4 ms·

I think you are conflating America of the past with America of today.

rayiner 4y ago
It’s the same today, probably better. A Latino immigrant kid who grows up at the 25th percentile income level will reach the 43rd percentile income level on average: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. In the steady state, they’ll reach the 48th percentile. Meanwhile an Asian kid raised in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% (Table I, Panel A). There’s no evidence immigrant mobility is slowing down. Italian Americans reached parity with British Americans around 1980, 70-80 years after the main immigration wave began: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1989.tb00594.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X..... Vietnamese Americans by contrast reached parity Briths Americans within a 40-50 year span. South Asians, of course, nearly all immigrated into “the America of today.” We didn’t have to deal with half the shit the Italians did. We are not only at the top of the income distribution, but overrepresented in everything from elite schools to corporate boardrooms. Moreover, it’s not just the highly educated immigrants that have upward mobility. My mom could not use her Bangladeshi degree here, but still made a six figure income selling furniture. Our family had zero social connections to law or finance (and didn’t even know anyone in those fields growing up) and my brother ended up as a trader on Wall Street and I ended up as a partner at a corporate law firm. My uncle came here less than a decade ago with his wife and two adult kids. They moved to a tiny two bedroom apartment in a run down part of Queens. My cousin is now getting her PhD in biochemistry. The upward mobility available to immigrants in America is insane.
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  We are told that the former elite of the country was nepotistic and elitist against other groups. America's immigration policy seems like it encouraged highly talented people to immigrate. The US has a smaller population than some of the countries a lot of immigrants arrived from. This means that theoretically, there are more talented people overall in the countries with larger populations. So in some sense the US may have imported a new elite making up <1% of jobs. Do you think this new elite in the schools and corporate boardrooms you mentioned is less likely to be nepotistic and elitist towards other ethnic groups as some of the previous elite groups? Why or why not?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    > We are told that the former elite of the country was nepotistic and elitist against other groups. Who is saying this, and what is their point of reference? The founding elite of this country were the WASPs, and they have been the least insular elite since maybe the Romans. We haven’t had a WASP President since Bush, less than half of Congress is WASPs, and just one of nine people on the Supreme Court is a WASP. It’s pretty much unheard of for an elite ethnic group to give up their power like that without losing it in a war. I mean, I’ll hazzard a guess that e.g. in 100 years the leadership of China will still be overwhelmingly Han Chinese. I’m not optimistic about the next generation of American elite to be perfectly honest. There is new research suggesting that much of immigrants’ fundamental attitudes from their home country, such as social trust, persist for generations after immigration: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594. So as we replace the WASPs that created this meritocracy with immigrant elites, we can anticipate that the culture will change. I saw this happen first hand in northern Virginia, where I grew up. In 1989 when we moved there, the culture was characterized by the quintessential American republicanism (not as in the party but as in the political arrangement). It was a place that had no Michelin star restaurants and where you’d be embarrassed to wear Italian-made shoes to work. Today it has lots of Asian and middle eastern immigrants. These are good, highly educated, productive people. But to a great degree, they bring their basic attitudes with them. They often look down on “the common people” (as my dad calls them). They might be “liberal” in a paternalistic way, but they’re not egalitarian in the way Virginia historically was. There’s also been an increasing cultural trend where people are elites, in the sense that they have power over other people’s lives, but think they are not elites, and have no corresponding sense of duty, because they’re racial minorities or because they’ve redefined “elites” to mean only billionaires, etc. The fact is that the WASPs that created America’s meritocracy were unusual and frankly kind of odd people. Their descendants do stuff like pay a Indian Brahmin woman $2,000 to have dinner with them and tell them they’re racist: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/dinner-party-from-hell https://www.aei.org/op-eds/dinner-party-from-hell. Can you imagine Indians doing something similar in India? There’s a deep-seated (but in some sense healthy) guilt and sense of undeserved privilege baked into the culture that exists in few others. This characteristic just doesn’t exist to any significant degree among the new ethnic groups that are supplanting them, and I strongly suspect that this difference will be significant.

It’s the same today, probably better. A Latino immigrant kid who grows up at the 25th percentile income level will reach the 43rd percentile income level on average: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. In the steady state, they’ll reach the 48th percentile. Meanwhile an Asian kid raised in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20% (Table I, Panel A). There’s no evidence immigrant mobility is slowing down. Italian Americans reached parity with British Americans around 1980, 70-80 years after the main immigration wave began: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1989.tb00594.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X..... Vietnamese Americans by contrast reached parity Briths Americans within a 40-50 year span. South Asians, of course, nearly all immigrated into “the America of today.” We didn’t have to deal with half the shit the Italians did. We are not only at the top of the income distribution, but overrepresented in everything from elite schools to corporate boardrooms. Moreover, it’s not just the highly educated immigrants that have upward mobility. My mom could not use her Bangladeshi degree here, but still made a six figure income selling furniture. Our family had zero social connections to law or finance (and didn’t even know anyone in those fields growing up) and my brother ended up as a trader on Wall Street and I ended up as a partner at a corporate law firm. My uncle came here less than a decade ago with his wife and two adult kids. They moved to a tiny two bedroom apartment in a run down part of Queens. My cousin is now getting her PhD in biochemistry. The upward mobility available to immigrants in America is insane.

onetimeusename 4y ago
We are told that the former elite of the country was nepotistic and elitist against other groups. America's immigration policy seems like it encouraged highly talented people to immigrate. The US has a smaller population than some of the countries a lot of immigrants arrived from. This means that theoretically, there are more talented people overall in the countries with larger populations. So in some sense the US may have imported a new elite making up <1% of jobs. Do you think this new elite in the schools and corporate boardrooms you mentioned is less likely to be nepotistic and elitist towards other ethnic groups as some of the previous elite groups? Why or why not?
- rayiner 4y ago
  > We are told that the former elite of the country was nepotistic and elitist against other groups. Who is saying this, and what is their point of reference? The founding elite of this country were the WASPs, and they have been the least insular elite since maybe the Romans. We haven’t had a WASP President since Bush, less than half of Congress is WASPs, and just one of nine people on the Supreme Court is a WASP. It’s pretty much unheard of for an elite ethnic group to give up their power like that without losing it in a war. I mean, I’ll hazzard a guess that e.g. in 100 years the leadership of China will still be overwhelmingly Han Chinese. I’m not optimistic about the next generation of American elite to be perfectly honest. There is new research suggesting that much of immigrants’ fundamental attitudes from their home country, such as social trust, persist for generations after immigration: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594. So as we replace the WASPs that created this meritocracy with immigrant elites, we can anticipate that the culture will change. I saw this happen first hand in northern Virginia, where I grew up. In 1989 when we moved there, the culture was characterized by the quintessential American republicanism (not as in the party but as in the political arrangement). It was a place that had no Michelin star restaurants and where you’d be embarrassed to wear Italian-made shoes to work. Today it has lots of Asian and middle eastern immigrants. These are good, highly educated, productive people. But to a great degree, they bring their basic attitudes with them. They often look down on “the common people” (as my dad calls them). They might be “liberal” in a paternalistic way, but they’re not egalitarian in the way Virginia historically was. There’s also been an increasing cultural trend where people are elites, in the sense that they have power over other people’s lives, but think they are not elites, and have no corresponding sense of duty, because they’re racial minorities or because they’ve redefined “elites” to mean only billionaires, etc. The fact is that the WASPs that created America’s meritocracy were unusual and frankly kind of odd people. Their descendants do stuff like pay a Indian Brahmin woman $2,000 to have dinner with them and tell them they’re racist: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/dinner-party-from-hell https://www.aei.org/op-eds/dinner-party-from-hell. Can you imagine Indians doing something similar in India? There’s a deep-seated (but in some sense healthy) guilt and sense of undeserved privilege baked into the culture that exists in few others. This characteristic just doesn’t exist to any significant degree among the new ethnic groups that are supplanting them, and I strongly suspect that this difference will be significant.