Children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than US-born
nber.org
nber.org
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"
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.
[1]https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000224
[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...
[3]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1
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.
I think that the classic "western" approach to family residences is becoming more obviously damaging to everyone involved as time goes by. Growing up in a multi-generational household is a significantly different experience compared to having either two parents - or having one primary parent and a bread earner. Being exposed to more diverse opinions on a regular basis is probably healthy - seeing authority as imbued and transferable instead of being the exclusive domain of a parent is probably healthy - living in a household with more access to people (less technology filling the gap) is probably healthy - and living in a household with lower overall stress (since there are more people to bear the burden) is probably healthy.
I think single children end up doing poorer for much the same reasons that older siblings serve to lessen the reliance on parents while also being imbued with trust and responsibility... but, I think having more adults present as "caretakers" is just a good thing. So, even if we keep nuclear families internally - it might be beneficial to children to open up more community trust for communal custody of children's development.
I grew up an only child[1] and I have a lot of pleasant memories but I especially treasure some times I went off with a random Aunt, or a random neighbor and got to watch them for a day do their art stuff, or go for hikes in a different way - it helped shake up my mental monoculture. I had friends that grew up in multi-generational households but didn't myself, and it was quite a different experience being over there... learning that just because parents were away it wasn't anarchy - getting to interact with different adults different days and doing different activities that interested them.
I really think the nuclear family approach could use some real improvement.
1. Essentially... both me and my brother were only children at 13 years apart.
Some people have a lot of conflict with their parents and/or parents-in-law. But, since they live in different residences and only see them once every few weeks, it is manageable. If they were under the same roof, the stress might be a lot worse.
But you cannot choose to stay if there's no space... Modern houses are often too small to fit a multigenerational family.
> unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country
If it's not clear to you, take a look at immigration policies of Canada and Australia. In the US, only 12% of visas are employment based which are very strict in terms of skills.
Clearly not the cause.
The USA has accepted many waves of refugees. For example the Cambodian boat refugees. They arrived with no skills, no education, no money, and didn't even speak the language. There was every reason to believe that they would be a drain on public assistance. And yet the children of these groups also show much greater upwards mobility than children of people who were already here.
There are about 47 million immigrants living in the US[1] and about 267 thousand refugees[2]. There have been an average of more than a million people gaining permanent resident status each year for the past 20 years and less than 100 thousand refugees admitted each year for the same time period[3]. Even in the single highest year ever for refugee admittance, they were only about a quarter of immigrants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee_p...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
Disclaimer: Self determination and environmental determination both have their limits and maladaptive behaviors may have roots in trauma. It isn't meant to be any statement of intrinsic vice or virtue.
I could see easily how refugees forced to cooperate to survive and fleeing horrifying death would support one another when in an unfamiliar new country and knowing there is no hope in heading back.
I wonder how relevant the "hedonic treadmill" is to the phenomenon as well. Motivation and incentives having a positive impact on success is no surprise and unfortunately it isn't as easy or simple as just telling people to get motivated, making things better for them if they succeed, nor making things worse if they don't. Nor even more slippery sloped approaches like propaganda for social goods "Black Mirroring" a metric feedback loop that would be dystopian even if it worked.
But the fact that upward mobility is strongly evident among refugee groups says that a theory for upward mobility among children of immigrants should explain why it still happens despite all of the disadvantages of being refugees.
Eh... my parents came with zero dollars to this country as part of family migration (zero due to currency export restrictions from their original country).
It's a different kind of high-pass filter (not meaning necessarily that's easier).
Put another way, many societies have artificial ceilings on the social status and income you can attain regardless of your intelligence, education, drive, ambition, and resourcefulness. Caste systems, guanxi, racial prejudice, endemic corruption, drug cartels that will kill you if you don't help them out, organized crime, warlords that will kill you, lack of infrastructure, etc. When you leave that country and go to one that allows free contracts between people, your social standing - and your children's, to the extent that these traits are heritable - should rise to its natural level, where it would be in the absence of arbitrary restrictions.
There's another level of selection bias where people who feel like all these arbitrary restrictions work in their favor don't tend to leave their home countries. So those people who you speak of who would mean revert - the folks that are above average and have a good deal in their home country - would be underrepresented within the immigrant sample, to the extent that they can realize when they have a good deal. (This is the same principle by which contracts and free trade raise general welfare: people who already have what they need choose not to trade and drop out of the sample, which then consists only of people who feel they are better off trading for something someone else has.)
In other words, immigrants coming in through the highly qualified routes are already high status in their countries of origin. Indians coming to the US on H1Bs for instance are overwhelmingly from high caste social groups and educated at the best Indian universities.
We can replace "illegal immigration" in the above statement with any other illegal activities and it will still hold true.
Or your home country just needs to be significantly worse.
If these countries are really significantly worse, and that is the only factor pushing normal people to relocate, then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time. Instead, only the extremely motivated with a sizable risk appetite take the chance. And, one could argue that those two factors combined qualifies that group of people as non-standard.
Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.
>Or conversely, why haven't tons of the homeless in the US made their way to Mexico?
Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
>then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time. Instead, only the extremely motivated with a sizable risk appetite take the chance. And, one could argue that those two factors combined qualifies that group of people as non-standard.
Considering the difficulty of illegally crossing the border for a poor South American, we are seeing just that. There's another selection bias here - those who are competent are less likely to risk illegal entry because they understand life as an illegal immigrant is difficult.
That never stopped anyone.
>Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
Not everyone in a country actually hates it enough to leave. There are lots of high class people like CEOs, managers, software developers even if they are the minority they clearly live a reasonably good life. You are also underestimating how much people are fond of their home country and the associated culture. All your family and friends are there. Your mother tongue is probably only spoken there. The food that you used to eat as a child is there. Maybe you had a plot of land and you built your own house there, sure it isn't as comfortable as one in the USA but it was yours and in the USA you have nothing except a cramped apartment you share with room mates.
The idea that a country would lose its entire population if the USA lifted border controls is absolutely insane.
We see plenty of illegal immigration. So much so that some people want to build a wall, as if that is a meaningful control. If all it takes is a country to be worse than the US like the parent states, then we should expect much higher rates of legal immigration applications and significantly higher rates of illegal immigration. The argument was that it only takes one metric to convince a regular person to move, and I reject that notion.
> Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
Again, this is in response to the idea that all it takes to convince a person to relocate is for a situation to be worse than another situation. Theoretically, due to cheaper cost of living and less focus on technology/high skill jobs, Mexico or Central America would provide a homeless person more opportunity to at least survive compared to the US. But, since that is not the only factor in relocating, people don't do that en masse.
> Considering the difficulty of illegally crossing the border for a poor South American, we are seeing just that. There's another selection bias here - those who are competent are less likely to risk illegal entry because they understand life as an illegal immigrant is difficult.
And this brings us back to the beginning, where I don't think all it takes is a place to be sufficiently bad enough compared to the US to get them to move. It takes a host of factors, and some of those factors are personal drive and aspirations, and a fairly high tolerance for risk. Both of those align with an entrepreneur, which is basically the American Dream.
Thus, we then see upward mobility from these same demographics.
No, this is not at all the argument I made. I was pointing out that built-in appetite for risk (or being a go-getter or whatever) is not the only explanation for why someone would come to the U.S. illegally. That the conditions in their home country shift the risk-reward equation so that more people are willing to immigrate than would otherwise.
If everything were simply about appetite for risk (or being a go-getter), then you would expect immigration from Canada to take place at similar rates as immigration from Mexico (since incomes in the U.S. are significantly higher than in Canada). But you don't see that, because the delta between Canada and the U.S. is way smaller than it is between Mexico and the U.S., and so the risk/reward equation doesn't work out for nearly as many Canadians.
I would bet that if there were no barriers to immigration then you would see a significantly higher Hispanic population in the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hispanic_and...
Another group of people came along and decided that was enough of that. The land belongs to them now and put up a border after what Ulysses S. Grant called "the most unjust war" ever waged. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
As recently as 1940, Hispanics made up only 1.5% of the US. Population. As of 2010, they made up 16.3% of the U.S. population (about 50 million people). As a point of reference, Canada has a population of about 37 million people and the UK has a population of 63 million people. So we have imported roughly an entire Canada/UK's worth of people from Latin America. As far as I am aware, immigration of this scale is basically unprecedented in human history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
In my opinion, this is probably what explains the vast divergence between the professions that immigrants from Latin American end up in vs. the professions that immigrants from Asia end up in.
This is not true, because the socioeconomic status of people in a given country is not a flat line. Many Mexicans live what Americans would describe as comfortable, middle class lives. But, because Mexico is less prosperous than the U.S. per capita, there is a whole arm of the Mexican income distribution that is shifted into what Americans would recognize as extreme poverty. The Mexicans occupying this part of the income distribution are the ones leaving.
We don't see high numbers (let's say, above 50%) even when the push is high enough and their movements are legal.
The majority of the Syrian population is still inside Syria as an example.
Because it's hard to do it, legally or illegally. Only people that are driven and open to accepting the high risk of relocating are willing to do so. Therefore, it at least says something about the people immigrating to the US; They are driven individuals who are willing to take chances for success. Thus better numbers in terms of upward mobility.
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 he will always have upper middle class existence he's currently enjoying, no matter what, even though with his current grades there's no way he will get into a decent college.
I personally was under no such illusion ever in my life, so I worked super hard to get to where I am today.
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.
> Yes I can say there is definitely a selection bias
I think this is an anecdote. You might certainly be ambitious, intelligent and overall successful. But I quite don't understand the selection bias specifically in the GC lottery category. You don't really need any any education, wealth, ambition to apply for and get through the GC lottery. The only thing you need is to be willing to uproot your life and move (and this might be the example of 'ambition' in this case).
Or were just good enough to be offered a high paying job outside their country, such that emigrating was their next move.
Four of us left Iowa seeking a better life: two VPs of Fortune-500 companies; one entrepreneur (me); one wandering IT specialist.
Our Iowan cohort we left behind are pretty much driving the school bus, working food service, mid-level office managers.
So some correlation between 'willing to leave' and 'ambitious enough to succeed'?
But this is also important to note, as the common zeitgeist of the day says that upward mobility is impossible, but it is clear that with ambitious and effortful parents, children can have higher rates of social mobility. That is encouraging?
This is basically saying personal efforts matter. I believe this is not most upward mobility advocators want to hear.
Surely you're not implying that 'upward mobility advocates' mean that people will magically become richer while doing nothing?
If you want to build an entrepreneurial country you want a lot of immigrants.
Majority Indians come to USA on H1B and student visas
I think it's way more complex than you describe: Canadians don't go through all the hoops to become American residents in order to work at Walmart... But I think South Americans probably would...
And resources and community connections... even if they come here with little or no money, they had to have something to leave. It's expensive as hell to move to a new city without a job lined up, let alone a new country.
in many immigrants case they only can come w/ a job lined up (ie, they get a visa via a job)
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.
1. Those peers may have spouses/SOs, that, depending on their profession would turn into stay-at-home house-wives/husbands, if the peer moves into the US. This is an immediate show-stopper for a lot of people.
2. Those peers may value Canadian culture more then the person you're responding to. That doesn't mean that the person who moves to the US for better paying work values US culture. They may prefer Canadian culture - just not $200,000/year prefer.
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 probability one would except of there was zero correlation between child and parent incomes). For Asian Americans its almost 27%. A white child born in the bottom quantile is about 2.5 times more likely to stay in the bottom quantile (28%) than to rise to the top quantile (12%). An asian child born in the bottom quantile is about 1.5 times more likely to rise to the top quantile (27%) than to stay in the bottom quantile (12%).
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.
This also makes me wonder if there's data about the mobility of native vs immigrant blacks. If it's similar, it would align with other data that show that degree attainment only serves to partially overcome the barriers to upward mobility placed in the way of black workers.
I'm of the opinion that many of the impediments that punish or withhold assistance from minorities often bleed over into mainstream American life. The specific drum I'll keep beating is that if, perhaps, the infrastructure to battle the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health issue had been allowed to be built to a robust state, the opioid epidemic would not have become so dire. The apathy towards these issues, even as they encroach upon "mainstream" middle class life, must be part of the mechanics of the calcification of class in America.
I'm seeing the other side of this, recently (disadvantaged white people). It's astonishing the loser mentalities and habits that many disadvantaged children learn from their early caregivers and peer group. As middle to upper middle class people, we often have no idea how many little bits of knowledge we pick up to work the system (legally), from those around us.
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.
> 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?
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?
A theory my parents had was that the limiting factor in teaching a child to read is not the mental capacity, but their eyesight - supposedly it's normal to start out relatively farsighted and unable to focus on small print close up. So they started me and my sister on words printed in very large letters and gradually reduced them.
(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)
Having friends & colleagues from both American Black and African and Black Caribbean backgrounds has given me a tiny glimpse into some of the difference in background and treatment. A Caribbean friend who came here for her PhD in mathematics mentioned to me that she was shocked at how she was treated here in the US -- in her home country, she was universally respected as an educator and a professional, while in the US she was... respected in the classroom, but not on the street. A different friend whose family has been in the US longer than mine, on the other hand, talked about being discouraged from a career in the National Park Service: his grandfather in particular had stories of the violence inflicted on black people in the woods, and felt it would be a very unsafe career. There's a really complex interaction of history, current economics, and personal choice, mediated by our schools. Just looking at the numbers, the US education system is not doing well by black students in particular and many children overall. Rural white kids are also not being served well. No one is getting good math education. And as long as we continue to divide against each other in a fight for artificially limited resources, we won't do better as a nation.
I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
We should do both, while sourcing more black teachers and administrators for schools from within those communities. The reality is that the history of impoverishment has set of cycles of negligence and trauma in these communities that money alone can't fix, though it can help change the direction.
Treatment from within the community is needed. Practically, the school is where that happens for the children. It would be great if the families would be able to afford to pay for their own treatment like more well off people do, but realistically, the direct payments would primarily be used pay for basics, like food and the roof over their heads.
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.
Local funding is in fact uneven. But state and federal funding is primarily directed to eliminating those disparities: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/alfresco...
> The paper then examines changes in finances over time—both within and across states— and evaluates how spending levels have changed for school districts that serve students of different races. Spending differences have largely disappeared. Spending levels across districts have converged; most remaining differences in spending are between rather than within states.
Obviously Kansas still spends less than California, but everything is much cheaper in Kansas too.
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.
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.
It's amazing when you stack up the numbers from redlining, the Freedman's bank failure, these tax shenanigans, and the impact of differential sentencing for minor drug offenses propagating through to inability to access student loans and housing assistance.... (remember, if you rape someone, you can get government student loans, but if you had a baggie of marijuana, you cannot). So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying immigrant families are in a better financial situation than the discriminated-against blacks, because they weren't discriminated against in the same way? Many immigrant families bring very little with them and have to start from scratch.
However, what they usually bring is intact community and family support structures. Trust is one of the most valuable and scarce resources there is. It can even make up for a lack of money, because valuable services are often provided reciprocally to members of the community at low or no cost, and people tolerate sharing resources more easily with people they trust.
But if there's neither trust nor money, it's a much harder struggle.
Which is pretty damning of the way America treats its own people.
Edit: I want to add that this is not simply my own speculation; this is the explanation that I've heard in part from several friends and acquaintances. They're often horrified by the leniency of standards for even high performing American students, and they will often state that they are not "black" in the way that native African Americans are, and are therefore not subject to the same biases and limitations.
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.
[1] Could have come from: Can American Capitalism Survive?, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, maybe Enlightenment Now.
[2] It could very well be luck: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
Immigrating and deciding to live in another country takes a lot determination.
If you take ambitious and motivated black parents in America I am quite sure their children far outcompete the averages.
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.
Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.
If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.
This a false dichotomy. For one, teachers in SV can make 100k. Second the skills required to be an effective teacher are not the same as a good math major. They just aren't. We've all had the brilliant professor who can't teach. But we should pay teachers because good teachers are professionals and they should be rewarded appropriately.
The problem with education is that we treat each kid the same. But actually every kid is different and has unique needs and thus requires a personalized learning program. When they are young these are social and behavioral. As they get older they can be subject specific. An individualized program could be aligned with a cohort in a class setting but you really need individual tutoring to address the child's specific needs and deficits. A good teacher is able to recognize these needs and give them the education they need.
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.
I don't know if "competition" is a panacea, but there is definitely something wrong with how a lot of our institutions function.
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 cassette tapes" is beyond absurd. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When combined with the prevalence of social intervention in the lives of poor families - up to and including removal of the children - you see that there is a profound and toxic distrust of these parents and of their ability to take care of their own children. We've allowed a model to grow where, instead of ensuring people make enough to take care of their families, we shift the burden onto the state. This is inefficient in education for a number of reasons, least of which the central conceit as described above, which undermines the effort at its core.
The specific example I gave, DC, simply destroys the argument that local funding is the problem. DC is very well-funded from national sources, and it has horrific schools.
Perhaps the whole idea that there's a "system" that's responsible for everyone's success is the problem?
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.
Anecdotally, all of the parents of this batch came poor, most of us were below poverty level because all of the parents came as older students (30s and some times 40s) doing their masters or PhD. None of their previous degrees or work experience counted so everyone started from scratch. Add to that the language and cultural barriers and it took everyone a while to get back on their feet.
The children though had no barrier other than being in poor families. Education and hard work were very much valued. The family situation were stable and there was a lot of time investment from the parents in helping with homework etc. There was also a push towards professions fields. My parents half jokingly said to me I can pick any field of study as long as it’s medicine, law or engineering (ended up in engineering). So end result, all the children are doing well professionally and financially. Definitely in the top quartile, but not super wealthy. From my own and my parents social circles this seems to be a very common pattern.
[Strike out] Asians mostly use high-skilled visas / education based visas as a door to enter the nation. Almost by definition, this beings in the subset of Asians who grew up in a culture of education and hard work. [\Strike out]
I think, the cultural boon/curse of living vicariously through your child also leads to parents pushing their child towards "lucrative" / "respected" careers.
There might also be a snow-ball effect, where Asians aspire to pursue careers where Asians have traditionally succeeded. That would be professions in STEM fields, which have high median wages.
[Strike out]The real title should be -> "Children of Asian immigrants who were top percentiles in their own countries, perform at a similarly high level"[\Strike out]
edit: didn't see the lower quartile number. Renders my argument invalid.
The minimum salary for an H1-B Visa is $60,000, which would put someone at the 68-th percentile of individual income (or the fourth quantile). The statistics I am referring to are for asians whose parents had incomes in the lowest quantile (below about $19,000 today) between age 11-22.
Now, that could capture a lot of immigrants who have skills or education back home, but are underemployed once here. (E.g. college degree back home, but working in food service here.) But it excludes immigrants who were able to use their degrees or skills to provide financial advantages to their kids in the U.S.
I'd like to see some numbers on that.
Lot's of Asians have come as refugees over the years, and also as family connections.
Yeah, the ones I meet at my Silicon Valley job are highly educated and often on that kind of visa, but that's of course a big selection bias trap...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Culture seems to play a significant role in their success. Notably they tend to focus on education and prioritize it over other things[2].
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/233324/median-household-...
2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/culture-explains-asians-educati...
"Diversity is the engine that drives this country. We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation... snowboards and takes improv classes."
Feels like one of those things that we all thought was true.
Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
And people use that myth as a way to make political arguments about decadence. I'm not doing it justice, just take a look.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
The good thing is that resliance is like a muscle and can be strengthened, people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally.
It would be nice if that happened, though. You tell your students, 75 % of whom have no grasp of 8th-grade math, that they have been cheated out of an education and that consequently they now need to work twice as hard. But instead of knuckling down they all march off to the Dean to complain. Of course the Dean enables the underperformance.
You can't frame "easy life" only in terms of money, "easy life" also means coasting through an underperforming school and never having to face reality.
If you have an issue with the statement, just say it. Don’t hide your criticism behind supposed ambiguity.
I think that in aggregate, generations are more or less the same, so I don't agree with it.
Except for some very specific times in history, it is almost universally true that the older generation had harder times. Human progress is -- in the grand scheme of things -- a march towards much easier lives.
Overall trend may be positive, but there are enough local downfalls to make the "universally true that the older generation had harder times" not really true. It any given moment it can go either way. The whole first half of 20century was one massive downfall after another.
In particular with economy, you have years where it is easy to get a job for anyone who breathe and then downfall when it is hard for everyone.
Whole economies went down and unemployment rates went up. All that produces plenty of young people who have it harder then their parents.
I personally got a job easily. It is quite possible that my kids won't.
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 and a thirst for one result.
to strain this tangent further, it seems evident that industry and under-priced oil destroyed local craft, and the Internet and an entertainment-economy, has crushed fine arts practice in locale after locale.
Back in their home country, people who are actually from a poorer class do not experience the same upward mobility.
That is all the more so in places that have caste or caste-like systems. Who your great-great-grandfather was still influences where you stand.
"Furthermore, immigrant parents were “under-placed” in the income distribution, thus allowing their children who were native English speakers and educated in the US more scope for upward mobility."
I don't see numbers on how much of the total "upward mobility" can be attributed to any of the individual factors.
The children of upward mobile immigrants who don't come from lower classes in their home country reflect that, even if the parents struggle in the new country.
They are socialized differently from true poor people.
For instance, language: the children will tend to pick up the "socio-economically preferred dialect"¹ of English, rather than a socially stigmatized dialect. The children will do this naturally, because they will tune in to how the way people speak English in America determines the perception of social class, and then they will learn that way of speaking which fits their self-image about where they fit in society.
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1. A phrase I picked up years ago from a linguistics prof.
1. Stable two parent home - my parents lived together and shielded us from any arguments/disagreements they had and presented a stable unified upbringing
2. My father had a degree in Microbiology, but when he first migrated had to take a less paying job due to language/racism. My mother had a high school education. My father eventually ended up in a top research company and my mother got a masters in computer science from the local state university. This example ingrained the merits of grit and hard work
3. Education - specifically math and science - were emphasized in my family over sports, social and other activities. This was very different then my friends.
4. Academic expectations were extremely high - in my family strait As was baseline.
5. Family and community support - we had strong support from other immigrant indian community growing up. And the community as a whole valued the same things as my family.
These traits can be replicated in non immigrant American society - but often it is not. The main difference I see is a lack of a strong family unit and acceptance of low academic standards.
This could be just my experience - would be interested in hearing others
My mother had an economics and poli sci degree but worked as a secretary. She decided to become a teacher and had to her entire university again at night because California wouldn't accept her Indian degrees. My brother and I spent many nights in her college classes doing our homework under her desk. Really taught us the importance of hard work to get what we want.
After waitering, my dad had all sorts of odd jobs -- real estate agent, garbage man, computer guy -- until finally getting a job in pharmaceuticals thanks to my mom getting the HR ladies at her office (while she was a secretary) to review his resume and help him.
Academic expectations were absolutely the same. Even A minus was not accepted.
I know factory workers raising their kids to be a factory working running some machine on an assembly line. It never occurs to them to encourage their kids to be something. They know that their their own factory had 10 times as many factory workers just 30 years ago but not even that is enough for them to think they need to start thinking of getting their family to do something else.
Most immigrants never had that luxury. They came with no credentials and worked low wage jobs at or below the poverty line. They want to get out of that situation and maybe more importantly want their children to get out of that situation.
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.
This at least passes the sniff test. I know plenty of 1.5 or 2nd Gen Indian Americans who seamlessly assimilate because they and/or their parents speak English, in an accent coded as classy (ie British-sounding)[1]. This is even true to some degree in the workplace: I work with some brilliant first gen Chinese immigrants, but there's a practical ceiling on their ability to work at higher levels because of the increasing importance of communication as you rise,and the way their thick accents and lack of vocabulary interact with that. A hypothetical kid of theirs with the same level of talent would shoot up the ranks.
[1] Note that this doesnt cover all Indian accents, only most traditionally upper-class ones.
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.
~20% of the world population of foreign-born people lives in the US. It's difficult to think that's unrelated to the fact that the US produces a disproportionate amount of global innovation.
> 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.
I do think you have a valid question and shouldn't have been down-voted
Abstract:
>Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants’ advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. In the past, this advantage can be explained by immigrants moving to areas with better prospects for their children and by “under-placement” of the first generation in the income distribution. These findings are consistent with the “American Dream” view that even poorer immigrants can improve their children’s prospects.
3rd World -> Middle Class America takes hard work (once you're in America) Middle Class America -> Upper Class takes strategic, risk, and hard work
There's so much more to capital than assets! While often asset-poor, a lot of immigrants to the west have considerable intellectual capital and good social capital among their community. Even when foreign diplomas are judged worthless, the fact that the individual was able to acquire them in his country still probably places him in the top percentile of his home nation. And the immigrant community often serves as a pipeline for employment, no matter what the skill level.
Even if two third (that's the number claimed) came through family migration, it doesn't really matter as the first person that's sponsoring them had to get selected in the first place through employment. Even if the initial sponsor went to some diversity lottery, I suppose applying and meeting all requirements still requires a little bit of education and some financial resources to send the application in the first place.
I would be curious to see the breakdown per initial immigration category and country, with folks coming in from family based immigration counted as the category of the initial sponsor.
But, again, just because it was predictable doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to have rigorously verified that it is so.
Immigrating to the United States, for a lot of people, is a great reward.
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.