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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

#261
post #159

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 exactly what it's saying, and I think it's an important message to get our with all of the propaganda against immigrants right now. These are highly motivated people, not lazy slobs like some people paint them.

Maybe we should build our people up as a society, as a country rather than depending on draining the "highly motivated" people from their own countries, presumably where they are needed much more. It makes me very sad that as a whole we have lost so much faith in each other.

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

#262

Earlier 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.

Here's an interesting paper: https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-dozen-facts-about-immig...

> Immigrants are 4 times more likely than children of native-born parents to have less than a high school degree, but are almost twice as likely to have a doctorate.

> Immigrants are much more likely than others to work in construction or service occupations, but children of immigrants work in roughly the same occupations as the children of natives.

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

#263
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>aaaand ... loser gangster culture. No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are. The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, but do you have skin in the game or personal experience with these issues?

I have family that dealt with these issue, I live in and near communities that are fighting it, and I live a version of it, transposed from the pre-school->school transition to the college->postgrad/working world transition.

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

#264
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>aaaand ... loser gangster culture. No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are. The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.

Isn't this exactly what acephal alluded to above? > But this also was a major source of resentment and ostracization that I'm still dealing with to this day. Isn't it possible that resentment and ostracization could lead someone to not want to try as hard to learn?

My contention was the characterization as "loser gangster culture." It's victim-blaming, even if the victim is an angry-seeming young black boy.

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

#265
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the vast majority of our primary and secondary school funding comes from local property taxes, no? That creates situations where wealthy districts have excess resources, while poorer districts are artificially limited. Something as simple as bundling up school funds to the state level and redistributing similar per-pupil funds back to districts might help to close the gap - with no change in total expenditure.

The gap is there in DC, which gets special federal funding. DC is spending over $30,000 per student. DC schools are so bad that you should wonder if excess funding somehow makes things worse.

I'll again refer you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22258862

In addition to what I said earlier, I'll add that though $30,000 sounds like a big scary number, it's not so much when realizing that private schools with similar student support programs in DC go for $40,000-$60,000 a year.

As for DC public school performance, aside from the challenges that attending students often face, it should be known that DC has unfortunately served as a testing ground for a number of unorthodox education philosophies, to the detriment of the students. For at least the last two decades, during which I've been aware of the circumstances, we've had several high-profile school system admins attempt to radically reshape how DC schools "work", leaving a constantly shifting landscape in their wake. Multiple school closures, mass teacher firings and mutinies, charter school scandals, and more, while the basics (building maintenance and suitability, teacher professional training and support, resource access, etc.) are neglected.

If there's any truth to your assertions, it really doesn't have anything to do with the people who just want to provide students with traditional, stable learning environments and the support necessary to take full advantage of them.

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

#266
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you see a similar phenomenon across many aspects of contemporary American life. We've found inferior-yet-workable ways to route around the increasingly dire financial situation of the average family, often by lowering standards, paying with debt, or simply with outright theft. 30 years ago, Sheila may have driven her new car to college (both of which she's paying for with a summer job), picking up a few new c…

> Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time. Education aside, this is an odd comparison. She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify). Comparing this unfavorably to "a few cas…

>She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify).

Which she could afford to pay for (albeit at a much lower price than the cassettes would have commanded, appropriate for the advances in distribution efficiency) in a parallel today.

>Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.

But it's not anywhere near what a new car offers in terms of fuel efficiency and especially safety. So there is a relative QoL loss there.

>The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.

They're not, they're just the first that came to mind that fit in a neat illustration.

The overall point is that we're no longer capable of paying outright for things we used to be able to. We have to rely on workarounds (ad support, used goods, debt, theft) to maintain a semblance of the same QoL. Our standards haven't declined perceptionally because we have those tools, but their use is anywhere from unsustainable to morally-objectionable. And if you take them away, you have a far poorer American than one or two generations ago.

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

#267

American children are struggling because migrant children are taking all the good jobs. Mass migration is a disaster for American families.

You're completely wrong. The anti immigrant sentiment is mostly about low skilled work being undervalued because the application pool is filled with immigrants who usually have no other choice because of language barriers or lack of recognition of foreign education. You can definitively argue that this hurts the bottom American families the most. Those who fell to the bottom because they lost their job permanently (e…

It seems we agree that mass migration hurts American families. The poorest get hit the hardest. So wrong.

Our refugee program is immoral. We pick and choose refugees like dogs from a shelter. Instead we should help them in place. The money would be spent on the necessities of a refugee camp, not plane tickets to America and English lessons for a lucky few. And they’d be poised to return home and rebuild their countries, which is what they want.

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