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

270 points by harias 7y ago

harias 7y ago
Title editorialized from "Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the US over Two Centuries" 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.
- jvanderbot 7y ago
  So, the American Dream as upward mobility for established citizens was never true?
  - czbond 7y ago
    I read this more as it can be easier to move from really dire straits 3rd world country to middle class America. Whereas it can be harder to go from middle class America to Upper class. 3rd World -> Middle Class America takes hard work (once you're in America) Middle Class America -> Upper Class takes strategic, risk, and hard work
    - jvanderbot 7y ago
      Adding: I think there is some selection bias. Those who self-select to move to the US probably already have motivation, means, etc to get to the US and the intelligence to manage the complicated immigration process. Then, there's the "burn the ships" part, where you simply must succeed because there's no option of leaving.
chrisbennet 7y ago
I suspect that parents who "achieve" by coming to the U.S. are more likely to have children of the same persuasion.
- bigbadgoose 7y ago
  People with enough gumption to upend their lives and leave everything they knew behind for an uncertain future … it's the "right stuff"
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    Is it the "right stuff"? One might just as plausibly expect such people to be highly risk tolerant and to end up screwing up really badly as often as they succeed.
    - leftyted 7y ago
      I'd expect them to screw up much more often than they succeed. But if 25 people take a risk and found a company and 1 of them succeeds, that one company might employ 1000 people. The 24 failures may be worth it. That's leaving aside whatever useful services the company provides. ~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.
    - chrisbennet 7y ago
      I up-voted you though I don't think I agree with you. I do think you have a valid question and shouldn't have been down-voted
    - CalRobert 7y ago
      Although, they already managed not to screw up US immigration (if we're being US centric here) which indicates they can figure out relatively complex problems, and have the drive to get off their ass and do something. Whether it was legal or not, for most people immigrating to the US is a huge pain in the ass.
blakesterz 7y ago
This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy: "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.
- mc32 7y ago
  That echoes the three generation rule of wealth: http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Why-It-Takes-Just-3-Generations-for-Some-to-Lose-Their-Family-Fortune/ http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Wh...
- rayiner 7y ago
  John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
  - oblio 7y ago
    How do you define weak and strong, though?
    - dpark 7y ago
      You don’t get to the meat of a statement like that by subjecting it to semantic analysis.
      - oblio 7y ago
        I do. That statement is a platitude.
dragonwriter 7y ago
Immigrants are frequently working below what you'd expect of similarly talented/skilled/educated (especially if you exclude consideration of English language fluency) native born, so it's not really surprising that their children do better by comparison to them than the children of the native born.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  The immigration process itself contains a huge selection bias. Immigrating to America is not an easy process; it's long, confusing and intended to dissuade all but the most persistent of people. Given that, I would expect to find that people who immigrate in general are more intelligent and hard working than an average person.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Immigrants have left everything they know behind. They know they don't really know their way around, so they are raising their kids to be better than they were. 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.
  - yibg 7y ago
    Maybe it’s contentment. They’ve had a good life being a factory worker (or replace with any other formerly good earning but now dying job). Had the house and 2 cars and raised a family on the work, so why change things now. I know intellectually yes you can say this industry is dying and the wages are going down, but it’s probably not as emotionally connected a thought process. 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.
ipnon 7y ago
How much of this is attributable to immigrants clustering in highly productive urban areas?
- wweiss1230 7y ago
  Quoting the study "Geographic choices were important: first-generation immigrants were more likely to settle in areas with higher mobility prospects for their children. When we compare children growing up in the same US region, the intergenerational gap between immigrants and the US-born is reduced by 70%. When comparing children growing up in the same county, we no longer find an intergenerational gap between the children of immigrants and US-born individuals. In other words, immigrant children did not earn more than others who grew up in the same location. Rather, their parents chose to live in locations that offered high mobility prospects to all."
- mannykannot 7y ago
  Which is cause and which is effect? (It could be a virtuous cycle.)
rayiner 7y ago
It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race.... If you look at table 1 on page 56, you can see that for white americans, the probability of a child ending up in the top quantile of income where a parent is in the bottom quantile of income is 11% (about half the 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%).
- screye 7y ago
  I think this might have to do with the type of Asian-Americans that immigrate to the US. (esp. this generation) [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.
  - CaoCao 7y ago
    That's just immediately falsified by the fact that he's talking about children of Asian immigrants in the bottom quartile. The high-skilled visa workers are not in the bottom quartile.
    - wyxuan 7y ago
rossdavidh 7y ago
While this is good to see verified, and I absolutely think it is important to rigorously double-check whether things that "make sense" are actually true, it would have been really surprising if this were not true. 1) immigrants often have language difficulties that their children do not 2) immigrants often have cultural knowledge difficulties that their children do not 3) immigrants often have moved to places (both country and place within country) for the exact reason that they believe their children will do better there But, again, just because it was predictable doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to have rigorously verified that it is so.
kazinator 7y ago
This is because people who immigrate are "artificially" pushed down in social status and income due to issues like differences in language, and not having some of your work or education experience recognized in the foreign country. These people are just "bouncing back". In some cases people who were professionals in their country of origin do relatively lower ranked or even menial work. Their children will be constantly reminded "I was a dentist back home, not a hygienist", which affects their self-image. 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.
- heavyarms 7y ago
  That was my first take as well. This is explicitly called out in the Conclusions section in paper. "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.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    The thing is, it's not just about income. If you come from generations of poverty, it's written all over you, and that closes doors in your face. 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. --- 1. A phrase I picked up years ago from a linguistics prof.
slumdev 7y ago
Malcolm Gladwell hypothesizes in Outliers that children whose parents' efforts are rewarded are more likely to work hard themselves because their brains are wired from a young age to associate work with reward. Immigrating to the United States, for a lot of people, is a great reward.
blululu 7y ago
This seems like a variation on regression to the mean. If you take a group of people who have had unusually bad circumstances (language + cultural barriers) and compare with a similar group (their children) odds are that things will improve on the next iteration (assuming that the bad circumstances are transient and not endemic).
vparikh 7y ago
Being a first generation immigrant myself (parents immigrated to America in 1975) I can give a few cultural reasons: 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
- tathougies 7y ago
  You are basically me. My dad also had a microbiology degree but his first job in this country was a waiter and janitor. This ended up turning into basically slave, unpaid labor, which he managed to escape thanks to my mother. 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.
- jdmg94 7y ago
  If you're born into America to Immigrant parents, doesn't that make you a second generation immigrant?
throwaway_tech 7y ago
A lot of the comments are crediting the immigrant parents as being "motivated" parents...maybe, but in this modern economy I think there is a more economic reason: US born children have parents that more likely than not are indebted; whereas, even poor immigrants are unlikely to be indebted. It likely follows children whose parents not in debt, no matter how poor, likely have higher rates of upward mobility than children of indebted parents. There are very real glass ceilings in the US (having the lowest socio-economic mobility of all 1st world countries), so you are likely to raise from below the poverty line to just above, but if you are already above their isn't much likelihood of going up further.
PaulHoule 7y ago
The "ain't no making it" attitude that has been historically attributed to poor blacks is increasingly popular among "native" whites.
- acephal 7y ago
  Except they don't say "ain't no making it", they say "life is about the experiences not making money". I've heard 35-year olds say this.
aluminussoma 7y ago
The education entrepreneur Adam Robinson did his own survey a few decades ago. He found that while children of two immigrants did better on standardized tests than children of two non-immigrant parents, the "best" combination came from having an immigrant father and a non-immigrant mother. ("Best" when focusing solely on standardized test results)
- yourapostasy 7y ago
  That's curiously specific, as in the gender role and immigrant standing are tied together, but apparently that isn't the case. Googling around found the following editorialization of the source material [1] that gave a TL;DR faster than I can type it up: Study of NYC school data and using custom questionnaires of teens across the world testing into Stuyvesant HS Cutting to the conclusion: Groups that overcame socioeconomic factors to improve on tests (test improvement is more sensitive to those factors than outright performance) had the following factors: immigrant father US-born mother Speculation to why this mattered? One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. The gender didn’t matter, it just turned out that the father typically tended to be the immigrant. This combo even outperformed both parents being born in the US. [1] https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/ https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    > One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. 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.
known 7y ago
Like father, not like son https://archive.vn/YIjwk https://archive.vn/YIjwk
freepor 7y ago
That’s because (legal) immigrants have high social capital (education, values, two parent households) and often migrate to places where they have the highest relationship capital (hence the CountryVille neighborhoods like Koreatown or the Ukrainian neighborhood on the East side of Manhattan). So when you measure their kids income it jumps up on average.
ajuc 7y ago
That's because immigrants often have artificially lowered status compared to what they had in their home country. They might have been white collar workers there but they have to work worst jobs in US because of language and other barriers. 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.
- dannyperson 7y ago
  This makes sense - my grandfather was a top lawyer in his home country before fleeing a war. As a refugee in a foreign country, he did manage to get a law position with some connections he had - but his XX years of foreign law experience weren't very useful in the new country.
maerF0x0 7y ago
I often tell people to watch out for selection bias. Immigrants are a distinctly unique people. They're not just members of their foreign racial/national group, they're members of their foreign racial/national group with the ambitions/motivations to leave. To make the abstract concrete. Canadians living in the US are often thought to be "just like" Canadians living in Canada. But they're often not. Often they're the 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"
- 5440 7y ago
  That's very astute. I'm a Canadian living in the US and I ran away in 1996 during the terrible recession with the perception that life was better in the US.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  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.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      Unless you're an actual refugee fleeing imminent murder, rape and torture, migrating still takes a lot of get up and go.
JimBrimble35 7y ago
... so they really did took er jerbs?
stevespang 7y ago
PayWall, somebody upload to SCI-HUB this taxpayer funded research
nova22033 7y ago
Is it because they have fewer ties to the place where they grew up and they're more willing to move to a new city to make more money?
trekrich 7y ago
positive discrimination
908B64B197 7y ago
Is this really a surprise? 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sunkenvicar 7y ago
American children are struggling because migrant children are taking all the good jobs. Mass migration is a disaster for American families.
- imtringued 7y ago
  You're completely wrong. The anti immigrant sentiment is mostly about low skilled work being undervalued because the application pool is filled with immigrants who usually have no other choice because of language barriers or lack of recognition of foreign education. You can definitively argue that this hurts the bottom American families the most. Those who fell to the bottom because they lost their job permanently (e.g. coal workers) don't have a low skilled job as a fall back because salaries are being driven down by immigrants. Again as I have said the downsides of immigration are an oversupply of workers in specific industries which drive salaries down. If migrant children were truly "taking all the good jobs" then those good jobs would cease to be good jobs and become low income as well. This is obviously not happening. Once an immigrant is no longer under H1B visa restrictions by obtaining a green card their salary shoots up because they can find better employers. Finally does it matter if it is a disaster for American families especially if the newcomers will become one of those American families as well? If you want to reduce suffering in this world then you would start with those that suffer the most. Lets use refugees after WW2 as an example. As you may know Germany was divided into two pieces. What you may not know is that the third piece was given to Poland and Poland had to give Russia land on its eastern border. This means millions of polish people were forced to immigrate. Then there were the Germans of which 8 million had to migrate out of Poland. What are you going to do with such a huge influx of refugees? Just let them rot in a foreign country? Let them into your country even you can't feed or house everyone because of the war? Of course you let them in. It's the only right thing to do.
  - sunkenvicar 7y ago
    It seems we agree that mass migration hurts American families. The poorest get hit the hardest. So wrong. Our refugee program is immoral. We pick and choose refugees like dogs from a shelter. Instead we should help them in place. The money would be spent on the necessities of a refugee camp, not plane tickets to America and English lessons for a lucky few. And they’d be poised to return home and rebuild their countries, which is what they want.
WiPo 7y ago
Given how strict the immigration rule has become I'm not surprised, especially for those who work in tech/academics. Also UPWARD is relative, which means many immigrants start from scratch and there's just not enough time to gain too much wealth and social status, thus makes it easier for their children to go 'upwards', while it may just be their children are living like average Americans.

270 points by harias 7y ago

Title editorialized from "Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the US over Two Centuries" 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.

jvanderbot 7y ago
So, the American Dream as upward mobility for established citizens was never true?
- czbond 7y ago
  I read this more as it can be easier to move from really dire straits 3rd world country to middle class America. Whereas it can be harder to go from middle class America to Upper class. 3rd World -> Middle Class America takes hard work (once you're in America) Middle Class America -> Upper Class takes strategic, risk, and hard work
  - jvanderbot 7y ago
    Adding: I think there is some selection bias. Those who self-select to move to the US probably already have motivation, means, etc to get to the US and the intelligence to manage the complicated immigration process. Then, there's the "burn the ships" part, where you simply must succeed because there's no option of leaving.

chrisbennet 7y ago

I suspect that parents who "achieve" by coming to the U.S. are more likely to have children of the same persuasion.

bigbadgoose 7y ago
People with enough gumption to upend their lives and leave everything they knew behind for an uncertain future … it's the "right stuff"
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  Is it the "right stuff"? One might just as plausibly expect such people to be highly risk tolerant and to end up screwing up really badly as often as they succeed.
  - leftyted 7y ago
    I'd expect them to screw up much more often than they succeed. But if 25 people take a risk and found a company and 1 of them succeeds, that one company might employ 1000 people. The 24 failures may be worth it. That's leaving aside whatever useful services the company provides. ~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.
  - chrisbennet 7y ago
    I up-voted you though I don't think I agree with you. I do think you have a valid question and shouldn't have been down-voted
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Although, they already managed not to screw up US immigration (if we're being US centric here) which indicates they can figure out relatively complex problems, and have the drive to get off their ass and do something. Whether it was legal or not, for most people immigrating to the US is a huge pain in the ass.

blakesterz 7y ago

This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy: "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.

mc32 7y ago
That echoes the three generation rule of wealth: http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Why-It-Takes-Just-3-Generations-for-Some-to-Lose-Their-Family-Fortune/ http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Live-Wellthy/October-2018/Wh...
rayiner 7y ago
John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
- oblio 7y ago
  How do you define weak and strong, though?
  - dpark 7y ago
    You don’t get to the meat of a statement like that by subjecting it to semantic analysis.
    - oblio 7y ago
      I do. That statement is a platitude.

dragonwriter 7y ago

Immigrants are frequently working below what you'd expect of similarly talented/skilled/educated (especially if you exclude consideration of English language fluency) native born, so it's not really surprising that their children do better by comparison to them than the children of the native born.

mywittyname 7y ago
The immigration process itself contains a huge selection bias. Immigrating to America is not an easy process; it's long, confusing and intended to dissuade all but the most persistent of people. Given that, I would expect to find that people who immigrate in general are more intelligent and hard working than an average person.
bluGill 7y ago
Immigrants have left everything they know behind. They know they don't really know their way around, so they are raising their kids to be better than they were. 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.
- yibg 7y ago
  Maybe it’s contentment. They’ve had a good life being a factory worker (or replace with any other formerly good earning but now dying job). Had the house and 2 cars and raised a family on the work, so why change things now. I know intellectually yes you can say this industry is dying and the wages are going down, but it’s probably not as emotionally connected a thought process. 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.

ipnon 7y ago

How much of this is attributable to immigrants clustering in highly productive urban areas?

wweiss1230 7y ago
Quoting the study "Geographic choices were important: first-generation immigrants were more likely to settle in areas with higher mobility prospects for their children. When we compare children growing up in the same US region, the intergenerational gap between immigrants and the US-born is reduced by 70%. When comparing children growing up in the same county, we no longer find an intergenerational gap between the children of immigrants and US-born individuals. In other words, immigrant children did not earn more than others who grew up in the same location. Rather, their parents chose to live in locations that offered high mobility prospects to all."
mannykannot 7y ago
Which is cause and which is effect? (It could be a virtuous cycle.)

rayiner 7y ago

It's particularly interesting to look at the mobility statistics of asian americans (many of whom are also immigrants) as a category: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race.... If you look at table 1 on page 56, you can see that for white americans, the probability of a child ending up in the top quantile of income where a parent is in the bottom quantile of income is 11% (about half the 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%).

screye 7y ago
I think this might have to do with the type of Asian-Americans that immigrate to the US. (esp. this generation) [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.
- CaoCao 7y ago
  That's just immediately falsified by the fact that he's talking about children of Asian immigrants in the bottom quartile. The high-skilled visa workers are not in the bottom quartile.
  - wyxuan 7y ago

rossdavidh 7y ago

While this is good to see verified, and I absolutely think it is important to rigorously double-check whether things that "make sense" are actually true, it would have been really surprising if this were not true. 1) immigrants often have language difficulties that their children do not 2) immigrants often have cultural knowledge difficulties that their children do not 3) immigrants often have moved to places (both country and place within country) for the exact reason that they believe their children will do better there But, again, just because it was predictable doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to have rigorously verified that it is so.

kazinator 7y ago

This is because people who immigrate are "artificially" pushed down in social status and income due to issues like differences in language, and not having some of your work or education experience recognized in the foreign country. These people are just "bouncing back". In some cases people who were professionals in their country of origin do relatively lower ranked or even menial work. Their children will be constantly reminded "I was a dentist back home, not a hygienist", which affects their self-image. 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.

heavyarms 7y ago
That was my first take as well. This is explicitly called out in the Conclusions section in paper. "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.
- kazinator 7y ago
  The thing is, it's not just about income. If you come from generations of poverty, it's written all over you, and that closes doors in your face. 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. --- 1. A phrase I picked up years ago from a linguistics prof.

slumdev 7y ago

Malcolm Gladwell hypothesizes in Outliers that children whose parents' efforts are rewarded are more likely to work hard themselves because their brains are wired from a young age to associate work with reward. Immigrating to the United States, for a lot of people, is a great reward.

blululu 7y ago

This seems like a variation on regression to the mean. If you take a group of people who have had unusually bad circumstances (language + cultural barriers) and compare with a similar group (their children) odds are that things will improve on the next iteration (assuming that the bad circumstances are transient and not endemic).

vparikh 7y ago

Being a first generation immigrant myself (parents immigrated to America in 1975) I can give a few cultural reasons: 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

tathougies 7y ago
You are basically me. My dad also had a microbiology degree but his first job in this country was a waiter and janitor. This ended up turning into basically slave, unpaid labor, which he managed to escape thanks to my mother. 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.
jdmg94 7y ago
If you're born into America to Immigrant parents, doesn't that make you a second generation immigrant?

throwaway_tech 7y ago

A lot of the comments are crediting the immigrant parents as being "motivated" parents...maybe, but in this modern economy I think there is a more economic reason: US born children have parents that more likely than not are indebted; whereas, even poor immigrants are unlikely to be indebted. It likely follows children whose parents not in debt, no matter how poor, likely have higher rates of upward mobility than children of indebted parents. There are very real glass ceilings in the US (having the lowest socio-economic mobility of all 1st world countries), so you are likely to raise from below the poverty line to just above, but if you are already above their isn't much likelihood of going up further.

PaulHoule 7y ago

The "ain't no making it" attitude that has been historically attributed to poor blacks is increasingly popular among "native" whites.

acephal 7y ago
Except they don't say "ain't no making it", they say "life is about the experiences not making money". I've heard 35-year olds say this.

aluminussoma 7y ago

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

yourapostasy 7y ago
That's curiously specific, as in the gender role and immigrant standing are tied together, but apparently that isn't the case. Googling around found the following editorialization of the source material [1] that gave a TL;DR faster than I can type it up: Study of NYC school data and using custom questionnaires of teens across the world testing into Stuyvesant HS Cutting to the conclusion: Groups that overcame socioeconomic factors to improve on tests (test improvement is more sensitive to those factors than outright performance) had the following factors: immigrant father US-born mother Speculation to why this mattered? One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. The gender didn’t matter, it just turned out that the father typically tended to be the immigrant. This combo even outperformed both parents being born in the US. [1] https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/ https://fs.blog/adam-robinson-pt1/
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > One parent to impart work ethic, one parent to impart language. 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.

known 7y ago

Like father, not like son https://archive.vn/YIjwk https://archive.vn/YIjwk

freepor 7y ago

That’s because (legal) immigrants have high social capital (education, values, two parent households) and often migrate to places where they have the highest relationship capital (hence the CountryVille neighborhoods like Koreatown or the Ukrainian neighborhood on the East side of Manhattan). So when you measure their kids income it jumps up on average.

ajuc 7y ago

That's because immigrants often have artificially lowered status compared to what they had in their home country. They might have been white collar workers there but they have to work worst jobs in US because of language and other barriers. 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.

dannyperson 7y ago
This makes sense - my grandfather was a top lawyer in his home country before fleeing a war. As a refugee in a foreign country, he did manage to get a law position with some connections he had - but his XX years of foreign law experience weren't very useful in the new country.

maerF0x0 7y ago

I often tell people to watch out for selection bias. Immigrants are a distinctly unique people. They're not just members of their foreign racial/national group, they're members of their foreign racial/national group with the ambitions/motivations to leave. To make the abstract concrete. Canadians living in the US are often thought to be "just like" Canadians living in Canada. But they're often not. Often they're the 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"

5440 7y ago
That's very astute. I'm a Canadian living in the US and I ran away in 1996 during the terrible recession with the perception that life was better in the US.
nostrademons 7y ago
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.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    Unless you're an actual refugee fleeing imminent murder, rape and torture, migrating still takes a lot of get up and go.

JimBrimble35 7y ago

... so they really did took er jerbs?

stevespang 7y ago

PayWall, somebody upload to SCI-HUB this taxpayer funded research

nova22033 7y ago

Is it because they have fewer ties to the place where they grew up and they're more willing to move to a new city to make more money?

trekrich 7y ago

positive discrimination

908B64B197 7y ago

Is this really a surprise? 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.

deleted 7y ago

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sunkenvicar 7y ago

American children are struggling because migrant children are taking all the good jobs. Mass migration is a disaster for American families.

imtringued 7y ago
You're completely wrong. The anti immigrant sentiment is mostly about low skilled work being undervalued because the application pool is filled with immigrants who usually have no other choice because of language barriers or lack of recognition of foreign education. You can definitively argue that this hurts the bottom American families the most. Those who fell to the bottom because they lost their job permanently (e.g. coal workers) don't have a low skilled job as a fall back because salaries are being driven down by immigrants. Again as I have said the downsides of immigration are an oversupply of workers in specific industries which drive salaries down. If migrant children were truly "taking all the good jobs" then those good jobs would cease to be good jobs and become low income as well. This is obviously not happening. Once an immigrant is no longer under H1B visa restrictions by obtaining a green card their salary shoots up because they can find better employers. Finally does it matter if it is a disaster for American families especially if the newcomers will become one of those American families as well? If you want to reduce suffering in this world then you would start with those that suffer the most. Lets use refugees after WW2 as an example. As you may know Germany was divided into two pieces. What you may not know is that the third piece was given to Poland and Poland had to give Russia land on its eastern border. This means millions of polish people were forced to immigrate. Then there were the Germans of which 8 million had to migrate out of Poland. What are you going to do with such a huge influx of refugees? Just let them rot in a foreign country? Let them into your country even you can't feed or house everyone because of the war? Of course you let them in. It's the only right thing to do.
- sunkenvicar 7y ago
  It seems we agree that mass migration hurts American families. The poorest get hit the hardest. So wrong. Our refugee program is immoral. We pick and choose refugees like dogs from a shelter. Instead we should help them in place. The money would be spent on the necessities of a refugee camp, not plane tickets to America and English lessons for a lucky few. And they’d be poised to return home and rebuild their countries, which is what they want.

WiPo 7y ago

Given how strict the immigration rule has become I'm not surprised, especially for those who work in tech/academics. Also UPWARD is relative, which means many immigrants start from scratch and there's just not enough time to gain too much wealth and social status, thus makes it easier for their children to go 'upwards', while it may just be their children are living like average Americans.