81–90 of 267 posts
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
Categorically false! Most of immigration to the US is family based; actually about two-third of them.
source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/17/key-facts-a...
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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 do think you have a valid question and shouldn't have been down-voted
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 te…
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.
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There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.
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…
Or your home country just needs to be significantly worse.
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 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. source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/17/key-facts-a...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.