Silly Little Country

The Follies of Racial Accomodation

Steve Sailer has a VDARE column today, advising the GOP of how not to disappear from the political planet, a goal I am not sure I share, but along the way providing a sad and funny characterization of the quality and impact of US 'racial' (I use this word because part of what he shows is how arbitrary the government's concept of this is) accommodation. It makes me laugh and cry at the same time - there is much in this, but I noticed one story that rang very true for me.

See, in theory you don’t qualify for taxpayer-subsidized loans just by being “Asian”. No, you have to be a socially or economically disadvantaged Asian. And how do you demonstrate you are disadvantaged? You fill out a form about how you’ve suffered under the lash of white bigotry.
...
The Inspector General’s office discovered, however, that in the company where the victim toiled, his father was a senior officer and shareholder. In fact, this young martyr to social and economic disadvantage:
1. came from a wealthy family; e.g., according to a newspaper article, since 1996, three companies his parents founded and were affiliated with were sold for approximately $3 billion;
2. was raised in his parents’ home, which had an assessed value of $5.2 million as of January 1, 2005; …
5. was gainfully employed by the United States Senate, Goldman Sachs International … among others.
As the title of the 2005 report points out, after decades of handing out loans to each and every Asian who submitted a form claiming to be “socially or economically disadvantaged”, the federal government still hadn’t gotten around to developing criteria for “overcoming the presumption of social disadvantage".
In other words, if you are Asian, the government just takes your word for it.

This brought to mind, though the focus is not on the issue of the 'socially disadvantaged' concern, an experience I had as a grad student at Berkeley in the 1970s; when my scholarship funding ran out, but determined not to graduate for as long as possible in that wonderful Northern California lifestyle (we grad students all spoke longingly of being TAs with tenure), I took a job as a tutor with some office tasked with helping 'minority' students. The office had its own definition of minority, and I do not believe there was any concern about 'social disadvantage' in the program. I was assigned three students. One was a woman of East Asian background, bright and hard-working, but struggling with math; she fought hard and wound up doing pretty well. Her family was of fairly modest background. One was a black man, again of modest background, appallingly ill-prepared for Berkeley, but sincere, though by no means understanding what it really was to study; we made some progress, and he made whatever hurdle he has supposed to jump, but I worried for the next step. The third was a man with a 'Spanish surname'. I believe that was the exact category used at the time, and I wondered if they had a list that defined the term. In any case, this fellow had a surname that is likely shared by tens of millions of people in South America, and sure seemed Spanish to me; in fact he was a son of the US ambassador of a South American country, and rich and cocky, if at best moderately talented and committed to work. He was committed to mediocrity, and achieved it. He could have achieved somewhat greater mediocrity without my help, and he certainly could have paid for his own bloody tutor, and every session with him outraged me, though I liked the money. But it annoyed me that all sorts of hard-working Americans were essentially subsidizing this preppie.
Steve's article reminded me also of a clipping my mother sent me a couple of weeks ago, reminded herself by it of a comment I had made forty years ago about the impresssive disproportion of Asian students in my math classes.

Call it the China effect. An astonishing 88.3 per cent of young Chinese immigrants in Canada go to university -- more than double the figure for young Canadians as a whole, according to a new study.
When community college was added to the mix, 98.3 per cent of young Chinese immigrants sought post-secondary education by the time they were 21 years old.

These are stunning numbers, and suggest that Canada's immigration policy regarding the Chinas is likely building us a better future.
The article provides a portrait of one example, I think a bad one as both her parents are university professors. It would have been more interesting to hear about students from more modest backgrounds. (To be fair, it is an Ottawa paper, and the example is a prestigious Ottawa example, involving both an Ottawa high school and an Ottawa university.)
What about their kids?

Immigrant hustle is nothing new. But the China effect continues into the first generation born in Canada, with 81.3 per cent going to university and 13.6 per cent going to college, Finnie and Mueller found.

Hooray!
Now the China effect skews the overall statistics, which sound pretty good here for our immigration policies.

A little less than 38 per cent of non-immigrant youth went to university compared to 57 per cent of all first-generation immigrants and 54.3 per cent of second-generation immigrants, says Finnie, who mined the data from Canada's Youth in Transition survey, which asked in-depth questions of 26,000 Canadian young people who were 15 in 1999.
More than 90 per cent of immigrants from Asian countries other than China (including India and the Middle East) as well as those from African nations went to university or college.

I'd like to see that broken down a little more.

The study also looked at immigrants from English-speaking nations, as well as western and northern Europe.
About 70 per cent of them attend university or college, close to the rate for non-immigrants. The only group less likely to go than non-immigrants were those born anywhere else in the Americas, aside from the United States.

Ahhh I see, it is because they speak English that they aren't achievers.
The study, which I mmust read in detail, makes some fasconating observations, including:

Another interesting pattern was noted: those with a Canadian mother and an immigrant father were 19 percentage points more likely to go to university than non-immigrant youth. But if the youth had an immigrant mother and a non-immigrant father, the difference was 13 percentage points.

Our points system has its benefits - our profile is quite different from that in Europe.

The difference might have something to do with Canada's immigration "points" system, which favours people who are young, have more education, better language skills and relatives already living in Canada.

We're interested in nation-building," says Sweetman. "They're interested in people doing menial labour.

Sweetman, a researcher at the Queen's School of Policy Studies, was involved in research that looked at differences in education levels among U.S. and Canadian immigrants and how that trickled down through three generations.
The results suggested that differences in immigration policy -- Canada has a greater emphasis on skilled workers -- accounted for lower education levels among U.S. immigrants compared to Canadian immigrants. The gap is expected to widen because of the "intergenerational transmission of education."

I liked the last comment, as well:

"It's a two-sided message. The kids do well in the education system. And the education system does well by the kids."

I worked many years in a high-skill industry, surrounded by immigrants and their children, and I'd make the same comment about the workplace.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 8:04 AM