Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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 uproot their whole life to leave, and they have to bring enough to the table to convince U.S. immigration to let them in.

View on HN

> 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

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...

You take an initial immigrant who gets in because of the merit categories and then have them bring over all their family members, whose gene pool ends up in the U.S? Whose family values?

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.

As far as I'm aware, there's no strong link between motivation and generics.

Or as Vincent said in Gattaca: "There is no gene for the human spirit."

it is a whole constellation of genetic, epi-genetic, environmental factors, and experiences in concert. to say that there is no genetic predisposition for behavior is... not confirmed by the science.

I don't know if "motivation" per se is studied in this context, but the genetic links for at least "self-regulation"[1], "self-control"[2], and "political ambition"[3] have been studied:

[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

A lot of what "motivation" is comes from being able and healthy, and a lot of that certainly comes from genetics, I'd say. If my family's health history didn't prevent me from sleeping more than a few hours a night, I'd certainly be much, much more motivated. No idea how it translates in statistics.

As genetics leads to different body types, so does it lead to distinct individual cultures to adapt to genetically defined physiology. So genetics can directly inform culture that way.

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.

It's hard to argue for nature when the immigrants come from among the most diverse ethnic groups. There is literally no homogeneity among them apart from the fact that their parents weren't American citizens.

I don't believe the assertion was that these genes are ethnogenetic. I find gp's assertion dubious as well, but I think you may have misunderstood it.

While I definitely buy the nurture side of that argument more than the nature side, it's still possible to be selecting for a set of genetic traits across a diverse group as long as those traits are distributed pretty evenly.

Much like a randomized controlled trial, the high-pass filters tend to render the nature-nurture argument a moot point. In fact, raising it mostly makes me worry about the more racist aspects of anthropology leaking into the discussion.

That brings up a slightly different aspect in my mind, that children of immigrants might be more than likely to be surrounded by large amounts of family members which probably tends to have a positive effect?

This is probably a quite important point.

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.

> and living in a household with lower overall stress (since there are more people to bear the burden) is probably healthy.

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.

I don't know how relevant that is. Some people will always get divorced and while there are ways to address that (and, multi-generational houses that lower the stress of child rearing may reduce it) I think we can treat them as independent and still see benefits in multi-generational household. Instead of having either one parent or the other and placing the full responsibility on that single person, a multi-generational household of a divorcee might still include that person's parents and unmarried siblings to help raise the child.

I don't understand what divorce has to do with my comment? I was talking about people who don't get along with their own parents and/or with their spouse's parents. Neither has any necessary connection to the topic of divorce. Plenty of people remain married despite the fact that they have a poor relationship with their own parents or with their spouse's parents.

Nobody is forced to stay in the multigenerational home unless they cannot afford something else.

But you cannot choose to stay if there's no space... Modern houses are often too small to fit a multigenerational family.

One major effect is that when grandparents are there to watch the kids, the parents can devote more time and effort to their career, especially women. Have you ever noticed that in IT, women are more proportionally represented among immigrants, often from countries that are more socially conservative overall (Eastern Europe, South and East Asia etc).

Even if family-based, you need to be on the more ambitious side to make the move to a different country, most likely a quarter to half the world away. Many Americans seem to think that everyone in a third-world country wants to move to the US. This is not true. Only a small subset is actually willing to uproot themselves into a new nation with a different language, culture and society for the sake of their future generations. Even if you ask the people here on H1B, many of them will tell you that they want to go back and don't think the stress of adapting and staying away from family is worth it. There is a lot of sacrifice involved. And these are people who are ambitious and entrepreneurial enough.

I find it strange that you're able to define it as categorically false given that the parent didn't specify what U.S immigration selection bias was being compared against.

> what U.S immigration selection bias was being compared against

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.

In order for something to be "categorically false" it needs to be false for the whole category. Two thirds is....not the whole.

But you need one family member in the US for you to pull in the rest, and the first one tends to have

> unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country

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.

Refugees account for about 10% of immigration to the US.

True.

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.

If you start at the bottom there is a lot of up to rise into and no down to further sink. Same at the opposite end: all the nepotism and Ivy Leagues in the world won't be able to keep some billionaire spawn from sinking and there are no higher ranks to rise into. Their average mobility can only be negative. I guess I'd still prefer being a failing trust fund baby over the upward mobility of rags to better rags, despite a considerable delta in sense of achievement (rags to better rags might actually be happier with themselves).

Reminds me of one theory behind the success of immigrant "model minority" groups dating back to 19th century Jewish emigrants from pogrums being their community support network and a cultural values towards education. Of course none of this is in a vacuum and depends upon the host society and reaction.

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.

Refugees are a vanishingly small portion of immigrants in the US.

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...

> and they have to bring enough to the table to convince U.S. immigration to let them in.

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).

did they come as refugees or did they bring skills that suggested they would likely get employed/be able to contribute to the economy/would use welfare benefits etc?

Family migration means a family member who is a citizen guarantees their ability to support themselves. They did.

A lot of countries have that filter. Canada has an explicit point based ranking system based on age, level of education, language fluency and profession.

Yes, the bar has been going higher ever since (we might even say prohibitively so), however we know that not all immigrants go to the US through official means.

It's a different kind of high-pass filter (not meaning necessarily that's easier).

Wouldn't that lead to the opposite effect? If you take an above average subset, you will have less upward mobility in their children because of mean reversion. If your parents are top decile already then there is a lot more room below you than above you.

Only if their country of origin is meritocratic and market-driven. As many flaws as the U.S. has, it generally ranks pretty well on these aspects.

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.)

But wouldn't those artificial ceilings also prevent immigration applicants from having the "paperwork" to show their capability which is precisely what the American immigration bureaucracy will look at? It's not like they're letting immigrants in based on an IQ test, they're letting people in because they have elite degrees, are admitted to American universities, or have American job offers. All of those are indicators of status already achieved rather than potential status which has been supressed by local conditions in their country of origin.

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.

There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.

Unless you're an actual refugee fleeing imminent murder, rape and torture, migrating still takes a lot of get up and go.

"A foreign accent is a sign of bravery"

Lack of opportunity, high crime, and institutional corruption are pretty strong motivators even if you're not in a warzone or on the run from cartels.

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.

> it takes a particular form of resourcefulness and ambition.

Or your home country just needs to be significantly worse.

I mean, we see people in fairly terrible countries not relocate. Why haven't 80% of all Mexican or Central American citizens relocated to the US? Or conversely, why haven't tons of the homeless in the US made their way to Mexico?

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.

Actually a significant percentage have. The US is 16.7% Hispanic. That is over 50 million people. The population of Mexico is a little over 120 million.

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...

And from the article, over 60% is of Mexican ancestry. So over 30 million versus the population of Mexico at a little over 120 million. Roughly 20% of Mexicans moved to the US.

Or, as is the case with my family, the US moved to the Mexicans.

Using the modern populations of these countries is disingenuous, you need to consider recent historical immigration rates (legal and illegal). This is like saying there are 42 million Black Americans and most Black people have West African roots, so Roughly 20% of Nigeria has moved to the US. As posted below, historically Mexicans have been in the US forever, and the US annexed large parts of Mexico relatively early in its history.

> historically Mexicans have been in the US forever

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...

Wait until you hear about how much the population of white people increased in the 17th century.

I guess what I meant to say is: population movements of this scale occurring without violence and genocide.

Many Hispanics didn't immigrate to the US. Their ancestors were already there when the US conquered California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Colorado from Mexico.

For generations Hispanics were migrating to the states you mentioned. They colonized first. See Pobladores https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Pobladores

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.

>Why haven't 80% of all Mexican or Central American citizens relocated to the US?

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.

> Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.

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.

> The argument was that it only takes one metric to convince a regular person to move

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.

>Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.

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.

> Why haven't X% of all "persons from country" relocated to "Country"?

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.

Thats kind of my point though isn't it? If it was something any normal person would be willing to do, then we wouldn't see that many Syrians stay inside of Syria. I would expect there is a top controlling percentage that would want to stay because their interests are protected, but outside of that, why aren't they just leaving?

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.

There are other selection effects, as well. If you have a large population of young, single males with poor employment prospects, there's not much to keep them attached to their home country. If all they have to do is walk across a border (which they can probably muster the resources to attempt, as opposed to a transcontinental voyage), then there's a huge pull to immigrate to the US. In a circumstance like this, there would be a selection effect for the least capable young men (since more capable young men with better prospects would stay behind).

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

We can replace "illegal immigration" in the above statement with any other illegal activities and it will still hold true.

It doesn't change the outcome though: even illegals are more likely to be upwardly mobile _from their lower baseline_. They can't take anything for granted the way a native would.

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.

Are you an immigrant yourself or a child of immigrant parents? Yes, because immigrants on average have it harder they also work harder. Usually their children reap more benefits but the children's children flake out. Not sure how much of a trend this is but I've noticed this...

I'm a Russian-American immigrant, yes, a legal one. We had our kid when we were already mostly out of the woods financially though.

Eastern European fellow here. I came to the states about 20 years ago and the kid came about 2 years ago. Ive had it rough for a while as my dad passed and had to step in to help the family. Stress was something I wish I didn’t have to go through like that. The hardship made the ship sail better though, I understand why the first gen immig are more succesfull: they have to push themselves to the max

Reply on news.ycombinator.com