience being over there... learning that just because parents were away it wasn't anarchy - getting to interact with different adults different days and doing different activities that interested them.
I really think the nuclear family approach could use some real improvement.
1. Essentially... both me and my brother were only children at 13 years apart.
> and living in a household with lower overall stress (since there are more people to bear the burden) is probably healthy.
Some people have a lot of conflict with their parents and/or parents-in-law. But, since they live in different residences and only see them once every few weeks, it is manageable. If they were under the same roof, the stress might be a lot worse.
I don't know how relevant that is. Some people will always get divorced and while there are ways to address that (and, multi-generational houses that lower the stress of child rearing may reduce it) I think we can treat them as independent and still see benefits in multi-generational household. Instead of having either one parent or the other and placing the full responsibility on that single person, a multi-generational household of a divorcee might still include that person's parents and unmarried siblings to help raise the child.
I don't understand what divorce has to do with my comment? I was talking about people who don't get along with their own parents and/or with their spouse's parents. Neither has any necessary connection to the topic of divorce. Plenty of people remain married despite the fact that they have a poor relationship with their own parents or with their spouse's parents.
One major effect is that when grandparents are there to watch the kids, the parents can devote more time and effort to their career, especially women. Have you ever noticed that in IT, women are more proportionally represented among immigrants, often from countries that are more socially conservative overall (Eastern Europe, South and East Asia etc).
Even if family-based, you need to be on the more ambitious side to make the move to a different country, most likely a quarter to half the world away. Many Americans seem to think that everyone in a third-world country wants to move to the US. This is not true. Only a small subset is actually willing to uproot themselves into a new nation with a different language, culture and society for the sake of their future generations. Even if you ask the people here on H1B, many of them will tell you that they want to go back and don't think the stress of adapting and staying away from family is worth it. There is a lot of sacrifice involved. And these are people who are ambitious and entrepreneurial enough.
I find it strange that you're able to define it as categorically false given that the parent didn't specify what U.S immigration selection bias was being compared against.
> what U.S immigration selection bias was being compared against
If it's not clear to you, take a look at immigration policies of Canada and Australia. In the US, only 12% of visas are employment based which are very strict in terms of skills.
There's also significant selection bias on the entry side. U.S. immigration policies are heavily biased towards people with unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country, and biased against people who are likely to be a drain on public assistance.
Clearly not the cause.
The USA has accepted many waves of refugees. For example the Cambodian boat refugees. They arrived with no skills, no education, no money, and didn't even speak the language. There was every reason to believe that they would be a drain on public assistance. And yet the children of these groups also show much greater upwards mobility than children of people who were already here.
Refugees are a vanishingly small portion of immigrants in the US.
There are about 47 million immigrants living in the US[1] and about 267 thousand refugees[2]. There have been an average of more than a million people gaining permanent resident status each year for the past 20 years and less than 100 thousand refugees admitted each year for the same time period[3]. Even in the single highest year ever for refugee admittance, they were only about a quarter of immigrants.
Reminds me of one theory behind the success of immigrant "model minority" groups dating back to 19th century Jewish emigrants from pogrums being their community support network and a cultural values towards education. Of course none of this is in a vacuum and depends upon the host society and reaction.
Disclaimer: Self determination and environmental determination both have their limits and maladaptive behaviors may have roots in trauma. It isn't meant to be any statement of intrinsic vice or virtue.
I could see easily how refugees forced to cooperate to survive and fleeing horrifying death would support one another when in an unfamiliar new country and knowing there is no hope in heading back.
I wonder how relevant the "hedonic treadmill" is to the phenomenon as well. Motivation and incentives having a positive impact on success is no surprise and unfortunately it isn't as easy or simple as just telling people to get motivated, making things better for them if they succeed, nor making things worse if they don't. Nor even more slippery sloped approaches like propaganda for social goods "Black Mirroring" a metric feedback loop that would be dystopian even if it worked.
But the fact that upward mobility is strongly evident among refugee groups says that a theory for upward mobility among children of immigrants should explain why it still happens despite all of the disadvantages of being refugees.
If you start at the bottom there is a lot of up to rise into and no down to further sink. Same at the opposite end: all the nepotism and Ivy Leagues in the world won't be able to keep some billionaire spawn from sinking and there are no higher ranks to rise into. Their average mobility can only be negative. I guess I'd still prefer being a failing trust fund baby over the upward mobility of rags to better rags, despite a considerable delta in sense of achievement (rags to better rags might actually be happier with themselves).
> and they have to bring enough to the table to convince U.S. immigration to let them in.
Eh... my parents came with zero dollars to this country as part of family migration (zero due to currency export restrictions from their original country).
did they come as refugees or did they bring skills that suggested they would likely get employed/be able to contribute to the economy/would use welfare benefits etc?
A lot of countries have that filter. Canada has an explicit point based ranking system based on age, level of education, language fluency and profession.
Yes, the bar has been going higher ever since (we might even say prohibitively so), however we know that not all immigrants go to the US through official means.
It's a different kind of high-pass filter (not meaning necessarily that's easier).
Wouldn't that lead to the opposite effect? If you take an above average subset, you will have less upward mobility in their children because of mean reversion. If your parents are top decile already then there is a lot more room below you than above you.
Only if their country of origin is meritocratic and market-driven. As many flaws as the U.S. has, it generally ranks pretty well on these aspects.
Put another way, many societies have artificial ceilings on the social status and income you can attain regardless of your intelligence, education, drive, ambition, and resourcefulness. Caste systems, guanxi, racial prejudice, endemic corruption, drug cartels that will kill you if you don't help them out, organized crime, warlords that will kill you, lack of infrastructure, etc. When you leave that country and go to one that allows free contracts between people, your social standing - and your children's, to the extent that these traits are heritable - should rise to its natural level, where it would be in the absence of arbitrary restrictions.
There's another level of selection bias where people who feel like all these arbitrary restrictions work in their favor don't tend to leave their home countries. So those people who you speak of who would mean revert - the folks that are above average and have a good deal in their home country - would be underrepresented within the immigrant sample, to the extent that they can realize when they have a good deal. (This is the same principle by which contracts and free trade raise general welfare: people who already have what they need choose not to trade and drop out of the sample, which then consists only of people who feel they are better off trading for something someone else has.)
But wouldn't those artificial ceilings also prevent immigration applicants from having the "paperwork" to show their capability which is precisely what the American immigration bureaucracy will look at? It's not like they're letting immigrants in based on an IQ test, they're letting people in because they have elite degrees, are admitted to American universities, or have American job offers. All of those are indicators of status already achieved rather than potential status which has been supressed by local conditions in their country of origin.
In other words, immigrants coming in through the highly qualified routes are already high status in their countries of origin. Indians coming to the US on H1Bs for instance are overwhelmingly from high caste social groups and educated at the best Indian universities.
There's a different form of positive selection bias for that: to survive in a country where you're there illegally, cut off from many high-paying jobs because of that, and may be deported at any time, it takes a particular form of resourcefulness and ambition. You'd expect these people to have fewer book smarts than highly-educated Indian and Chinese immigrants, but perhaps more street smarts. And to the extent that resourcefulness, intelligence, and determination are genetic (most studies suggest a strong positive correlation), these traits would be passed on to their U.S. citizen children.
> There's a different form of positive selection bias for that: to survive in a country where you're there illegally, cut off from many high-paying jobs because of that, and may be deported at any time, it takes a particular form of resourcefulness and ambition.
We can replace "illegal immigration" in the above statement with any other illegal activities and it will still hold true.
I mean, we see people in fairly terrible countries not relocate. Why haven't 80% of all Mexican or Central American citizens relocated to the US? Or conversely, why haven't tons of the homeless in the US made their way to Mexico?
If these countries are really significantly worse, and that is the only factor pushing normal people to relocate, then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time. Instead, only the extremely motivated with a sizable risk appetite take the chance. And, one could argue that those two factors combined qualifies that group of people as non-standard.
>Why haven't 80% of all Mexican or Central American citizens relocated to the US?
Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.
>Or conversely, why haven't tons of the homeless in the US made their way to Mexico?
Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
>then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time. Instead, only the extremely motivated with a sizable risk appetite take the chance. And, one could argue that those two factors combined qualifies that group of people as non-standard.
Considering the difficulty of illegally crossing the border for a poor South American, we are seeing just that. There's another selection bias here - those who are competent are less likely to risk illegal entry because they understand life as an illegal immigrant is difficult.
>Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.
That never stopped anyone.
>Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
Not everyone in a country actually hates it enough to leave. There are lots of high class people like CEOs, managers, software developers even if they are the minority they clearly live a reasonably good life. You are also underestimating how much people are fond of their home country and the associated culture. All your family and friends are there. Your mother tongue is probably only spoken there. The food that you used to eat as a child is there. Maybe you had a plot of land and you built your own house there, sure it isn't as comfortable as one in the USA but it was yours and in the USA you have nothing except a cramped apartment you share with room mates.
The idea that a country would lose its entire population if the USA lifted border controls is absolutely insane.
> Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.
We see plenty of illegal immigration. So much so that some people want to build a wall, as if that is a meaningful control. If all it takes is a country to be worse than the US like the parent states, then we should expect much higher rates of legal immigration applications and significantly higher rates of illegal immigration. The argument was that it only takes one metric to convince a regular person to move, and I reject that notion.
> Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
Again, this is in response to the idea that all it takes to convince a person to relocate is for a situation to be worse than another situation. Theoretically, due to cheaper cost of living and less focus on technology/high skill jobs, Mexico or Central America would provide a homeless person more opportunity to at least survive compared to the US. But, since that is not the only factor in relocating, people don't do that en masse.
> Considering the difficulty of illegally crossing the border for a poor South American, we are seeing just that. There's another selection bias here - those who are competent are less likely to risk illegal entry because they understand life as an illegal immigrant is difficult.
And this brings us back to the beginning, where I don't think all it takes is a place to be sufficiently bad enough compared to the US to get them to move. It takes a host of factors, and some of those factors are personal drive and aspirations, and a fairly high tolerance for risk. Both of those align with an entrepreneur, which is basically the American Dream.
Thus, we then see upward mobility from these same demographics.
> The argument was that it only takes one metric to convince a regular person to move
No, this is not at all the argument I made. I was pointing out that built-in appetite for risk (or being a go-getter or whatever) is not the only explanation for why someone would come to the U.S. illegally. That the conditions in their home country shift the risk-reward equation so that more people are willing to immigrate than would otherwise.
If everything were simply about appetite for risk (or being a go-getter), then you would expect immigration from Canada to take place at similar rates as immigration from Mexico (since incomes in the U.S. are significantly higher than in Canada). But you don't see that, because the delta between Canada and the U.S. is way smaller than it is between Mexico and the U.S., and so the risk/reward equation doesn't work out for nearly as many Canadians.
Actually a significant percentage have. The US is 16.7% Hispanic. That is over 50 million people. The population of Mexico is a little over 120 million.
I would bet that if there were no barriers to immigration then you would see a significantly higher Hispanic population in the US.
Many Hispanics didn't immigrate to the US. Their ancestors were already there when the US conquered California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Colorado from Mexico.
Another group of people came along and decided that was enough of that. The land belongs to them now and put up a border after what Ulysses S. Grant called "the most unjust war" ever waged. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
And from the article, over 60% is of Mexican ancestry. So over 30 million versus the population of Mexico at a little over 120 million. Roughly 20% of Mexicans moved to the US.
Using the modern populations of these countries is disingenuous, you need to consider recent historical immigration rates (legal and illegal). This is like saying there are 42 million Black Americans and most Black people have West African roots, so Roughly 20% of Nigeria has moved to the US. As posted below, historically Mexicans have been in the US forever, and the US annexed large parts of Mexico relatively early in its history.
> historically Mexicans have been in the US forever
As recently as 1940, Hispanics made up only 1.5% of the US. Population. As of 2010, they made up 16.3% of the U.S. population (about 50 million people). As a point of reference, Canada has a population of about 37 million people and the UK has a population of 63 million people. So we have imported roughly an entire Canada/UK's worth of people from Latin America. As far as I am aware, immigration of this scale is basically unprecedented in human history.
There are other selection effects, as well. If you have a large population of young, single males with poor employment prospects, there's not much to keep them attached to their home country. If all they have to do is walk across a border (which they can probably muster the resources to attempt, as opposed to a transcontinental voyage), then there's a huge pull to immigrate to the US. In a circumstance like this, there would be a selection effect for the least capable young men (since more capable young men with better prospects would stay behind).
In my opinion, this is probably what explains the vast divergence between the professions that immigrants from Latin American end up in vs. the professions that immigrants from Asia end up in.
> If these countries are really significantly worse, and that is the only factor pushing normal people to relocate, then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time.
This is not true, because the socioeconomic status of people in a given country is not a flat line. Many Mexicans live what Americans would describe as comfortable, middle class lives. But, because Mexico is less prosperous than the U.S. per capita, there is a whole arm of the Mexican income distribution that is shifted into what Americans would recognize as extreme poverty. The Mexicans occupying this part of the income distribution are the ones leaving.
Thats kind of my point though isn't it? If it was something any normal person would be willing to do, then we wouldn't see that many Syrians stay inside of Syria. I would expect there is a top controlling percentage that would want to stay because their interests are protected, but outside of that, why aren't they just leaving?
Because it's hard to do it, legally or illegally. Only people that are driven and open to accepting the high risk of relocating are willing to do so. Therefore, it at least says something about the people immigrating to the US; They are driven individuals who are willing to take chances for success. Thus better numbers in terms of upward mobility.
It doesn't change the outcome though: even illegals are more likely to be upwardly mobile _from their lower baseline_. They can't take anything for granted the way a native would.
I observe this in my (upper middle class) son: he thinks he's set for life, and doesn't put in _any_ effort whatsoever. I told him he's on his own when he's 19, he's a mere 3 years away from that mark, and it hasn't yet sunk in. He thinks he will always have upper middle class existence he's currently enjoying, no matter what, even though with his current grades there's no way he will get into a decent college.
I personally was under no such illusion ever in my life, so I worked super hard to get to where I am today.
Are you an immigrant yourself or a child of immigrant parents? Yes, because immigrants on average have it harder they also work harder. Usually their children reap more benefits but the children's children flake out. Not sure how much of a trend this is but I've noticed this...
Eastern European fellow here. I came to the states about 20 years ago and the kid came about 2 years ago. Ive had it rough for a while as my dad passed and had to step in to help the family. Stress was something I wish I didn’t have to go through like that. The hardship made the ship sail better though, I understand why the first gen immig are more succesfull: they have to push themselves to the max
I am an immigrant (a lucky one, to obtain GC lottery). My US born peers considered me successful (relative to them). They often talks to me about their situation and I just gave them advice of what worked for me.
Based on my conversation with them. I think it made me more aware that I'm definitely not a regular person even compared to my fellow home country citizens. I am more restless, more ambitious, more conditioned to harsh environments, whether in work or study, and lucky to have several innate talents.
Yes I can say there is definitely a selection bias, but we can learn from one another, whether immigrant or US born. Everyone has their own strengths, weaknesses, and challenges in life.
> I am an immigrant (a lucky one, to obtain GC lottery).
> Yes I can say there is definitely a selection bias
I think this is an anecdote. You might certainly be ambitious, intelligent and overall successful. But I quite don't understand the selection bias specifically in the GC lottery category. You don't really need any any education, wealth, ambition to apply for and get through the GC lottery. The only thing you need is to be willing to uproot your life and move (and this might be the example of 'ambition' in this case).
Among GC lottery. My life circumstances is generally pretty unusual from avg people. Broken home with multi generational multiple marriages and divorces, fights, debt, lawsuits and shady practices among family members. Survived riot and persecution that killed 1500 people (Jakarta riot May 1998, warning: gore visual). And other lucky and unlucky streaks. My friends who know my overall story told me that I am an anomaly, but they are still willing to seek my advice. Idk what else I can give them other than my anecdote.
> To make the abstract concrete. Canadians living in the US are often thought to be "just like" Canadians living in Canada. But they're often not. Often they're the Canadians that sufficiently didnt fit into Canadian culture, or found something immanently attractive about US life (at least the perception of US life)...
Or were just good enough to be offered a high paying job outside their country, such that emigrating was their next move.
The fact that they were even willing to apply and try to get a good-paying job outside of their hometown is a huge indicator. People are reluctant enough to leave their hometown when the local factory closes and all the jobs go away because of the comfort of home, actively being willing to move is a big indicator by itself.
> So this study is kind of saying "The children of ambitious and effortful parents have higher rates of upward mobility than the general populace of US people"
But this is also important to note, as the common zeitgeist of the day says that upward mobility is impossible, but it is clear that with ambitious and effortful parents, children can have higher rates of social mobility. That is encouraging?
That's very astute. I'm a Canadian living in the US and I ran away in 1996 during the terrible recession with the perception that life was better in the US.
That still provides profound insights into the nature of economic mobility. If children of immigrants have greater economic mobility than children of natives, that means economic structures beyond people’s control are at the very least not dispositive. I.e. if the factors that keep people born in the bottom quantile more likely to stay there were purely structural, such as inability of poorer people to afford housing in better school districts, then it wouldn’t matter whether parents are ambitious and effort full.
That's exactly what it's saying, and I think it's an important message to get our with all of the propaganda against immigrants right now. These are highly motivated people, not lazy slobs like some people paint them.
Sure there is, all immigrants are people who moved here from other nations. They may have different reasons, times, methods, causes, and there may be different subgroups, etc, but there certainly is a single group of immigrants just like there's a single group of Americans, sheep, and pizzas.
Surely you understood what I was saying but so we don't talk past one another: Yes there is a category of people called an immigrant that one can define. However when you look at groups or even individuals in that category there are certain differences, many times vast and very meaningful differences, between the things in each of those categories. So to treat the whole group the same would be foolhardy; thus the need for a selection process. If you had to purchase 10 sheep from a group of 100 would you not buy the best sheep you could afford or the best pizza you could afford?
Yes, but if that superior work ethic is a trait more frequently expressed in immigrants than natives, then that's important, and that's the distinction being made here. They didn't look for the best immigrants for this study, this was a study of random immigrants. The entire point is to show how this group called "immigrants" is different, not it's subgroups. The selection criteria itself was immigrant vs non-immigrant. you're saying that's not valid because it should have been more narrow, but it wasn't invalid because they were explicitly looking at the group as a whole.
Maybe we should build our people up as a society, as a country rather than depending on draining the "highly motivated" people from their own countries, presumably where they are needed much more. It makes me very sad that as a whole we have lost so much faith in each other.
But that’s the whole point of immigrants. They’re a self selected group of people who are far more likely to take major risks to improve their and their children’s’ futures. In other words, they are self selected to be more likely to be entrepreneurs.
If you want to build an entrepreneurial country you want a lot of immigrants.
Research related to IQ (which is not a very useful thing to be honest) and income levels have shown that over time the immigrant communities tend to regress towards the mean values of their home country. Indian immigrants being the only exception of this observation.
Majority Indians come to USA on H1B and student visas
The only Canadians I know who aren't retired and work in the US are there for the money. Though I'm not sure what not fitting into Canadian culture can even mean, to be honest.
I think it's way more complex than you describe: Canadians don't go through all the hoops to become American residents in order to work at Walmart... But I think South Americans probably would...
>they're members of their foreign racial/national group with the ambitions/motivations to leave.
And resources and community connections... even if they come here with little or no money, they had to have something to leave. It's expensive as hell to move to a new city without a job lined up, let alone a new country.
I think the "didn't fit into Canadian culture, or found something imminently attractive about US life" may be reading too much into things. It's more like those people just found good jobs in the US that weren't available in their country. I'm a Canadian and found a great job in the US and moved down. I didn't move down thinking the culture would be better and then found work.
> I think the "didn't fit into Canadian culture, or found something imminently attractive about US life" may be reading too much into things.
That is probably true for Canadians. It is definitely easier, faster, and more accessible for a Canadian to immigrate to the US. Fewer reasons can be enough.
For immigrants from other countries even though good jobs is one of the priorities it does not always justify immigrating. There are often other additional factors that push people to immigrate.
Oh I totally agree with you about immigration from other countries not necessarily being about finding jobs immediately. My family (including me) immigrated to Canada from another country (a third world country) because the opportunities would be better. I can't imagine us having not done that and what kind of life I would be living today.
I think you did find something imminently attractive about US life: said great job. Do not underplay the fact that many of your peers (a) wouldn't even look for "a great job in the US", and (b) wouldn't move for it if one landed at their feet. There are plenty of things I may dislike about US, yet I am also here by choice rather than necessity.
> (a) wouldn't even look for "a great job in the US", and (b) wouldn't move for it if one landed at their feet.
1. Those peers may have spouses/SOs, that, depending on their profession would turn into stay-at-home house-wives/husbands, if the peer moves into the US. This is an immediate show-stopper for a lot of people.
2. Those peers may value Canadian culture more then the person you're responding to. That doesn't mean that the person who moves to the US for better paying work values US culture. They may prefer Canadian culture - just not $200,000/year prefer.
I don't understand the emphasis on immigrants in studies that's followed in the wake of President Trump. It almost always plays with the definition of an immigrant for signaling reasons when it's obvious that the biggest policy target has been a particular subset of immigrants. Discussing the superset just looks like dishonesty to people who follow both sides.
If you look at table 1 on page 56, you can see that for white americans, the probability of a child ending up in the top quantile of income where a parent is in the bottom quantile of income is 11% (about half the probability one would except of there was zero correlation between child and parent incomes). For Asian Americans its almost 27%. A white child born in the bottom quantile is about 2.5 times more likely to stay in the bottom quantile (28%) than to rise to the top quantile (12%). An asian child born in the bottom quantile is about 1.5 times more likely to rise to the top quantile (27%) than to stay in the bottom quantile (12%).
Something that many HNers will probably be embarrased to admit being surprised by is how higher education attainment rates for immigrants don't exclude African immigrants. In fact, black immigrants from Africa and the West Indies have among the highest degree attainment rate of any group. This belies the lower college-and-advanced-degree attainment rate for black Americans as a whole.
All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.
This also makes me wonder if there's data about the mobility of native vs immigrant blacks. If it's similar, it would align with other data that show that degree attainment only serves to partially overcome the barriers to upward mobility placed in the way of black workers.
I'm of the opinion that many of the impediments that punish or withhold assistance from minorities often bleed over into mainstream American life. The specific drum I'll keep beating is that if, perhaps, the infrastructure to battle the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health issue had been allowed to be built to a robust state, the opioid epidemic would not have become so dire. The apathy towards these issues, even as they encroach upon "mainstream" middle class life, must be part of the mechanics of the calcification of class in America.
Black SWE here, grew up on the west side of Chicago, I don't think most white people understand how bad the literacy situation is. I could read competently before I even got to school and I went to grammar school in the 90s. First day of first grade, I found out no one could competently read a sentence. In fact, whole school (which has closed) was on this remedial education program called Advanced Directives or something. I'd never seen a book where the words were broken up syllable-by-syllable before I got to this school and I'm like 7 years old, and kids struggled with that. Making this a little more personal, I ultimately had to be separated from the other kids, and you can imagine why: you can't have one kid making all the others feel embarrassed and inadequate. But this also was a major source of resentment and ostracization that I'm still dealing with to this day.
This. Systemic racism ... aaaand ... loser gangster culture. Would love to see the numbers on whether it's easier to become a chartered accountant or a rap artist.
I'm seeing the other side of this, recently (disadvantaged white people). It's astonishing the loser mentalities and habits that many disadvantaged children learn from their early caregivers and peer group. As middle to upper middle class people, we often have no idea how many little bits of knowledge we pick up to work the system (legally), from those around us.
I think of it more as the bullying culture. I got bullied a lot for simply looking “nerdy” and doing my homework. Affects me to this day. It was “cool” to be dumb and flunk out. That’s a recipe for a system that holds people down.
I went to school with those loser gangster children. I tutored a lot of them. I'm still friends with a few of them through social media. While I was being insecure about my grades, physical size (I was a pipsqueak), and typical teenage angst. Some of those loser gangsters had real insecurities about society. Being treated poorly by a family, school, and country that did not want them there.
No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are.
The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.
I have family that dealt with these issue, I live in and near communities that are fighting it, and I live a version of it, transposed from the pre-school->school transition to the college->postgrad/working world transition.
> First day of first grade, I found out no one could competently read a sentence.
Isn't the standard expectation that children enter first-grade completely illiterate? I remember learning how to read and write letters one per lesson in first grade.
I'd guess that maybe 5% are taught to read by parents?
I think schools even discourage parents teaching their kids to read, even in wealthy suburban, college oriented districts. But some do anyway, and it could be more than 5% especially if you only count those that end up being strong readers.
A theory my parents had was that the limiting factor in teaching a child to read is not the mental capacity, but their eyesight - supposedly it's normal to start out relatively farsighted and unable to focus on small print close up. So they started me and my sister on words printed in very large letters and gradually reduced them.
For the places that have it, I think kindergarten is where you're expected to first learn. Mine was in the same building as 1st through 6th grade.
(I was taught by my parents before even that, and when I started school they didn't believe my parents' claim - had to prove it by reading a new book aloud to them)
This is definitely worth thinking about, and in particular to put it into today's political context, Nigerian-Americans have the most PhDs per capita of any immigrant or native-born group -- and yet Nigeria was just put under travel restrictions.
Having friends & colleagues from both American Black and African and Black Caribbean backgrounds has given me a tiny glimpse into some of the difference in background and treatment. A Caribbean friend who came here for her PhD in mathematics mentioned to me that she was shocked at how she was treated here in the US -- in her home country, she was universally respected as an educator and a professional, while in the US she was... respected in the classroom, but not on the street. A different friend whose family has been in the US longer than mine, on the other hand, talked about being discouraged from a career in the National Park Service: his grandfather in particular had stories of the violence inflicted on black people in the woods, and felt it would be a very unsafe career. There's a really complex interaction of history, current economics, and personal choice, mediated by our schools. Just looking at the numbers, the US education system is not doing well by black students in particular and many children overall. Rural white kids are also not being served well. No one is getting good math education. And as long as we continue to divide against each other in a fight for artificially limited resources, we won't do better as a nation.
I was with you until the last point. The resources are not artificially limited. The US spends almost a trillion tax dollars each year on education. We’re at over 4.1% of GDP spent on education (excluding private money), well above Germany, Spain or Italy (about 3.6%), about the same as the UK (4.2%), and not too far below France (4.6%). https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati... Those are the five largest EU countries comprising more than 2/3 of the EU population. We also spend more than Japan, Ireland, and about the same as Korea.
I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
> I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
We should do both, while sourcing more black teachers and administrators for schools from within those communities. The reality is that the history of impoverishment has set of cycles of negligence and trauma in these communities that money alone can't fix, though it can help change the direction.
Treatment from within the community is needed. Practically, the school is where that happens for the children. It would be great if the families would be able to afford to pay for their own treatment like more well off people do, but realistically, the direct payments would primarily be used pay for basics, like food and the roof over their heads.
But the vast majority of our primary and secondary school funding comes from local property taxes, no? That creates situations where wealthy districts have excess resources, while poorer districts are artificially limited.
Something as simple as bundling up school funds to the state level and redistributing similar per-pupil funds back to districts might help to close the gap - with no change in total expenditure.
> The paper then examines changes in finances over time—both within and across states— and evaluates how spending levels have changed for school districts that serve students of different races. Spending differences have largely disappeared. Spending levels across districts have converged; most remaining differences in spending are between rather than within states.
Obviously Kansas still spends less than California, but everything is much cheaper in Kansas too.
The report you cite from the tax policy center indicates that 30% of variation in school funding is still within-state between districts, so I'm not sure why they feel comfortable asserting that "spending levels across districts have converged". The authors also point out that district-level funding analyses gloss over large spending disparities between schools within districts.
The gap is there in DC, which gets special federal funding. DC is spending over $30,000 per student. DC schools are so bad that you should wonder if excess funding somehow makes things worse.
In addition to what I said earlier, I'll add that though $30,000 sounds like a big scary number, it's not so much when realizing that private schools with similar student support programs in DC go for $40,000-$60,000 a year.
As for DC public school performance, aside from the challenges that attending students often face, it should be known that DC has unfortunately served as a testing ground for a number of unorthodox education philosophies, to the detriment of the students. For at least the last two decades, during which I've been aware of the circumstances, we've had several high-profile school system admins attempt to radically reshape how DC schools "work", leaving a constantly shifting landscape in their wake. Multiple school closures, mass teacher firings and mutinies, charter school scandals, and more, while the basics (building maintenance and suitability, teacher professional training and support, resource access, etc.) are neglected.
If there's any truth to your assertions, it really doesn't have anything to do with the people who just want to provide students with traditional, stable learning environments and the support necessary to take full advantage of them.
Most of the reason for immigrant children doing so well is the fact that immigrants are often more driven, ambitious, and at the top of their peer group. So the USA gets a biased sample of immigrants from countries like Nigeria. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and interpreting it as such is misguided propaganda.
It is simultaneously the case that those African immigrants benefit from intact family and community structures, just like other immigrant groups. For example, they have people in their community they can trust to care for their children, or to offer them job opportunities at businesses that serve their communities specific cultural needs, like a Nigerian grocery.
Trust networks are extremely valuable, and they underpin a lot of the wealth, or lack thereof, in communities.
Poorer African Americans often have limited community and cultural support systems and the implied access to trust networks.
They instead have to contend with the massive and continuous structural damage inflicted upon their communities through the history of the country, including Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, social isolation, and the war on drugs.
History echoes and echoes and echoes. Redlining is still huge in its effects on generational wealth: housing is the single largest mechanism for wealth transfer in American families, and systematically and intentionally excluding black Americans has resulted in billions in dollars of vanished wealth. Go back in history and look at the Freedman's Bank: established during Reconstruction for freed slaves, it was placed under different oversight than other banks of the time and was used by Henry Cooke (a white guy) to give unsecured loans to his other foolish investments. He wiped out the bank, losing $57 million dollars (mildly inflation adjusted) of black American's money in 1874. Imagine if black families from 1874 had retained their $57 million dollars and been able to invest -- the capital they'd have today would be dramatically different. Then look again at today: in Detroit, families are still losing their homes because of confusing tax rules. Many families were exempted from property tax, but didn't get the paperwork properly completed and renewed every year, so they didn't pay property tax as they thought they had the exemption, but now the city is foreclosing on them due to back taxes even though they're now exempt and -- AND -- the city owes them a refund for overstating the same taxes when these families did pay!
It's amazing when you stack up the numbers from redlining, the Freedman's bank failure, these tax shenanigans, and the impact of differential sentencing for minor drug offenses propagating through to inability to access student loans and housing assistance.... (remember, if you rape someone, you can get government student loans, but if you had a baggie of marijuana, you cannot). So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
> [...] So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying immigrant families are in a better financial situation than the discriminated-against blacks, because they weren't discriminated against in the same way? Many immigrant families bring very little with them and have to start from scratch.
> Many immigrant families bring very little with them and have to start from scratch.
However, what they usually bring is intact community and family support structures. Trust is one of the most valuable and scarce resources there is. It can even make up for a lack of money, because valuable services are often provided reciprocally to members of the community at low or no cost, and people tolerate sharing resources more easily with people they trust.
But if there's neither trust nor money, it's a much harder struggle.
I hear this a lot, but I don't know if it's particularly true. For black immigrants, I find more compelling the notion that their comfort with, and belief in, pursuing higher education isn't rocked so profoundly by white supremacy, as is so for native blacks. They're simply not as exposed to anti-black messaging, from the history of discrimination in America to the demographically disproportionate reporting of crime in American media. Add to that the arguably superior education of black Caribbeans, who are free to support higher standards with the requisite resources and are not stymied by regressive funding policy, and you have a population that is often more prepared for the rigors of higher education.
Which is pretty damning of the way America treats its own people.
Edit: I want to add that this is not simply my own speculation; this is the explanation that I've heard in part from several friends and acquaintances. They're often horrified by the leniency of standards for even high performing American students, and they will often state that they are not "black" in the way that native African Americans are, and are therefore not subject to the same biases and limitations.
African immigrants can have racist beliefs about black Americans just as much as anyone. (Including black Americans.) Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" gets into this in a way I found to be eye-opening.
Immigrants are also forced to develop their own peer communities and support networks since mainstream culture, stores, and media don't cater to them. Growing up I was surprised by how low the expectations were for my American classmates from their parents.
A "goof off" from my community would be struggling to get Bs while a goof from the non-immigrant groups would be struggling to pass at all. And being a "straight-A student" was a baseline expectation rather than a marker of being a rare and special talent. The bar for how many sacrifices parents are willing to make to set their kids up for success is higher too. I got a B- in Math ONCE and my parents immediately hired me a tutor and started forcing me to do remedial exam drills, which is a reaction I don't think I would have seen in the average or median American household among my peer group.
I don't think it's any special level of intelligence among the immigrant community, but I think there is sort of an "Overton window" of cultural expectations for what are normal ways to spend your time, what's an appropriate spread for grades to be at, or what things you should be prioritizing in life. I think immigrant communities maintain an Overton window that prioritizes scholastics over the mainstream culture.
This is probably in large part due to selection bias since the immigration process chooses the cream of the crop, but the durability of this tendency across generations is probably set up by the higher standards I talked about.
That educational attainment was a priority for my extended family, and that there are high-profile fights for educational equity in cities across the country, lead me to believe that even non-immigrant black families and communities do have similar values. I wonder how much resource access, rather than intention, matters.
One of the books that I read last year, I can’t remember which [1], said that the greatest contributor to wealth over the long run is education. My unfounded assumption that explains the reasoning of why you did not experience American families reacting the same way that yours did is: the American belief in rugged individualism. I think that most Americans would say that “hard work” is the biggest contributor to wealth [2]. Being an immigrant, I guess that your family, and probably society they are from, adhered to the former belief, and that is why they took your education so seriously?
[1] Could have come from: Can American Capitalism Survive?, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, maybe Enlightenment Now.
How long in the family history does it take to lose that ambition/motivation? The colonists back in the day had to have had those same qualities. Maybe even more so with all the added risk and dangers of the time.
Indeed. While you're covering multiple topics, I wanted to touch on the education specifically.
I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.
If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.
>If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
This a false dichotomy. For one, teachers in SV can make 100k. Second the skills required to be an effective teacher are not the same as a good math major. They just aren't. We've all had the brilliant professor who can't teach. But we should pay teachers because good teachers are professionals and they should be rewarded appropriately.
The problem with education is that we treat each kid the same. But actually every kid is different and has unique needs and thus requires a personalized learning program. When they are young these are social and behavioral. As they get older they can be subject specific. An individualized program could be aligned with a cohort in a class setting but you really need individual tutoring to address the child's specific needs and deficits. A good teacher is able to recognize these needs and give them the education they need.
The classic school system was designed for the industrial era. We train you like a factory because you're going to work in a factory making 1 cog/minute. Now, those factory workers have been replaced with automation, simple AI, and robots. And the schools are woefully unprepared for it.
> I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
I don't think the two have much to do with each other. being a good k-12 teacher is much more about the teaching skills than the subject mastery. anyone who can complete a stem major should be able to understand all the concepts they would have to present in a high school math class.
sure, but someone with a BA in english would do a fine job teaching writing intensive courses. outside of stem, people aren't facing the huge pay differential from industry anyway.
I think you see a similar phenomenon across many aspects of contemporary American life. We've found inferior-yet-workable ways to route around the increasingly dire financial situation of the average family, often by lowering standards, paying with debt, or simply with outright theft. 30 years ago, Sheila may have driven her new car to college (both of which she's paying for with a summer job), picking up a few new cassette tapes along the way. Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time.
I don't know if "competition" is a panacea, but there is definitely something wrong with how a lot of our institutions function.
> Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time.
Education aside, this is an odd comparison. She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify). Comparing this unfavorably to "a few cassette tapes" is beyond absurd. Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
>She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify).
Which she could afford to pay for (albeit at a much lower price than the cassettes would have commanded, appropriate for the advances in distribution efficiency) in a parallel today.
>Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
But it's not anywhere near what a new car offers in terms of fuel efficiency and especially safety. So there is a relative QoL loss there.
>The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
They're not, they're just the first that came to mind that fit in a neat illustration.
The overall point is that we're no longer capable of paying outright for things we used to be able to. We have to rely on workarounds (ad support, used goods, debt, theft) to maintain a semblance of the same QoL. Our standards haven't declined perceptionally because we have those tools, but their use is anywhere from unsustainable to morally-objectionable. And if you take them away, you have a far poorer American than one or two generations ago.
You can have plenty of great math teachers for $50k/yr in the US, or you can require most teachers to have a masters degree and still make $50k/yr, not both.
Plenty of people home school their children, and reportedly those children have great academic ability. I'm willing to wager the vast majority of those home schooling their kids aren't graduates of a teaching program.
Thanks to common core, I successfully taught a younger family member how to do long division, since common core doesn't teach long division for whatever reason, at least not at the age that we used to learn it. It was simple, intuitive, and I have no math teaching background. It took about 120 seconds to demonstrate the technique for the kid to get it and do it on their own.
It's not a question of funding, it's a question of policy. People want their cake and eat it too. Kids failing in basic mathematics all over the country? Maybe we should overhaul the education system, get rid of useless subjects like science, history, art, 'every kid learns a second language now,' and focus on literacy and mathematics.
I disagree on the comprtition argument. In Eastern Europe competition for teaching jobs could not be lower. It's one of the lowest paying and most stressful jobs out there.
However, everyone I know from there thinks that American level of school education is lower, especially in STEM. So they send their children here in NorCal to extra math classes.
If education in the USA is underfunded, then education is underfunded in pretty much every country. The USA pays more per student than Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Korea. Look:
So that isn't the problem, at least relative to the rest of the world.
The worst schools in the USA seem to spend the most. Maybe the money is anti-educational, being used to purchase distractions. DC is spending well over $30,000 per student. At that rate, DC could easily pay 300k for a teacher. It would only require the funds from 1/3 of the class.
Funding models differ greatly. Often those sky-high prices-per-student are because the schools are taking care of several meals a day for students, as well as before/after care, extracurriculars, and special needs programs, where all these initiatives are a necessity but unable to be provided by parents. In America, all of these are provided at higher cost and higher quality by wealthier parents themselves; in other countries, more robust social safety nets, more lenient workplace and parental leave policy, and occasionally higher real income/wealth per family allow parents to take on those needs at lower cost.
When combined with the prevalence of social intervention in the lives of poor families - up to and including removal of the children - you see that there is a profound and toxic distrust of these parents and of their ability to take care of their own children. We've allowed a model to grow where, instead of ensuring people make enough to take care of their families, we shift the burden onto the state. This is inefficient in education for a number of reasons, least of which the central conceit as described above, which undermines the effort at its core.
The countries you cite are all relatively homogenous. The U.S. has greater disparities in education funding due to funding coming primarily from local sources rather than national.
Sweden and Germany are no longer homogeneous at all, and anyway isn't diversity supposed to be a strength?
The specific example I gave, DC, simply destroys the argument that local funding is the problem. DC is very well-funded from national sources, and it has horrific schools.
> All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.
You're missing a huge cause before jumping to this conclusion. African immigrants don't just differ from African-Americans in that they weren't born here; they're also a subpopulation that's gone through the dramatic filter of the US's legal immigration policy. If you have a filter that is explicitly trying to select for the educated and economically productive, it's practically a tautology to say that the outcome of that filter will consist of a more educated and productive population than your control group.
I can't imagine the same dynamic wouldn't hold for recent immigrants from most regions vs their many-generations-American counterparts.
In all my years browsing HN I don't remember reading anything racist, overt or implied. If your first paragraph is true, I think it would have more to do with the media's portrayal of people of African American and Hispanic descent.
I’m what’s considered 1.5 generation immigrant. My parents are first gen immigrants and while I wasn’t born in the west, I spent a considerable portion of my childhood here. My parents friends and their children are all in similar situation with children arriving at different ages.
Anecdotally, all of the parents of this batch came poor, most of us were below poverty level because all of the parents came as older students (30s and some times 40s) doing their masters or PhD. None of their previous degrees or work experience counted so everyone started from scratch. Add to that the language and cultural barriers and it took everyone a while to get back on their feet.
The children though had no barrier other than being in poor families. Education and hard work were very much valued. The family situation were stable and there was a lot of time investment from the parents in helping with homework etc. There was also a push towards professions fields. My parents half jokingly said to me I can pick any field of study as long as it’s medicine, law or engineering (ended up in engineering). So end result, all the children are doing well professionally and financially. Definitely in the top quartile, but not super wealthy. From my own and my parents social circles this seems to be a very common pattern.
I think this might have to do with the type of Asian-Americans that immigrate to the US. (esp. this generation)
[Strike out] Asians mostly use high-skilled visas / education based visas as a door to enter the nation. Almost by definition, this beings in the subset of Asians who grew up in a culture of education and hard work. [\Strike out]
I think, the cultural boon/curse of living vicariously through your child also leads to parents pushing their child towards "lucrative" / "respected" careers.
There might also be a snow-ball effect, where Asians aspire to pursue careers where Asians have traditionally succeeded. That would be professions in STEM fields, which have high median wages.
[Strike out]The real title should be -> "Children of Asian immigrants who were top percentiles in their own countries, perform at a similarly high level"[\Strike out]
edit: didn't see the lower quartile number. Renders my argument invalid.
> Asians mostly use high-skilled visas / education based visas as a door to enter the nation.
The minimum salary for an H1-B Visa is $60,000, which would put someone at the 68-th percentile of individual income (or the fourth quantile). The statistics I am referring to are for asians whose parents had incomes in the lowest quantile (below about $19,000 today) between age 11-22.
Now, that could capture a lot of immigrants who have skills or education back home, but are underemployed once here. (E.g. college degree back home, but working in food service here.) But it excludes immigrants who were able to use their degrees or skills to provide financial advantages to their kids in the U.S.
That's just immediately falsified by the fact that he's talking about children of Asian immigrants in the bottom quartile. The high-skilled visa workers are not in the bottom quartile.
There might be some hard to account for factors. Many immigrants end up in worse jobs than they had in their home countries. Some doctors end up driving cabs for instance. If your parent is a doctor with the income of a cab driver I'd expect you to have more upward mobility than if your parent is a cab driver with the income of a cab driver.
Also, there's a factor of where the people live. Someone who is a cab driver in Los Angeles might be making the same money as someone who is a mechanic in Nebraska. But the possibility of upwards mobility and higher education in Los Angeles is much higher than that of rural areas. Most immigrants move to large metropolitan areas than the countryside.
While anecdata can be useful in general, in this particular case I have a hard time believing that the case you describe: working in a worse job than your home country, is informative or representative.
There is a wisdom of crowds at work, especially when it comes to huge decisions such as immigration - no country offering worse prospects is ever the target of large scale immigration.
> While anecdata can be useful in general, in this particular case I have a hard time believing that the case you describe: working in a worse job than your home country, is informative or representative.
Does being a homemaker as a result of moving countries count as "worse job"? Maybe I'm living in a bubble but I know many couples where one spouse got a job in another country and the other became a homemaker (most common) or got a worse job. There as a huge amount of skill sets that do not transit well across countries/cultures/continents. So much that I'd argue it is the exception when your skill set transitions well (such as computers, sciences).
Yes, it is possible for those persons to invest time and money (go to college, form new network, learn the language and culture) to eventually get back to their original career but by the time they manage to get there they already lost years of their career so automatically they are behind when compared to others of the same age and talent in the same career or if they wouldn't have changed countries. And to be honest, people are only getting older, not younger, so having to start from scratch when the best outlook for that is being able to be were you ware X years ago in your country is not a very attractive proposition. Combined with the SO who moved for the job earning enough for both it results in a lot of homemakers.
That specific case may seem too radical, but there is some logic in moving to a different country with less promising job prospects if, say, your home country is ravaged by war or by systemic violence.
Also, citizens of countries with fickle economies and high inflation could benefit from having an income in a more stable currency, especially if they are breadwinners for their extended family, in which case they send back money they earn abroad.
I would bet that these poor Asian Americans are highly educated. I know that my dad, after arriving here in 90s and having to feed 6 mouths, worked odd jobs for the first 10 years despite having gotten a masters in chemical engineering in Asia, never topped more than 40k. But the five of us now each make 6-figures.
I know many stories like this. But I also know a couple folks who were poor, but not educated -- their kids are not doing well financially.
I wonder how much of this comes from insulation from cultural trends that seem to try to push away every cultural norm in favor of something else. I’d imagine immigrant families that haven’t fully assimilated into all that are less influenced.
Clearly white kids need more of the right kind of child abuse! Beating the snot out of your white kid because you're a drunk loser? No. Emotional abuse directed at producing a doctor/lawyer/engineer -- yessss! BrownDadLove (tm).
This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy:
"Diversity is the engine that drives this country. We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation... snowboards and takes improv classes."
Feels like one of those things that we all thought was true.
John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
I have a rebuttal on the quote, as it applies to the Romans in particular. Where the author goes into how people in "hard times" still get stomped by the Romans more often than not.
And people use that myth as a way to make political arguments about decadence. I'm not doing it justice, just take a look.
I think of it as resiliance to adversity. If someone has had a comparatively easy life, they'll probably have a harder time dealing with difficult situations. The problem is that everything is relative, so people may not see their life as easy, even if it is compared to most people. For example, I used to work with someone who was raised by wealthy parents, went to super exclusive private schools, and had multiple college degrees paid for by their parents. They didn't think they had an easy life though, because their parents only had a couple million dollars in the bank, and his classmates were mostly old money with 10s or 100s of millions in the bank, so they wouldn't hang out with him because he was "poor".
The good thing is that resliance is like a muscle and can be strengthened, people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally.
people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally
It would be nice if that happened, though. You tell your students, 75 % of whom have no grasp of 8th-grade math, that they have been cheated out of an education and that consequently they now need to work twice as hard. But instead of knuckling down they all march off to the Dean to complain. Of course the Dean enables the underperformance.
You can't frame "easy life" only in terms of money, "easy life" also means coasting through an underperforming school and never having to face reality.
> Ok, easy, I've seen this statement used several times to criticize younger generations because things were harder "back in my day".
Except for some very specific times in history, it is almost universally true that the older generation had harder times. Human progress is -- in the grand scheme of things -- a march towards much easier lives.
I was referring to places with war and right after war. Places where ISIS can still come back and places that were either destabilized or had attempts at democratic revolutions suppressed. Historically, wars and revolutions are not some rare exceptions. It gets very very bad then better, then it starts failing and then again very very bad.
Overall trend may be positive, but there are enough local downfalls to make the "universally true that the older generation had harder times" not really true. It any given moment it can go either way. The whole first half of 20century was one massive downfall after another.
In particular with economy, you have years where it is easy to get a job for anyone who breathe and then downfall when it is hard for everyone.
Whole economies went down and unemployment rates went up. All that produces plenty of young people who have it harder then their parents.
I personally got a job easily. It is quite possible that my kids won't.
> Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn't happen by choice. The weak men were unwilling to sacrifice even mere comfort for their own nation, so they did things like outsourcing to cut costs.
This ignores some complex geopolitics of not drawing a nuclear superpower in to open conflict with us.
This quote is often used as a dog whistle by far right groups. In their definition, “weak” is caring about others, providing services to citizens like healthcare and education etc. “Strong” is then the Trumpian ideal of a successful self made business man who takes no nonsense from no one and gets things done regardless of their snowflake feelings (sic).
So? I find the quote very compelling as someone from a family of immigrants. My cousins left Bangladesh as children. Their parents left professional jobs to take service jobs (“hard times”). But the kids worked hard, majored in engineering, science, business, medicine, and accounting (“strong men and women”), and secured professional jobs for themselves (“good times”). I see the next generation being bombarded with ideas to make them weak. Culture that emphasizes personal fulfillment, pernicious individualism, hedonism, rebelling against authority, etc. And I’m profoundly afraid of the “weak men and women” that might follow in the next generation.
Quotations, like any other meme, do not exist in a vacuum, and are sometimes taken up by ideologies to justify different agendas. It's fine to like a quote for the value it resonates with oneself, but you can't ignore that it also exists within a larger culture- http://tiny.cc/pinojz
Yes, you can. Those who get hysterical about which other people might believe the same things are actively ceding control of that message to them (the "Hitler was a vegetarian!!" problem)
in a class-less society, where competition for cash is the elevator to wealth, high-pollution industry, treachery and predatory lending moves classes while "arts" does nothing..
These comments make it sound like "soft" people rightfully lose their chance at wealth, this is over-generalized, and badly so. People who build a social and artistic fabric, and do no harm, get run over by others with no social allegiance and a thirst for one result.
to strain this tangent further, it seems evident that industry and under-priced oil destroyed local craft, and the Internet and an entertainment-economy, has crushed fine arts practice in locale after locale.
I learned about a similar concept in my high school world history class of all places. Except that was for nomadic traders in north Africa and the Arabian peninsula. The first generation could traipse endlessly across the desert and build a fortune. The second generation could maintain it. The third generation couldn't. The phrase was "losing the desert", though Googling indicates this isn't a common term after all.
This is because people who immigrate are "artificially" pushed down in social status and income due to issues like differences in language, and not having some of your work or education experience recognized in the foreign country. These people are just "bouncing back". In some cases people who were professionals in their country of origin do relatively lower ranked or even menial work. Their children will be constantly reminded "I was a dentist back home, not a hygienist", which affects their self-image.
Back in their home country, people who are actually from a poorer class do not experience the same upward mobility.
That is all the more so in places that have caste or caste-like systems. Who your great-great-grandfather was still influences where you stand.
That was my first take as well. This is explicitly called out in the Conclusions section in paper.
"Furthermore, immigrant parents were “under-placed” in the income distribution, thus allowing their children who were native English speakers and educated in the US more scope for upward mobility."
I don't see numbers on how much of the total "upward mobility" can be attributed to any of the individual factors.
The thing is, it's not just about income. If you come from generations of poverty, it's written all over you, and that closes doors in your face.
The children of upward mobile immigrants who don't come from lower classes in their home country reflect that, even if the parents struggle in the new country.
They are socialized differently from true poor people.
For instance, language: the children will tend to pick up the "socio-economically preferred dialect"¹ of English, rather than a socially stigmatized dialect. The children will do this naturally, because they will tune in to how the way people speak English in America determines the perception of social class, and then they will learn that way of speaking which fits their self-image about where they fit in society.
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1. A phrase I picked up years ago from a linguistics prof.
Being a first generation immigrant myself (parents immigrated to America in 1975) I can give a few cultural reasons:
1. Stable two parent home - my parents lived together and shielded us from any arguments/disagreements they had and presented a stable unified upbringing
2. My father had a degree in Microbiology, but when he first migrated had to take a less paying job due to language/racism. My mother had a high school education. My father eventually ended up in a top research company and my mother got a masters in computer science from the local state university. This example ingrained the merits of grit and hard work
3. Education - specifically math and science - were emphasized in my family over sports, social and other activities. This was very different then my friends.
4. Academic expectations were extremely high - in my family strait As was baseline.
5. Family and community support - we had strong support from other immigrant indian community growing up. And the community as a whole valued the same things as my family.
These traits can be replicated in non immigrant American society - but often it is not. The main difference I see is a lack of a strong family unit and acceptance of low academic standards.
This could be just my experience - would be interested in hearing others
You are basically me. My dad also had a microbiology degree but his first job in this country was a waiter and janitor. This ended up turning into basically slave, unpaid labor, which he managed to escape thanks to my mother.
My mother had an economics and poli sci degree but worked as a secretary. She decided to become a teacher and had to her entire university again at night because California wouldn't accept her Indian degrees. My brother and I spent many nights in her college classes doing our homework under her desk. Really taught us the importance of hard work to get what we want.
After waitering, my dad had all sorts of odd jobs -- real estate agent, garbage man, computer guy -- until finally getting a job in pharmaceuticals thanks to my mom getting the HR ladies at her office (while she was a secretary) to review his resume and help him.
Academic expectations were absolutely the same. Even A minus was not accepted.
I mean aren't you talking about most Indian-Americans if not all :). Being an Indian-American myself (first generation even though I came here at a very young age), what you described is pretty much how we live.
Immigrants are frequently working below what you'd expect of similarly talented/skilled/educated (especially if you exclude consideration of English language fluency) native born, so it's not really surprising that their children do better by comparison to them than the children of the native born.
The immigration process itself contains a huge selection bias. Immigrating to America is not an easy process; it's long, confusing and intended to dissuade all but the most persistent of people. Given that, I would expect to find that people who immigrate in general are more intelligent and hard working than an average person.
Immigrants have left everything they know behind. They know they don't really know their way around, so they are raising their kids to be better than they were.
I know factory workers raising their kids to be a factory working running some machine on an assembly line. It never occurs to them to encourage their kids to be something. They know that their their own factory had 10 times as many factory workers just 30 years ago but not even that is enough for them to think they need to start thinking of getting their family to do something else.
Maybe it’s contentment. They’ve had a good life being a factory worker (or replace with any other formerly good earning but now dying job). Had the house and 2 cars and raised a family on the work, so why change things now. I know intellectually yes you can say this industry is dying and the wages are going down, but it’s probably not as emotionally connected a thought process.
Most immigrants never had that luxury. They came with no credentials and worked low wage jobs at or below the poverty line. They want to get out of that situation and maybe more importantly want their children to get out of that situation.
The education entrepreneur Adam Robinson did his own survey a few decades ago. He found that while children of two immigrants did better on standardized tests than children of two non-immigrant parents, the "best" combination came from having an immigrant father and a non-immigrant mother. ("Best" when focusing solely on standardized test results)
That's curiously specific, as in the gender role and immigrant standing are tied together, but apparently that isn't the case. Googling around found the following editorialization of the source material [1] that gave a TL;DR faster than I can type it up:
Study of NYC school data and using custom questionnaires of teens across the world testing into Stuyvesant HS
Cutting to the conclusion: Groups that overcame socioeconomic factors to improve on tests (test improvement is more sensitive to those factors than outright performance) had the following factors:
immigrant father
US-born mother
Speculation to why this mattered? One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. The gender didn’t matter, it just turned out that the father typically tended to be the immigrant. This combo even outperformed both parents being born in the US.
> One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language.
This at least passes the sniff test. I know plenty of 1.5 or 2nd Gen Indian Americans who seamlessly assimilate because they and/or their parents speak English, in an accent coded as classy (ie British-sounding)[1]. This is even true to some degree in the workplace: I work with some brilliant first gen Chinese immigrants, but there's a practical ceiling on their ability to work at higher levels because of the increasing importance of communication as you rise,and the way their thick accents and lack of vocabulary interact with that. A hypothetical kid of theirs with the same level of talent would shoot up the ranks.
[1] Note that this doesnt cover all Indian accents, only most traditionally upper-class ones.
That's because immigrants often have artificially lowered status compared to what they had in their home country. They might have been white collar workers there but they have to work worst jobs in US because of language and other barriers.
They still have high expectations for their kids and support them like better-off parents would, so when kids enter the job market with no language barrier - they return to their usual place.
This makes sense - my grandfather was a top lawyer in his home country before fleeing a war. As a refugee in a foreign country, he did manage to get a law position with some connections he had - but his XX years of foreign law experience weren't very useful in the new country.
Is it the "right stuff"? One might just as plausibly expect such people to be highly risk tolerant and to end up screwing up really badly as often as they succeed.
I'd expect them to screw up much more often than they succeed. But if 25 people take a risk and found a company and 1 of them succeeds, that one company might employ 1000 people. The 24 failures may be worth it. That's leaving aside whatever useful services the company provides.
~20% of the world population of foreign-born people lives in the US. It's difficult to think that's unrelated to the fact that the US produces a disproportionate amount of global innovation.
> Immigrants are 4 times more likely than children of native-born parents to have less than a high school degree, but are almost twice as likely to have a doctorate.
> Immigrants are much more likely than others to work in construction or service occupations, but children of immigrants work in roughly the same occupations as the children of natives.
Although, they already managed not to screw up US immigration (if we're being US centric here) which indicates they can figure out relatively complex problems, and have the drive to get off their ass and do something. Whether it was legal or not, for most people immigrating to the US is a huge pain in the ass.
Title editorialized from "Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the US over Two Centuries"
Abstract:
>Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants’ advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. In the past, this advantage can be explained by immigrants moving to areas with better prospects for their children and by “under-placement” of the first generation in the income distribution. These findings are consistent with the “American Dream” view that even poorer immigrants can improve their children’s prospects.
I read this more as it can be easier to move from really dire straits 3rd world country to middle class America. Whereas it can be harder to go from middle class America to Upper class.
3rd World -> Middle Class America takes hard work (once you're in America)
Middle Class America -> Upper Class takes strategic, risk, and hard work
Adding: I think there is some selection bias. Those who self-select to move to the US probably already have motivation, means, etc to get to the US and the intelligence to manage the complicated immigration process. Then, there's the "burn the ships" part, where you simply must succeed because there's no option of leaving.
Quoting the study "Geographic choices were important: first-generation immigrants were more likely to settle in areas with higher mobility prospects for their children. When we compare children growing up in the same US region, the intergenerational gap between immigrants and the US-born is reduced by 70%. When comparing children growing up in the same county, we no longer find an intergenerational gap between the children of immigrants and US-born individuals. In other words, immigrant children did not earn more than others who grew up in the same location. Rather, their parents chose to live in locations that offered high mobility prospects to all."
There's so much more to capital than assets! While often asset-poor, a lot of immigrants to the west have considerable intellectual capital and good social capital among their community. Even when foreign diplomas are judged worthless, the fact that the individual was able to acquire them in his country still probably places him in the top percentile of his home nation. And the immigrant community often serves as a pipeline for employment, no matter what the skill level.
Even if two third (that's the number claimed) came through family migration, it doesn't really matter as the first person that's sponsoring them had to get selected in the first place through employment. Even if the initial sponsor went to some diversity lottery, I suppose applying and meeting all requirements still requires a little bit of education and some financial resources to send the application in the first place.
I would be curious to see the breakdown per initial immigration category and country, with folks coming in from family based immigration counted as the category of the initial sponsor.
Given how strict the immigration rule has become I'm not surprised, especially for those who work in tech/academics. Also UPWARD is relative, which means many immigrants start from scratch and there's just not enough time to gain too much wealth and social status, thus makes it easier for their children to go 'upwards', while it may just be their children are living like average Americans.
While this is good to see verified, and I absolutely think it is important to rigorously double-check whether things that "make sense" are actually true, it would have been really surprising if this were not true.
1) immigrants often have language difficulties that their children do not
2) immigrants often have cultural knowledge difficulties that their children do not
3) immigrants often have moved to places (both country and place within country) for the exact reason that they believe their children will do better there
But, again, just because it was predictable doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to have rigorously verified that it is so.
This seems like a variation on regression to the mean. If you take a group of people who have had unusually bad circumstances (language + cultural barriers) and compare with a similar group (their children) odds are that things will improve on the next iteration (assuming that the bad circumstances are transient and not endemic).
That’s because (legal) immigrants have high social capital (education, values, two parent households) and often migrate to places where they have the highest relationship capital (hence the CountryVille neighborhoods like Koreatown or the Ukrainian neighborhood on the East side of Manhattan). So when you measure their kids income it jumps up on average.
You're completely wrong. The anti immigrant sentiment is mostly about low skilled work being undervalued because the application pool is filled with immigrants who usually have no other choice because of language barriers or lack of recognition of foreign education. You can definitively argue that this hurts the bottom American families the most. Those who fell to the bottom because they lost their job permanently (e.g. coal workers) don't have a low skilled job as a fall back because salaries are being driven down by immigrants.
Again as I have said the downsides of immigration are an oversupply of workers in specific industries which drive salaries down. If migrant children were truly "taking all the good jobs" then those good jobs would cease to be good jobs and become low income as well. This is obviously not happening. Once an immigrant is no longer under H1B visa restrictions by obtaining a green card their salary shoots up because they can find better employers.
Finally does it matter if it is a disaster for American families especially if the newcomers will become one of those American families as well? If you want to reduce suffering in this world then you would start with those that suffer the most. Lets use refugees after WW2 as an example. As you may know Germany was divided into two pieces. What you may not know is that the third piece was given to Poland and Poland had to give Russia land on its eastern border. This means millions of polish people were forced to immigrate. Then there were the Germans of which 8 million had to migrate out of Poland. What are you going to do with such a huge influx of refugees? Just let them rot in a foreign country? Let them into your country even you can't feed or house everyone because of the war? Of course you let them in. It's the only right thing to do.
It seems we agree that mass migration hurts American families. The poorest get hit the hardest. So wrong.
Our refugee program is immoral. We pick and choose refugees like dogs from a shelter. Instead we should help them in place. The money would be spent on the necessities of a refugee camp, not plane tickets to America and English lessons for a lucky few. And they’d be poised to return home and rebuild their countries, which is what they want.
Malcolm Gladwell hypothesizes in Outliers that children whose parents' efforts are rewarded are more likely to work hard themselves because their brains are wired from a young age to associate work with reward.
Immigrating to the United States, for a lot of people, is a great reward.
A lot of the comments are crediting the immigrant parents as being "motivated" parents...maybe, but in this modern economy I think there is a more economic reason:
US born children have parents that more likely than not are indebted; whereas, even poor immigrants are unlikely to be indebted. It likely follows children whose parents not in debt, no matter how poor, likely have higher rates of upward mobility than children of indebted parents. There are very real glass ceilings in the US (having the lowest socio-economic mobility of all 1st world countries), so you are likely to raise from below the poverty line to just above, but if you are already above their isn't much likelihood of going up further.
To make the abstract concrete. Canadians living in the US are often thought to be "just like" Canadians living in Canada. But they're often not. Often they're the Canadians that sufficiently didnt fit into Canadian culture, or found something immanently attractive about US life (at least the perception of US life)...
So this study is kind of saying "The children of ambitious and effortful parents have higher rates of upward mobility than the general populace of US people"