Posted: Mar 24, 2016 5:33 pm
I think a lot of it can come down to the support networks that certain ethnic groups have in place, and a lot of that comes down to culture. In Vietnam, and I assume a lot of other East Asian cultures, there's a massive amount of nepotism. If you have a business, you're expected to be able to find a job for your relatives. This is presumably extremely valuable in a marketplace where they are likely to face discrimination. Mormons are a religious version of this, with a massive in-group support mentality. I would suggest (but I'm not massively familiar with it) that a successful Mormon businessman would be expected to provide opportunities to others from that group.
With immigrants, you've also got to look at their social status in their home country. America isn't getting the Vietnamese people you see picking up trash in the streets, it's getting (even with scholarship students) rich Vietnamese. So while they might not be earning a massive amount when they first arrive in the country, and might be considered a low-income family, they are often backed up by a pretty hefty bank balance from someone back home. Which brings us to the other point: family pressure. Very few of my students who go to study abroad pick their own degree, and if they do, you can guarantee it's been approved by the parents first. They invest a lot in education, but they do so expecting a return, so they're very focused on choosing areas of study that will likely lead to well-paid jobs. I remember seeing Steven Pinker talking about this in relation to Jewish parents. He was trying to debunk the idea that Jews have historically put high value on education, arguing that "how are you going to get a job doing that?" was the typical attitude of Jewish parents, which is exactly the attitude to education that East Asian cultures that I'm aware of have. They do out a high value on education, but on a particular type of education, where the degree has a clear job attached (accounting, computer science, medicine, etc). It's actually a big problem here in Vietnam, because of the sheer number of people qualifying with these very job-specific degrees and the lack of transferable skills that you get in more abstract degrees.
But ultimately what you have is a culture where parents will make massive sacrifices to ensure their child gets a good education, and will put massive expectations of them that they will work hard and achieve. I used to work in a school where students were typically paying about $200 a month for English lessons, and many families had multiple kids. But what was interesting is that if you were ever doing a lesson about travel, the number who'd been abroad was typically zero, and the number who'd been on a plane was often just a handful. Very few of them had a car in the family. What you had was people who weren't particularly well off (although still above average for Vietnam) who just put everything into their kids' education. And that, I suspect, accounts for the success of the less well off Asian immigrants.
The other thing with immigrants in general, is that just through a process of elimination, you're going to end up with the hard-working ones. People were amazed at how hard-working Polish tradesmen were when they first came to the UK. Of course they were. The lazy ones wouldn't be arsed to go halfway across a continent in search of work. Trust me, there are plenty of lazy bastards in Vietnam, they're just not the ones that are going to bust their gut to get to America.
In the UK, there was a study of children on free school meals. They found that every ethnic group with the exception of gypsies performed better than white people. You might find that will even out the more generations the ethnic minorities have been in the country.
With immigrants, you've also got to look at their social status in their home country. America isn't getting the Vietnamese people you see picking up trash in the streets, it's getting (even with scholarship students) rich Vietnamese. So while they might not be earning a massive amount when they first arrive in the country, and might be considered a low-income family, they are often backed up by a pretty hefty bank balance from someone back home. Which brings us to the other point: family pressure. Very few of my students who go to study abroad pick their own degree, and if they do, you can guarantee it's been approved by the parents first. They invest a lot in education, but they do so expecting a return, so they're very focused on choosing areas of study that will likely lead to well-paid jobs. I remember seeing Steven Pinker talking about this in relation to Jewish parents. He was trying to debunk the idea that Jews have historically put high value on education, arguing that "how are you going to get a job doing that?" was the typical attitude of Jewish parents, which is exactly the attitude to education that East Asian cultures that I'm aware of have. They do out a high value on education, but on a particular type of education, where the degree has a clear job attached (accounting, computer science, medicine, etc). It's actually a big problem here in Vietnam, because of the sheer number of people qualifying with these very job-specific degrees and the lack of transferable skills that you get in more abstract degrees.
But ultimately what you have is a culture where parents will make massive sacrifices to ensure their child gets a good education, and will put massive expectations of them that they will work hard and achieve. I used to work in a school where students were typically paying about $200 a month for English lessons, and many families had multiple kids. But what was interesting is that if you were ever doing a lesson about travel, the number who'd been abroad was typically zero, and the number who'd been on a plane was often just a handful. Very few of them had a car in the family. What you had was people who weren't particularly well off (although still above average for Vietnam) who just put everything into their kids' education. And that, I suspect, accounts for the success of the less well off Asian immigrants.
The other thing with immigrants in general, is that just through a process of elimination, you're going to end up with the hard-working ones. People were amazed at how hard-working Polish tradesmen were when they first came to the UK. Of course they were. The lazy ones wouldn't be arsed to go halfway across a continent in search of work. Trust me, there are plenty of lazy bastards in Vietnam, they're just not the ones that are going to bust their gut to get to America.
In the UK, there was a study of children on free school meals. They found that every ethnic group with the exception of gypsies performed better than white people. You might find that will even out the more generations the ethnic minorities have been in the country.