Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by yourapostasy » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

aluminussoma wrote: post #41

The education entrepreneur Adam Robinson did his own survey a few decades ago. He found that while children of two immigrants did better on standardized tests than children of two non-immigrant parents, the "best" combination came from having an immigrant father and a non-immigrant mother. ("Best" when focusing solely on standardized test results)

That's curiously specific, as in the gender role and immigrant standing are tied together, but apparently that isn't the case. Googling around found the following editorialization of the source material [1] that gave a TL;DR faster than I can type it up:

Study of NYC school data and using custom questionnaires of teens across the world testing into Stuyvesant HS Cutting to the conclusion: Groups that overcame socioeconomic factors to improve on tests (test improvement is more sensitive to those factors than outright performance) had the following factors: immigrant father US-born mother Speculation to why this mattered? One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. The gender didn’t matter, it just turned out that the father typically tended to be the immigrant. This combo even outperformed both parents being born in the US.

[1] https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/

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

#72

Post by jbay808 » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #68

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 emigratin…

Yup. Many Canadians I know in the US would love to move back to Canada if they could find a job there that would pay a similar amount.

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

#73

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

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.

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 resourcefulness, intelligence, and determination are genetic (most studies suggest a strong positive correlation), these traits would be passed on to their U.S. citizen children.

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

#74

Post by allenu » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

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 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.

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

#75

Post by pen2l » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

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…

I would bet that these poor Asian Americans are highly educated. I know that my dad, after arriving here in 90s and having to feed 6 mouths, worked odd jobs for the first 10 years despite having gotten a masters in chemical engineering in Asia, never topped more than 40k. But the five of us now each make 6-figures.

I know many stories like this. But I also know a couple folks who were poor, but not educated -- their kids are not doing well financially.

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

#76

Post by throwaway_tech » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

A lot of the comments are crediting the immigrant parents as being "motivated" parents...maybe, but in this modern economy I think there is a more economic reason:

US born children have parents that more likely than not are indebted; whereas, even poor immigrants are unlikely to be indebted. It likely follows children whose parents not in debt, no matter how poor, likely have higher rates of upward mobility than children of indebted parents. There are very real glass ceilings in the US (having the lowest socio-economic mobility of all 1st world countries), so you are likely to raise from below the poverty line to just above, but if you are already above their isn't much likelihood of going up further.

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

#77

Post by leetcrew » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #65

bsanr2 wrote: post #39

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…

> 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.

I don't think the two have much to do with each other. being a good k-12 teacher is much more about the teaching skills than the subject mastery. anyone who can complete a stem major should be able to understand all the concepts they would have to present in a high school math class.

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

#78

Post by tmcb » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

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.

That specific case may seem too radical, but there is some logic in moving to a different country with less promising job prospects if, say, your home country is ravaged by war or by systemic violence.

Also, citizens of countries with fickle economies and high inflation could benefit from having an income in a more stable currency, especially if they are breadwinners for their extended family, in which case they send back money they earn abroad.

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

#79

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #65

bsanr2 wrote: post #39

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…

You can have plenty of great math teachers for $50k/yr in the US, or you can require most teachers to have a masters degree and still make $50k/yr, not both.

Plenty of people home school their children, and reportedly those children have great academic ability. I'm willing to wager the vast majority of those home schooling their kids aren't graduates of a teaching program.

Thanks to common core, I successfully taught a younger family member how to do long division, since common core doesn't teach long division for whatever reason, at least not at the age that we used to learn it. It was simple, intuitive, and I have no math teaching background. It took about 120 seconds to demonstrate the technique for the kid to get it and do it on their own.

It's not a question of funding, it's a question of policy. People want their cake and eat it too. Kids failing in basic mathematics all over the country? Maybe we should overhaul the education system, get rid of useless subjects like science, history, art, 'every kid learns a second language now,' and focus on literacy and mathematics.

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

#80

Post by tropo » Thu, Feb 06, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #65

bsanr2 wrote: post #39

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…

If education in the USA is underfunded, then education is underfunded in pretty much every country. The USA pays more per student than Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Korea. Look:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

So that isn't the problem, at least relative to the rest of the world.

The worst schools in the USA seem to spend the most. Maybe the money is anti-educational, being used to purchase distractions. DC is spending well over $30,000 per student. At that rate, DC could easily pay 300k for a teacher. It would only require the funds from 1/3 of the class.