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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

#211

Post by golemiprague »

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…

It's not the American education system problem, it works well for Asians or whites. It is the African American culture of being a gangster rather than studying and no school is going to change it, this is something they have to change within their own culture. Also fixing the families there, stop bringing children out of wedlock and behave properly like black families used to do 50 years ago.

There might be some genetic traits also, maybe the slaves were not that smart to start with and they can't close the IQ gap. The new immigrants from Africa are the descendants of people who sold those slaves, so obviously they were better, at least in warfare. They might also be from the upper classes, basically just having a higher IQ to start with.

An interesting thing is to look at England where blacks are all immigrants, there are more college educated blacks than whites percentage wise but the non educated ones are pretty problematic with the same gang issues as in the US. So maybe it is just black culture that is screwed up, who knows.

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

namirez wrote: post #83
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 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...

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by harryh »

namirez wrote: post #83
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 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...

In order for something to be "categorically false" it needs to be false for the whole category. Two thirds is....not the whole.

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

#214

Post by macspoofing »

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…

So this reinforces the point that ambition and hard work pays off.

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

#215

Post by Izkata »

toraobo wrote: post #178
acephal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somet…

> 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?

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)

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

#216

Post by m0zg »

tartoran wrote: post #207
m0zg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

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...

I'm a Russian-American immigrant, yes, a legal one. We had our kid when we were already mostly out of the woods financially though.

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

#217

Post by d1zzy »

glofish wrote: post #46
TimPC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#218

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

godelski wrote: post #100
nostrademons wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I'm aware, there's no strong link between motivation and generics.

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.

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

#219

Post by u37eyddeue »

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…

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.

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

#220

Post by wutbrodo »

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…

> 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.

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