51–60 of 267 posts
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 usual place.
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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.
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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…
How do you define weak and strong, though?
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…
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.
A "goof off" from my community would be struggling to get Bs while a goof from the non-immigrant groups would be struggling to pass at all. And being a "straight-A student" was a baseline expectation rather than a marker of being a rare and special talent. The bar for how many sacrifices parents are willing to make to set their kids up for success is higher too. I got a B- in Math ONCE and my parents immediately hired me a tutor and started forcing me to do remedial exam drills, which is a reaction I don't think I would have seen in the average or median American household among my peer group.
I don't think it's any special level of intelligence among the immigrant community, but I think there is sort of an "Overton window" of cultural expectations for what are normal ways to spend your time, what's an appropriate spread for grades to be at, or what things you should be prioritizing in life. I think immigrant communities maintain an Overton window that prioritizes scholastics over the mainstream culture.
This is probably in large part due to selection bias since the immigration process chooses the cream of the crop, but the durability of this tendency across generations is probably set up by the higher standards I talked about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How do you define weak and strong, though?
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'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. The weak men couldn't say "NO" to the lazy who wanted help, so the culture of hard work was lost. Everybody got coddled. Accommodations turned high school graduation into a participation trophy at best. Standards eroded.
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…
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)...
So this study is kind of saying "The children of ambitious and effortful parents have higher rates of upward mobility than the general populace of US people"
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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.
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…
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…
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.
Trust networks are extremely valuable, and they underpin a lot of the wealth, or lack thereof, in communities.
Poorer African Americans often have limited community and cultural support systems and the implied access to trust networks.
They instead have to contend with the massive and continuous structural damage inflicted upon their communities through the history of the country, including Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, social isolation, and the war on drugs.