Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

nber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 267 posts

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#61

Post by dannyperson »

ajuc wrote: post #51

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…

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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#62

Post by 5440 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #57

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…

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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#63

Post by peatmoss »

tropo wrote: post #55
oblio wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define weak and strong, though?

It's many things. People raised in the Great Depression went on to win a huge war and build a very comfortable life. By modern standards, they weren't complainers. The enemy was brutally killed without holding back and without caring about diverse values or culture. Men went off to near-certain death, often volunteering to do so. Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn'…

> 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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#64

Post by nostrademons »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #57

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…

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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#65

Post by rhacker »

bsanr2 wrote: post #39
rayiner wrote: post #12

It'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…

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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#66

Post by spappletrap »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #57

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…

>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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#67

Post by vparikh »

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

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#68

Post by justin66 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #57

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…

> 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.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#69

Post by toasterlovin »

nostrademons wrote: post #64
maerF0x0 wrote: post #57

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…

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 upro…

There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.

Re: Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born

#70

Post by barrkel »

toasterlovin wrote: post #69
nostrademons wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upro…

There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.

Unless you're an actual refugee fleeing imminent murder, rape and torture, migrating still takes a lot of get up and go.
Post reply on HN