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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It is simultaneously the case that those African immigrants benefit from intact family and community structures, just like other immigrant groups. For example, they have people in their community they can trust to care for their children, or to offer them job opportunities at businesses that serve their communities specific cultural needs, like a Nigerian grocery.

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.

History echoes and echoes and echoes. Redlining is still huge in its effects on generational wealth: housing is the single largest mechanism for wealth transfer in American families, and systematically and intentionally excluding black Americans has resulted in billions in dollars of vanished wealth. Go back in history and look at the Freedman's Bank: established during Reconstruction for freed slaves, it was placed under different oversight than other banks of the time and was used by Henry Cooke (a white guy) to give unsecured loans to his other foolish investments. He wiped out the bank, losing $57 million dollars (mildly inflation adjusted) of black American's money in 1874. Imagine if black families from 1874 had retained their $57 million dollars and been able to invest -- the capital they'd have today would be dramatically different. Then look again at today: in Detroit, families are still losing their homes because of confusing tax rules. Many families were exempted from property tax, but didn't get the paperwork properly completed and renewed every year, so they didn't pay property tax as they thought they had the exemption, but now the city is foreclosing on them due to back taxes even though they're now exempt and -- AND -- the city owes them a refund for overstating the same taxes when these families did pay!

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.

> [...] 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.

> 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.

I hear this a lot, but I don't know if it's particularly true. For black immigrants, I find more compelling the notion that their comfort with, and belief in, pursuing higher education isn't rocked so profoundly by white supremacy, as is so for native blacks. They're simply not as exposed to anti-black messaging, from the history of discrimination in America to the demographically disproportionate reporting of crime in American media. Add to that the arguably superior education of black Caribbeans, who are free to support higher standards with the requisite resources and are not stymied by regressive funding policy, and you have a population that is often more prepared for the rigors of higher education.

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.

African immigrants can have racist beliefs about black Americans just as much as anyone. (Including black Americans.) Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" gets into this in a way I found to be eye-opening.

Immigrants are also forced to develop their own peer communities and support networks since mainstream culture, stores, and media don't cater to them. Growing up I was surprised by how low the expectations were for my American classmates from their parents.

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.

That educational attainment was a priority for my extended family, and that there are high-profile fights for educational equity in cities across the country, lead me to believe that even non-immigrant black families and communities do have similar values. I wonder how much resource access, rather than intention, matters.

One of the books that I read last year, I can’t remember which [1], said that the greatest contributor to wealth over the long run is education. My unfounded assumption that explains the reasoning of why you did not experience American families reacting the same way that yours did is: the American belief in rugged individualism. I think that most Americans would say that “hard work” is the biggest contributor to wealth [2]. Being an immigrant, I guess that your family, and probably society they are from, adhered to the former belief, and that is why they took your education so seriously?

[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

Correct. A self-selecting sample if there ever was one.

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.

How long in the family history does it take to lose that ambition/motivation? The colonists back in the day had to have had those same qualities. Maybe even more so with all the added risk and dangers of the time.

Afaik, next generation takes up values and habits of society they are in and their children are like everybody else.

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