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Who believes this? Do you know any first generation Mexican immigrants? Some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, who are also rapidly pulling themselves towards the middle class.

No, hard work does result in success, but you just have to do the actual hard work part. I have never, ever met somebody who works really hard who isn’t rapidly seeing their life improve.

Some other lessons to take from first generation immigrants:

1) Focus on your family.

2) Traditional values are traditional because they work.

Don’t get caught into the contrarians trap of believing that conventional wisdom is wrong.

“Ackshually working hard doesn’t work” is demonstrably wrong. You may just have to do some work that isn’t very fun.




Found the conservative.

I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.

You're right that working yourself to the bone will improve your quality of life if you start from the very bottom.

You're wrong in that many people are in an lower to middle class life cycle and no amount of working hard will improve their situation.


I don’t know what you mean by conservative, but if you mean: “support working class people” then yes you caught me.

I wish people just spent more time around these communities they want to talk about. If you’re honestly going to tell me that you’re spending time around working class first generation immigrants, (my experience is working specifically with Mexicans) and not seeing a very strong obvious positive correlation between hard work and success, then I just frankly don’t believe you.


> Found the conservative.

that's a ridiculous statement and doesn't belong here. Hard work is required for success but not all hard work will lead you there. You have to know where to work hard and that comes from identifying and fighting for opportunities. Lots of first gen immigrants do this very well. If didn't work hard to leverage opportunities presented to them then they wouldn't be first-gen immigrants to begin with.


> Found the conservative.

What do you think this signals to people? That he may be conservative.

> I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.

Yeah and you could work really hard for free and not scrape by at all. It's not that all hard work results in higher income, it's that working hard __to raise your income__ tends to raise your income.


Our society is built on the backs of those who work hard at things that don't raise their income. Why should they have any hope?

This is the same crowd that told all food service workers to "get a real job" and then go out and complain that Starbucks is having trouble retaining workers.


This has been true in my experience too with my Indian relatives.




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