21 ms·

India should make more of a valuable asset abroad

112 points by randomname2 11y ago

xianshou 11y ago
This is no new phenomenon, but its effects have become more and more obvious and pronounced over the past decade, especially with the massive overrepresentation of Indians in engineering, science, and health. Indian American children actually scored better than any other group on "digit span" tests given to young immigrants, indicating an average IQ of about 112 (79th percentile). For an older article on the same subject, see: http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/indian-americans-most-educated-richest-says-pew-report.php http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/indian-americans-most-edu... What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. Most of the Indian immigrants I know attended one of the IITs, and I'm sure many here have a similar experience. The flipside of this self-selection is a pronounced brain drain on Indian society. It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. Even with the current level of investment, however, the new "model minority" is likely to stay that way for a while.
- jgalt212 11y ago
  i.e in this case, the following does not apply: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
  - Crito 11y ago
    Words of a late 19th century poet. The way people quote it, you'd think it was straight out of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence or something. The fact that the poem was written after the Chinese Exclusion Act was written makes it something of a farce, IMHO.
    - jgalt212 11y ago
      The words stand on their own, but the broad application of those words is certainly an ideal, and not a true reflection of this country's varied immigration policies towards various ethnic groups over its shortish history.
- krat0sprakhar 11y ago
  > It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. This is true. I graduated from one of the well-known engineering colleges 4 years back in India and a good percentage of my CS batch went to study in top-schools in the US with a primary motivation to get a job and get settled. Fast forward to now, most of them are looking at coming back and thinking of getting a slice of pie in the booming tech / Ecommerce market in the country. With VC investments booming, and mobile penetration rising tremendously (even in tier 2 cities / towns) the order of the day is to quickly clone a popular business model that has worked in the west and innovate under the local constraints. I can clearly see the curve flattening or even reversing in the next 8-10 years. All in all, it sounds like good news for the Indian economy.
  - shubhamjain 11y ago
    While the VC investments and rise of so many startups is exciting, I am still worried if it is sustainable or everyone is just riding on the VC fuel. Most of the startups, are consumer based companies, many of which, have followed the American counterparts, and to gain market share, they are not worried about spending money like it is endless. Take an example of "Lenskart", which will send an optician to your doorstep who will do eye-check for you @ Rs. 50 ( < $1 ). Not to mention, the sheer number of promotional and branding campaigns they have been running. I believe not every company is like that, but the startup scene in India is more or less, a gaining-user-share game. In pessimistic future, where these startups would be relying on the last pennies of their funding, I am not sure if they would be able to sustain if they start pricing the things they sell at a price to make a profit, since the Indian consumer finds these offers, the major reason to use the app. It would be good if the startups also tilt towards actually making products, like VWO, Browserstack and ours[1]. Although, I am aware, that question like, "How the heck that will make money?" has been proved to be pointless at many times in history, if you think of Facebook / Google but I believe eCommerce companies find it hard to grow profits quickly unless they are inventing a new business model (AirBnB, eBay, Alibaba). [1]: http://adpushup.com http://adpushup.com
    - ignoramous 11y ago
- joshuahedlund 11y ago
  > What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. As an American I often feel like we don't really appreciate the size of the population of Asia. 3 million Indians in America essentially represents the 0.1% of the Indian population most interested and able to come here, so it should not be surprising that the average performance of that group on many given metrics would be above average.
  - jkyle 11y ago
    The able part should not be downplayed either. The mere cost of a ticket to get to the U.S. automatically selects for a relatively high income family as a single ticket costs more than the annual median household income. As an analogy, it's as if a ticket to Europe cost $60,000 dollars and Europeans marveled at how educated and successful and driven all Americans were. When in reality, just to afford the ticket they would have to be either already successful or extremely driven and focused on that singular goal.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  > an average IQ of about 112 I am very curious about the new indian elite white collar crime rates. It seems like most of the time I see a headline about a bust of medicare/medicaid scams or insider trading. Then you get multiple anecdotes of guys like Vinod Khosla trying to steal a beach. Cheating and bribery is certainly rampant in india. IQ ain't everything, you know.
  - cubancigar11 11y ago
    Well they learned it from their master. Not joking. This is what American Indians say when I argue about corruption or workplace politicking - that Americans are much worse and much better at pretending it doesn't exist.
    - jonahx 11y ago
      Pretending what doesn't exist?
- Retric 11y ago
  Don't forget the high percentage of English proficiency in India as a whole. That opens a huge range of well-paid mid skilled corporate jobs (ex: software tester) for non-high achieving immigrants (family reunification etc.) This has a significant risk reduction for family's which has a host of positive knock on effects.
honest_joe 11y ago
"Oh cmon...because there's so many of them and most of them are not that good." translating : There are more indian immigrants than the other nationalities.
- logibly 11y ago
  Instead of generalization, how about you discuss objectively?
  - honest_joe 11y ago
    Yes i have been generalizing I admit to that crime. It's a fact that 1% of the best of the best from a country like India that has so huge population will disrupt the local economics. That and the fact that the others not that gifted will work for less than the locals. We live in a globalized world but that does not always work for benefits of humankind. They are different cultures...the same as gypsies and poorer social ranks from post-soviet countries.
randomname2 11y ago
Just for reference, the actual Economist tweet where the title came from: https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408 https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408
- randomname2 11y ago
  I would assume the reason this is getting so many upvotes/retweets is this is actually quite surprising to most people, who would still initially consider Indians of lower "social status" at first sight. Or maybe that's just a UK thing?
  - meric 11y ago
    Wealth != social status. E.g Garbage collectors have triple the median wage but to many they have low social status.
  - Brakenshire 11y ago
    Indians in the UK are similar - tend to be high achievers, middle-class, model minority etc. In fact, perhaps even more so, because a big proportion of the British Indian population were the professional class ejected from East Africa by people like Idi Amin.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Next up, "Down with immigrants!" and "They took my job!" - very ugly tide of anti-immigration sentiment rising in the UK, largely because migrants are prepared to work, and native brits are not, as they feel entitled to a record contract and a pony.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  People feel entitled to what they have and don't want to lost it. You don't need to be an expert in psychology to realize that. If you have to compete with people that are more desperate that you, you are not going to like that. This is true for Brits and for Indians. But I suppose it's easy (but lazy) to make a moral play of this. Downward pressure on wages is good for some people but not most people. Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also, and I don't have a solution, but don't make these issues more simpler than they are.
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    "Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also" Maybe we should be fixing their societies? Because letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run, while it can do considerable harm (or good, for sure!) for the receiving society.
    - RobertoG 11y ago
      Well yes. If we can do that, I totally agree. But, is that politically possible? I would vote for serious resource investment in a plan for finishing the world poverty but I suspect it's not in the program of the political parties. We prefer to organize military operations ¿!??, like the current European one against the "mafias" that "exploit" the Libyan illegal immigrants, instead of facing the roots of the problem.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run Sure it does. It alleviates the problem of the (often) explosive population growth, it brings in billions of dollars in remittances, and it allows future returnees to come with education and work experience which is, if not better, at least different from what the origin country provides. There's a nice example in this week's TAL episode, regarding Kaiser Kuo, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants who "brought rock and roll to China" (by being one of the founders of Tang Dynasty). I think it's clear that the immigration of his parents was essential for his accomplishments.
josephmx 11y ago
It's interesting that all the European countries (nationalities) fall together on that graph[1] 1: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/20150523_SRC174.png http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...
- lmz 11y ago
  So what's the secret of the immigrants from the Philippines? Why do they make more money with lower % postgraduate compared to other immigrants?
  - atonse 11y ago
    I don't know anything about Filipino demographics but a LOT of Indians that come to the US who aren't highly educated, end up starting small businesses in retail, etc, because that doesn't require a high degree, just raw hard work and perseverance. And those translate to really good incomes. Might be the same thing with Filipinos?
  - jpdus 11y ago
    It's probably because a large share of them work on ships(both, trade and passenger ships [1]) where unqualified workers often can earn slightly more. (I did not find a source on comparable wages, probably someone else has data on that...) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_seamen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_seamen
jkot 11y ago
I think there was discussion about taxes in India some time ago. If you make decent money in India, you get taxed to oblivion. No wonder their elite is leaving.
logibly 11y ago
I am from India and currently in India. This is not a news to me. India lacks opportunities for skilled people. Even with very few opportunities the competition here is fierce. For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands. Even after studies the competition is fierce. The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career.
- lnkmails 11y ago
  >For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands. This is untrue. They all have competitive examinations that are open to anyone. There is affirmative action after admission which is the only non-merit part of it. Generally in India, there is age discrimination when it comes to enrolling in schools. There are age limits. Of course examinations are not indicative of actual potential but then we need a quantifiable way to select students. I am also Indian and have participated in these examinations. Also, I never thought IIMs/IITs are Harvard/MIT. Year over year rankings of universities around the world indicate they are nowhere closer. So let's get real there as well.
- kamaal 11y ago
  And its a lot easier to get into Harvard, right? >>The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career. Same like middle class everywhere in the world. Failure is the norm in entrepreneurship, success is an exception. If some one's parents slogged their whole just to get their kids decent education, and all the kids did in return is blow up their their working years experimenting, I don't think the kid has respect for what their parents did. Contrary to whatever you might think, there are as much opportunities in the US, as they are in India. It all depends on how far you are ready to go. In the US, Indians who are even on short term visits work for dog hours, do the same in India. The result should hardly be different.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
An Indian immigrant family that makes it to the US is likely to be exceptional. When people fight immigration this is one side of it. The best and brightest want to come to the US and the US benefits if it simply lets them do it.
wahsd 11y ago
Caveat: If you are not American, a natural citizen, or even a second generation immigrant; please refrain from suppressing dissenting opinion I am expressing below, which you will surely not like. Also, man, this got long in short order. But it's an important topic. Now if they could just learn to properly speak English. I know that sounds like something an asshole says, but it's really an issue that should not be overlooked just because someone has been trained to be politically correct and for some reason accept poor language skills by one group of people, yet not from another. Would you be ok with a black person that speaks "ebonics" but is otherwise equally competent? In reality it is a significant issue because you frequently simply cannot understand those of Indian descent unless they have been in the USA for at least a generation. It's not really limited to Indians, it also and ever more frequently applies to Chinese, but they are not the subject of this article. There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them. There is even explicit discrimination going on in those kinds of companies that prevents someone like a "real American", a person who speaks English to a satisfactory and comprehensible degree from being hired. Are you going to work with a whole department of Indians that speak a foreign language to each other and actively ostracize you? Are you even going to get an interview as a Duane, Chad, Becky, Omar, Mercedes, Juliana, Marcos, etc.? This rise of the "burgeoning new elite" is just another symptom of the corporate and elite sell out of America. Indians were allowed to immigrate to the USA through various visa programs in order to quickly bolster corporate tech capacity on the cheap due to the ramifications of incompetent investments in education and insufficient support for engaging our poor and under-educated people. Essentially, America's corporate overlords took the easy route and sold out Americans by kicking the can down the road. What they did was the equivalent of taking out car title and pay day loans in order to fund their lavish lifestyles of exploitation. What should become more and more apparent to people, although I don't see any real signs of it happening or grabbing hold, is that America is nothing but a big feeding frenzy by the wealthy and powerful. There really is no sense of culture and society worth mentioning. As upsetting as that notion is, what we consider American and defining of our culture is really just all expression corporate interests and exploitation. What people don't quite get about America, even the 99%ers of Americans, is that although the economy is of course not a zero sum game, it is a limited game that can be represented by the ever popular pie, but where the pie represents a ratio of wealth and income. Or, another way of putting it, you can think of it as an ever replenishing pie. Do you have your mental model and visualization in place? Ok, let me explain. The thing about America is that there is a defined barrier, a gated community, if you will, between the 1% and 99% and that barrier has been erected in such a manner that 99% of the ever replenishing parts of the pie go to the 1%, or simply that the 1% get 99% of the pie and the rest of the 99% have to share a single sliver of 100 pieces that the pie is cut into. The problem with immigration, whether illegal laborers or H1B, is that they are all dumped into the same pool of 99% that have to share that one single tiny sliver of pie of the 100 pieces that the pie has been cut into, which makes getting ahead or increasing income next to impossible. Sure there are outliers and exceptions, and I am sure that the "success" of these "burgeoning new elite" would be cited as counter arguments, but the rule simply is that under normal circumstances it is next to impossible to make headway when immigrants keep getting dumped into the labor pool, whether it be construction, manufacturing, agriculture, service, or even all the tech jobs. That is the real reason why not only poor people in America can't make any headway and also why students are being buried under student loan debt while the prospective wages they can earn with the degree they hold has been driving down by cheap H1B tech labor and outsourcing. These are real consequences of immigration. I know that we all have been indoctrinated to love the shit out of some immigration because it has always been critical to the American elite to further their agenda of exploitation and domination, but reality is that what you have been led to believe is counter-productive to your own self-interest. And to think there are some people who don't believe that people will act against their own self interest.
dang 11y ago
Please don't use the titles of HN posts to editorialize. Instead, use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (Submitted title was "Indians “extraordinarily successful minority in America”, “burgeoning new elite”".)
- randomname2 11y ago
  This how The Economist promoted their own article on Twitter: "Indians have become an extraordinarily successful minority in America. A burgeoning new elite" (https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408 https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408), as I had pointed out in the first comment here. While this doesn't fit into the 80 characters HN enforces, and The Economist may have been "editorializing" by using that alternative title, they editorialize by definition and I'm not sure stepping in and changing the title was necessary here. The surprisingness of The Economist making that statement is what made that widely retweeted and made for interesting discussion here. Or was it the quotes that were "problematic" / offensive?
  - dang 11y ago
    The rules here ask you to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. It's fine to use a subtitle instead, if it's more neutral or informative. What's not fine is to pick what you think is important about the article and make that the title—that's what we mean by editorializing. On HN, the submitter of a story doesn't get to frame it for everybody else. Since the title of a post is the single most important influence on the discussion, this is important.
gyardley 11y ago
The immigration routes to the United States that have nothing to do with personal merit (family reunification, green card lottery) have hard per-country caps. Thanks to India's huge population, a greater percentage of their immigrants have to come from more merit-based routes, like the H-1B visa or the F-1 visa for students. I suspect that's why Indian immigrants are doing better as a group. The whole article is a strong argument for moving the United States' immigration policy in a more merit-based direction, like Canada's or Australia's. Skilled, deliberately-selected immigrants are great, but giving out permanent residence to the winners of a lottery is ridiculous.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gumby 11y ago
India does one thing interesting in regards to its diaspora. Like some HNers here advocate for the US, India restricts foreign ownership of things like land, companies etc. (Personally I think it hurts India but that's another discussion.) So if someone leaves India and becomes a citizen of another country they lose those rights. A couple of decades ago the government figured out this was a problem, so now Indian-born noncitizens and some decedents of Indian citizens get some ability to travel, invest etc as if they were locals -- even better in some cases because they can repatriate earnings). As a kid in South East Asia I saw how Chinese family-based affinity networks contributed to the well being, wealth and general prosperity of Cantonese immigrants (my mother, an Indian childhood emigrant who grew up speaking chinese, was weirdly tied in which is how I saw these). India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_person_of_Indian_origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_person_...
- vithlani 11y ago
  >India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it. You are wrong about this. I was brought up in precisely such a culture in Africa and see it everywhere that Indians migrate to in reasonable numbers.

112 points by randomname2 11y ago

This is no new phenomenon, but its effects have become more and more obvious and pronounced over the past decade, especially with the massive overrepresentation of Indians in engineering, science, and health. Indian American children actually scored better than any other group on "digit span" tests given to young immigrants, indicating an average IQ of about 112 (79th percentile). For an older article on the same subject, see: http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/indian-americans-most-educated-richest-says-pew-report.php http://newamericamedia.org/2012/07/indian-americans-most-edu... What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. Most of the Indian immigrants I know attended one of the IITs, and I'm sure many here have a similar experience. The flipside of this self-selection is a pronounced brain drain on Indian society. It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. Even with the current level of investment, however, the new "model minority" is likely to stay that way for a while.

jgalt212 11y ago
i.e in this case, the following does not apply: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
- Crito 11y ago
  Words of a late 19th century poet. The way people quote it, you'd think it was straight out of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence or something. The fact that the poem was written after the Chinese Exclusion Act was written makes it something of a farce, IMHO.
  - jgalt212 11y ago
    The words stand on their own, but the broad application of those words is certainly an ideal, and not a true reflection of this country's varied immigration policies towards various ethnic groups over its shortish history.
krat0sprakhar 11y ago
> It will be very interesting over the next two decades to see if, with the rise of India, this trend continues, flattens, or even reverses. This is true. I graduated from one of the well-known engineering colleges 4 years back in India and a good percentage of my CS batch went to study in top-schools in the US with a primary motivation to get a job and get settled. Fast forward to now, most of them are looking at coming back and thinking of getting a slice of pie in the booming tech / Ecommerce market in the country. With VC investments booming, and mobile penetration rising tremendously (even in tier 2 cities / towns) the order of the day is to quickly clone a popular business model that has worked in the west and innovate under the local constraints. I can clearly see the curve flattening or even reversing in the next 8-10 years. All in all, it sounds like good news for the Indian economy.
- shubhamjain 11y ago
  While the VC investments and rise of so many startups is exciting, I am still worried if it is sustainable or everyone is just riding on the VC fuel. Most of the startups, are consumer based companies, many of which, have followed the American counterparts, and to gain market share, they are not worried about spending money like it is endless. Take an example of "Lenskart", which will send an optician to your doorstep who will do eye-check for you @ Rs. 50 ( < $1 ). Not to mention, the sheer number of promotional and branding campaigns they have been running. I believe not every company is like that, but the startup scene in India is more or less, a gaining-user-share game. In pessimistic future, where these startups would be relying on the last pennies of their funding, I am not sure if they would be able to sustain if they start pricing the things they sell at a price to make a profit, since the Indian consumer finds these offers, the major reason to use the app. It would be good if the startups also tilt towards actually making products, like VWO, Browserstack and ours[1]. Although, I am aware, that question like, "How the heck that will make money?" has been proved to be pointless at many times in history, if you think of Facebook / Google but I believe eCommerce companies find it hard to grow profits quickly unless they are inventing a new business model (AirBnB, eBay, Alibaba). [1]: http://adpushup.com http://adpushup.com
  - ignoramous 11y ago
joshuahedlund 11y ago
> What is the cause? Most likely, an extremely strong self-selecting tendency for immigrants. As an American I often feel like we don't really appreciate the size of the population of Asia. 3 million Indians in America essentially represents the 0.1% of the Indian population most interested and able to come here, so it should not be surprising that the average performance of that group on many given metrics would be above average.
- jkyle 11y ago
  The able part should not be downplayed either. The mere cost of a ticket to get to the U.S. automatically selects for a relatively high income family as a single ticket costs more than the annual median household income. As an analogy, it's as if a ticket to Europe cost $60,000 dollars and Europeans marveled at how educated and successful and driven all Americans were. When in reality, just to afford the ticket they would have to be either already successful or extremely driven and focused on that singular goal.
a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
> an average IQ of about 112 I am very curious about the new indian elite white collar crime rates. It seems like most of the time I see a headline about a bust of medicare/medicaid scams or insider trading. Then you get multiple anecdotes of guys like Vinod Khosla trying to steal a beach. Cheating and bribery is certainly rampant in india. IQ ain't everything, you know.
- cubancigar11 11y ago
  Well they learned it from their master. Not joking. This is what American Indians say when I argue about corruption or workplace politicking - that Americans are much worse and much better at pretending it doesn't exist.
  - jonahx 11y ago
    Pretending what doesn't exist?
Retric 11y ago
Don't forget the high percentage of English proficiency in India as a whole. That opens a huge range of well-paid mid skilled corporate jobs (ex: software tester) for non-high achieving immigrants (family reunification etc.) This has a significant risk reduction for family's which has a host of positive knock on effects.

honest_joe 11y ago

"Oh cmon...because there's so many of them and most of them are not that good." translating : There are more indian immigrants than the other nationalities.

logibly 11y ago
Instead of generalization, how about you discuss objectively?
- honest_joe 11y ago
  Yes i have been generalizing I admit to that crime. It's a fact that 1% of the best of the best from a country like India that has so huge population will disrupt the local economics. That and the fact that the others not that gifted will work for less than the locals. We live in a globalized world but that does not always work for benefits of humankind. They are different cultures...the same as gypsies and poorer social ranks from post-soviet countries.

randomname2 11y ago

Just for reference, the actual Economist tweet where the title came from: https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408 https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408

randomname2 11y ago
I would assume the reason this is getting so many upvotes/retweets is this is actually quite surprising to most people, who would still initially consider Indians of lower "social status" at first sight. Or maybe that's just a UK thing?
- meric 11y ago
  Wealth != social status. E.g Garbage collectors have triple the median wage but to many they have low social status.
- Brakenshire 11y ago
  Indians in the UK are similar - tend to be high achievers, middle-class, model minority etc. In fact, perhaps even more so, because a big proportion of the British Indian population were the professional class ejected from East Africa by people like Idi Amin.

madaxe_again 11y ago

Next up, "Down with immigrants!" and "They took my job!" - very ugly tide of anti-immigration sentiment rising in the UK, largely because migrants are prepared to work, and native brits are not, as they feel entitled to a record contract and a pony.

RobertoG 11y ago
People feel entitled to what they have and don't want to lost it. You don't need to be an expert in psychology to realize that. If you have to compete with people that are more desperate that you, you are not going to like that. This is true for Brits and for Indians. But I suppose it's easy (but lazy) to make a moral play of this. Downward pressure on wages is good for some people but not most people. Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also, and I don't have a solution, but don't make these issues more simpler than they are.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  "Of course the immigrants have a right to the good things of life also" Maybe we should be fixing their societies? Because letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run, while it can do considerable harm (or good, for sure!) for the receiving society.
  - RobertoG 11y ago
    Well yes. If we can do that, I totally agree. But, is that politically possible? I would vote for serious resource investment in a plan for finishing the world poverty but I suspect it's not in the program of the political parties. We prefer to organize military operations ¿!??, like the current European one against the "mafias" that "exploit" the Libyan illegal immigrants, instead of facing the roots of the problem.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    letting 0,1% of people in third-world countries come and enjoy good things does nothing for their society in a long run Sure it does. It alleviates the problem of the (often) explosive population growth, it brings in billions of dollars in remittances, and it allows future returnees to come with education and work experience which is, if not better, at least different from what the origin country provides. There's a nice example in this week's TAL episode, regarding Kaiser Kuo, the American-born son of Chinese immigrants who "brought rock and roll to China" (by being one of the founders of Tang Dynasty). I think it's clear that the immigration of his parents was essential for his accomplishments.

josephmx 11y ago

It's interesting that all the European countries (nationalities) fall together on that graph[1] 1: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/20150523_SRC174.png http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...

lmz 11y ago
So what's the secret of the immigrants from the Philippines? Why do they make more money with lower % postgraduate compared to other immigrants?
- atonse 11y ago
  I don't know anything about Filipino demographics but a LOT of Indians that come to the US who aren't highly educated, end up starting small businesses in retail, etc, because that doesn't require a high degree, just raw hard work and perseverance. And those translate to really good incomes. Might be the same thing with Filipinos?
- jpdus 11y ago
  It's probably because a large share of them work on ships(both, trade and passenger ships [1]) where unqualified workers often can earn slightly more. (I did not find a source on comparable wages, probably someone else has data on that...) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_seamen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_seamen

jkot 11y ago

I think there was discussion about taxes in India some time ago. If you make decent money in India, you get taxed to oblivion. No wonder their elite is leaving.

logibly 11y ago

I am from India and currently in India. This is not a news to me. India lacks opportunities for skilled people. Even with very few opportunities the competition here is fierce. For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands. Even after studies the competition is fierce. The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career.

lnkmails 11y ago
>For eg, to get into IIM or IIT (equivalents of Harvard or MIT in US), you need more then just knowledge to get selected amongst hundreds of thousands. This is untrue. They all have competitive examinations that are open to anyone. There is affirmative action after admission which is the only non-merit part of it. Generally in India, there is age discrimination when it comes to enrolling in schools. There are age limits. Of course examinations are not indicative of actual potential but then we need a quantifiable way to select students. I am also Indian and have participated in these examinations. Also, I never thought IIMs/IITs are Harvard/MIT. Year over year rankings of universities around the world indicate they are nowhere closer. So let's get real there as well.
kamaal 11y ago
And its a lot easier to get into Harvard, right? >>The Indian middle class dream continues to pursue job as a career and very few take entrepreneurship as a career. Same like middle class everywhere in the world. Failure is the norm in entrepreneurship, success is an exception. If some one's parents slogged their whole just to get their kids decent education, and all the kids did in return is blow up their their working years experimenting, I don't think the kid has respect for what their parents did. Contrary to whatever you might think, there are as much opportunities in the US, as they are in India. It all depends on how far you are ready to go. In the US, Indians who are even on short term visits work for dog hours, do the same in India. The result should hardly be different.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

An Indian immigrant family that makes it to the US is likely to be exceptional. When people fight immigration this is one side of it. The best and brightest want to come to the US and the US benefits if it simply lets them do it.

wahsd 11y ago

Caveat: If you are not American, a natural citizen, or even a second generation immigrant; please refrain from suppressing dissenting opinion I am expressing below, which you will surely not like. Also, man, this got long in short order. But it's an important topic. Now if they could just learn to properly speak English. I know that sounds like something an asshole says, but it's really an issue that should not be overlooked just because someone has been trained to be politically correct and for some reason accept poor language skills by one group of people, yet not from another. Would you be ok with a black person that speaks "ebonics" but is otherwise equally competent? In reality it is a significant issue because you frequently simply cannot understand those of Indian descent unless they have been in the USA for at least a generation. It's not really limited to Indians, it also and ever more frequently applies to Chinese, but they are not the subject of this article. There are whole departments in tech companies that are staffed with essentially nothing but Indians who speak various Indian languages among each other and have such strong dialects when speaking English that it is almost impossible to understand them. There is even explicit discrimination going on in those kinds of companies that prevents someone like a "real American", a person who speaks English to a satisfactory and comprehensible degree from being hired. Are you going to work with a whole department of Indians that speak a foreign language to each other and actively ostracize you? Are you even going to get an interview as a Duane, Chad, Becky, Omar, Mercedes, Juliana, Marcos, etc.? This rise of the "burgeoning new elite" is just another symptom of the corporate and elite sell out of America. Indians were allowed to immigrate to the USA through various visa programs in order to quickly bolster corporate tech capacity on the cheap due to the ramifications of incompetent investments in education and insufficient support for engaging our poor and under-educated people. Essentially, America's corporate overlords took the easy route and sold out Americans by kicking the can down the road. What they did was the equivalent of taking out car title and pay day loans in order to fund their lavish lifestyles of exploitation. What should become more and more apparent to people, although I don't see any real signs of it happening or grabbing hold, is that America is nothing but a big feeding frenzy by the wealthy and powerful. There really is no sense of culture and society worth mentioning. As upsetting as that notion is, what we consider American and defining of our culture is really just all expression corporate interests and exploitation. What people don't quite get about America, even the 99%ers of Americans, is that although the economy is of course not a zero sum game, it is a limited game that can be represented by the ever popular pie, but where the pie represents a ratio of wealth and income. Or, another way of putting it, you can think of it as an ever replenishing pie. Do you have your mental model and visualization in place? Ok, let me explain. The thing about America is that there is a defined barrier, a gated community, if you will, between the 1% and 99% and that barrier has been erected in such a manner that 99% of the ever replenishing parts of the pie go to the 1%, or simply that the 1% get 99% of the pie and the rest of the 99% have to share a single sliver of 100 pieces that the pie is cut into. The problem with immigration, whether illegal laborers or H1B, is that they are all dumped into the same pool of 99% that have to share that one single tiny sliver of pie of the 100 pieces that the pie has been cut into, which makes getting ahead or increasing income next to impossible. Sure there are outliers and exceptions, and I am sure that the "success" of these "burgeoning new elite" would be cited as counter arguments, but the rule simply is that under normal circumstances it is next to impossible to make headway when immigrants keep getting dumped into the labor pool, whether it be construction, manufacturing, agriculture, service, or even all the tech jobs. That is the real reason why not only poor people in America can't make any headway and also why students are being buried under student loan debt while the prospective wages they can earn with the degree they hold has been driving down by cheap H1B tech labor and outsourcing. These are real consequences of immigration. I know that we all have been indoctrinated to love the shit out of some immigration because it has always been critical to the American elite to further their agenda of exploitation and domination, but reality is that what you have been led to believe is counter-productive to your own self-interest. And to think there are some people who don't believe that people will act against their own self interest.

dang 11y ago

Please don't use the titles of HN posts to editorialize. Instead, use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (Submitted title was "Indians “extraordinarily successful minority in America”, “burgeoning new elite”".)

randomname2 11y ago
This how The Economist promoted their own article on Twitter: "Indians have become an extraordinarily successful minority in America. A burgeoning new elite" (https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408 https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408), as I had pointed out in the first comment here. While this doesn't fit into the 80 characters HN enforces, and The Economist may have been "editorializing" by using that alternative title, they editorialize by definition and I'm not sure stepping in and changing the title was necessary here. The surprisingness of The Economist making that statement is what made that widely retweeted and made for interesting discussion here. Or was it the quotes that were "problematic" / offensive?
- dang 11y ago
  The rules here ask you to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. It's fine to use a subtitle instead, if it's more neutral or informative. What's not fine is to pick what you think is important about the article and make that the title—that's what we mean by editorializing. On HN, the submitter of a story doesn't get to frame it for everybody else. Since the title of a post is the single most important influence on the discussion, this is important.

gyardley 11y ago

The immigration routes to the United States that have nothing to do with personal merit (family reunification, green card lottery) have hard per-country caps. Thanks to India's huge population, a greater percentage of their immigrants have to come from more merit-based routes, like the H-1B visa or the F-1 visa for students. I suspect that's why Indian immigrants are doing better as a group. The whole article is a strong argument for moving the United States' immigration policy in a more merit-based direction, like Canada's or Australia's. Skilled, deliberately-selected immigrants are great, but giving out permanent residence to the winners of a lottery is ridiculous.

deleted 11y ago

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gumby 11y ago

India does one thing interesting in regards to its diaspora. Like some HNers here advocate for the US, India restricts foreign ownership of things like land, companies etc. (Personally I think it hurts India but that's another discussion.) So if someone leaves India and becomes a citizen of another country they lose those rights. A couple of decades ago the government figured out this was a problem, so now Indian-born noncitizens and some decedents of Indian citizens get some ability to travel, invest etc as if they were locals -- even better in some cases because they can repatriate earnings). As a kid in South East Asia I saw how Chinese family-based affinity networks contributed to the well being, wealth and general prosperity of Cantonese immigrants (my mother, an Indian childhood emigrant who grew up speaking chinese, was weirdly tied in which is how I saw these). India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_person_of_Indian_origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_person_...

vithlani 11y ago
>India's emigrants for whatever reason didn't have the same kind of informal structure, but cleverly the government formalized the mechanism which is actually more powerful. Let's see if they can really make use of it. You are wrong about this. I was brought up in precisely such a culture in Africa and see it everywhere that Indians migrate to in reasonable numbers.