White Flight from Asian Immigration: Evidence from California Public Schools
nber.org
nber.org
Wouldn’t the better term be “Asian gentrification of lower income white communities?”
I’m half joking here and half serious. In reality I see what the paper is saying and I tend to agree. It’s hard to say there is a “white” culture but at the upper end the is a shared sort of blue blood set of values that this paper addresses. Those values strongly lean into diverse and well rounded child rearing and wholistic development. The likely hood that Asian families create academic focused game theory problems by beating out students who focus on more wholistic education feels believable. However ultimately those values i think disappear by the second generation.
On the whole I think this paper is trying to point out that white upper class culture finds Asian cultural definitions of success mildly offensive, and to protect their ways move out.
I’m the product of white and Chinese heritage and this feels true to me.
"our estimate of white flight from Asian entry in high-SES districts is larger, with each new Asian student leading to 1.5 white student departures"
"Overall, we find a 1.5-to-one departure rate for the average suburban district, which is above the one-for-one threshold that would pertain to a pure housing market response."
"In this case, we use Census data from 2000 and 2010 and find that each Asian arrival in a district leads to the departure of -1.5 white households with children, a number very similar to our baseline estimate."
That's superficially true because most asians are concentrated in high cost of living areas and major cities while the white population is distributed all over the country ( both high cost and low cost areas ). If you take an asian nurse in LA ( 100K) and compare her salaray against the average of a white nurse in LA (100K) and a white nurse in rural missouri (50K), of course the 100K asian > 75K white average. But that's a bit misleading because the white nurse in LA earns as much as the asian nurse in LA. Granted asians are concentrated in these areas due to the long history of racism against asians in america, but stats are stats.
> isn’t using the term “White flight” a bit incorrect due to its connotations?
Only if you believe white flight is income based rather than race based. Pretty sure it is race based. I don't think people were vetting their minority neighbors' income and work history before deciding to flee for whiter pastures.
> I’m the product of white and Chinese heritage and this feels true to me.
My condolences.
Excuse me? Also I see you failed to read the comment.
This is utterly insane. As if the average white family are completely and utterly mobile and financially robust enough to whimsically change their kids schooling over fear of "competition" from Asians.
This is so outrageously reductionist it has to be agenda driven.
> high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts
Basically, over-emphasis at academics at any costs in the first/second gen asians (either Chinese or Korean), raises unhappy kids (this was by two of my asian friends).
My guess, rich white parents might view it the same, and they want to have a more free form/wholesome type of environment for their kids.
Take it as you will... (Ps. I am not american and I don't have kids, so I don't have a horse in this race, pun intended)
Maybe not disturbing, fine. But very weird.
Aside from the dubious assertion that the children and parents want the same thing, this is reduced to the point of absurdity. You can disagree with the parent's opinion on the subject, but you should at least formulate that disagreement in the context of the subject.
Especially when they are talking about California where the silicon valley sits, maybe check out the bigger picuture before pinning it on some races?
“kids spending their after school time doing homework”
Uh… what do you think homework is for? When is it traditionally done?
Have you ever done homework before???
What I saw is basically the embodiment of this chart. (And remember that the "Asian" number dilutes out the Chinese and Korean numbers.)
(b) kids sitting at cafes doing homework is not a "takeover"
(c) California was home to a bunch of Native American nations, who were then genocided by the Spanish. A bunch of foreign people, largely Americans, moved into Mexican Alta California (without papers!), mostly did not learn any of the local languages, and tried to start their own republic before being annexed by the US. There _have_ been takeovers here. Kids doing homework is not one of them.
(d) What's more disturbing, some Asian kids doing schoolwork or white people making sure that schools are more segregated now than they were before Brown v Board?
I think this is exactly the thing that the authors skate right past. "Parental fears of academic competition" is assumed to be fully disjoint with "racial animus". What if "fears of ... competition" is just one way to racial animus without expressing explicitly negative attitudes on surveys?
And yes, this is a swipe at both the parent and the paper authors for not seriously considering this. The authors have literally a 2-sentence paragraph on animus and later claim to have ruled it out. And literally, you cannot take surveys at face value for something like this. People will not and sometimes cannot be honest.
Again in just a few replies: What I can honestly only interpret as a bad-faith hyper-reduction. I understand that people tend to jump to accusations of racism with just as much unreasonableness as the people actually being racist, but I'd love a better effort to keep that away from here in particular.
2. Even if it was like that daily, how do you know the Asian kids weren't still playing and enjoying time with friends? Maybe the time they spent studying is just the free time the non-Asian kids spent addicted on the Playstation, and not all their free time.
3. Are there any studies that show Asian-American kids turn out more miserable than other races? Because AFAIK there's no one more depressed than white people. (which is kind of understandable considering modern American culture tries to brainwash them since early childhood to hate themselves, but still...)
> Even if it was like that daily, how do you know the Asian kids weren't still playing and enjoying time with friends?
I didn't go and measure daily -- I avoided the place because I didn't want to hang around a bunch of high schoolers -- but it's a sight, and a vibe, that would simply never happen, ever, where I grew up.
It's not like every kid in the school district was there, with nobody left to play on the sports teams.
Hard as I try I cannot summon an image of such an eldritch horror as you’ve described. I fear if did I would be driven to a madness that I might never recover from by the very sight of such a terrifying visage.
Kids… doing homework… in a cafe. I taste the bile of a nameless demon rise in my throat even typing the words. I shudder to banish the thought.
(For additional irony, please see my about me. :D)
«In particular, some white parents worry that their own children will suffer from competition in schools with high Asian enrollment or that the curriculum will emphasize academics at the expense of sports or other priorities»
and
«Many White parents say they’re leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports […]»
Effectively, some White parents appear to be imbued with the existential fear that their children are going to discover that a football field or a washing machine are not valid units of measure after all.
"the enrollment of one Asian student leads to 1.5 white departures on average"
"Another simple explanation for white flight could be a direct distaste for interacting with Asian peers. However, this account is not consistent with the fact that white flight is only observed in high-SES school districts, given that high-income and more-educated respondents are less likely (rather than more likely) to express negative attitudes toward Asian Americans on surveys."
They claim to "rule out" "direct racial animus", but they don't really back that up with anything. They don't even cite anything supporting their survey claim, they just throw out that comment. But maybe high-SES white people have just learned not to express "negative" attitudes towards racial groups on surveys?
DOI 10.3386/w31434 (not on sci-hub yet)
Asians are the leading demographic group in income and educational achievement now. Whites don't even come close in aggregate.
Who says that?
White person treats people differently based on race = racist
White person treats people the same regardless of race = racist
White parent doesn't want their 3rd grader being taught they are an oppressor = racist parent
I don’t hate Asian people, my best friend is Chinese, but I do feel like I do not belong when I hang out there. Their culture is pretty insular, rather than assimilating with American culture it feels like they just keep their own and the sense of being an outsider is strong when I spend time with my friends there.
On the whole I am glad I moved out to a place where I have more in common with my neighbors and we share more cultural similarities.
I think it's strange that we agonize over race-based cultural differences, but totally accept socioeconomic differences without question.
It's okay to say "I don't wanna live in the ghetto", but not okay to say "I don't want to live in a culturally unassimilated neighborhood"
Also one would have to considered the policy around admissions regarding things like affirmative action and equity.
That is total enrollment in the schools are decreasing.
Why shouldn't it be the case that middle class americans use the money from much wealthier newcomers to move to places they know they can thrive outside the main cities, but where newcomers would have thinner networks and fewer opportunities?
It was white flight when immigration rates were much lower and cities like Detroit needed a business tax base but exiled it by electing marxists in the 70s and 80s, where now, wealth comes from overseas and cities don't need "white" people to fund them. Whether Asian immigrants will also leave cities as they collapse under similar policies remains to be seen, as no matter how chaotic SF gets, it will never approach anything on the level of a BRIC megacity. Racism seems like the simplest explanation, but that's all it is, and it's getting boring.
This all being said, if we see a huge surge in white flight after the end of affirmative action I guess I'll have to eat crow. If their theory is correct and facts > my feelings that's exactly what we will see. If their theory is just racist bunkum we'll see no such thing.