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).
Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
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Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#32It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race... . 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 probab…
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.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#33Immigrants 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.
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 ye…
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.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with enough gumption to upend their lives and leave everything they knew behind for an uncertain future … it's the "right stuff"
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.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#35It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race... . 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 probab…
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.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
+1 to this. In order to even get an application for h1b there is even a requirement for employers that they are paid above a certain amount
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=google&job=&city=&year=201...
assuming that google pays the highest h1b salaries, if you sort the jobs by lowest to highest earnings. you see that many are barely earning a little more than 100k in the most expensive cities in the world. if an apartment cost 2k a month and half your income goes to taxes. you are left with 25k to pay for food and a car and medical coverage. why would they do this?????!!!!! to get the word google on their resume.
another issue is that people here are treating income as a measure of wealth. that's hilariously naive considering how so many ceo's today don't even take a salary. immigrants do not come here and severe all ties to their families in their home countries.
you can not compare immigrants that are a specific sub group of people to a non-immigrant population which typically represents a wide range of demographics.
it's the same argument made against those stats regarding how low females are paid. they never compare men and women in the same field of work. not only are you not comparing people in the same field of work, you are not comparing groups of people in the same class.
immigrants are twice as likely to have a college education vs the non-immigrants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_of_immigrants_in_the...
"Parents’ educational level when the child was 8 years old significantly predicted educational and occupational success for the child 40 years later." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/
so this is a bs study that compares very different groups of of people to come up with a very misleading point.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#37This 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, tapestr…
See also: The Strauss–Howe generational theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#38This 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.
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 an…
Different priorities means different outcomes.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#39It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race... . 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 probab…
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.
Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
#40It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race... . 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 probab…
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 tha…
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.