Some desi guy posted a hilarious rant to Craigslist on dealing with suspicious looks from fellow passengers while riding the DC metro (thanks, midnight toker):
… after the London subway bombings, i have been getting “the look” on public transportation and at airports. To put it mildly, my days of picking up girls on a plane are over…
I don’t have an accent, a dot or a large cobra wrapped around my head (except on Tuesdays). I’m your typical poser hipster Indian living in DC, trying to get my hands on as much smoke, beer and ass as i can. But step on the metro… and suddenly i transform into Allah-kazam bin Laden…
… open your book bag at least 3 times. As soon as you reach for the bag, look at their reactions. Kodak moments all over the place.
My dream is to go on a plane, act crazy suspicious… basically inviting some white folk to beat the shit out of me. Then when they open my bags, it will be full of Bibles and medicine for sick children. Then i’ll sue all the muthafuckers and go live on some island with all my money and broken bones. Now that’s the American dream.
… i gotta deal with this bullshit everyday on the metro… It’s not even a cool subway like NYC or in Paris. The lame ass DC metro.
The DC metro reminds me of BART. The New York subway is to DC’s what a fastback is to a station wagon: it isn’t wide and cushy, but it’s a hell of a lot faster.
Read the whole thing. See Anna’s related post here.
The next time anyone gets a dirty look, just say, “What you lookin’ at Pilgrim!” and then frown and say…shouldnt have work these shoes today, not going to be able to run fast enought….
The blacks and hispanics have been screaming racial profiling for a long time and what were the desis doing? Model minoritying and thus were a tool for blaming blacks and hispanics for their failures. Not to mention outright racism many desis harbor towards blacks and hispanics.
How exactly does a group go about ‘model minoritying’? Is a familial focus on education now evil?
I was saying the other day that I wanted to go onto the Tube with a big round Acme bomb Wile E. Coyote-style to see what would happen. Yes yes I all know your answer, it involves eight bullets and a funeral pyre.
Recently I’ve been getting a bit bored with every other Asian I know recounting their sob story about getting funny looks or maybe even…asked to open their bag! Sure, it’s a shock at first – I said my piece after 7/7 too. But now shut up. I don’t want to hear your story unless it features strip-searching, K-Y jelly or Brazilians. Actually, if your story involves all three I DEFINITELY want to hear it. So I’m delighted someone finally takes the piss as well, very funny post.
I (like others with same appearance) get pulled over at the airport all the time. Way back in 1996, at Madrid airport I was intensely queried by fairly high-up authorities. I had show them the bills from my stay in Spain, and proof of being a graduate student in USA since there had a terrorism attempt day before I was boarding. At that time, they thought I was from Middle East (whatever).
Usually, a potential terrorists goes out of the way to merge with the masses, not to raise alarm. Therefore, profiling thing is all bogus and simplistic. Not soon, we will see white Islamic terrorists…they are just evolving.
All said, I personally dead against the “model minority” concept and ugly baggage. It is us vs. them. I am going blog about it on my blog soon.
Perhaps people are a bit jumpy on the DC Metro because of reports like this…
Jihadist Forum Member Advocates a Chemical Weapon Attack on the Washington Metro Subway System
Vikram, you non-sequitur-slinging nincompoop. I’m glad you’re volunteering to be anally probed on your every trip. Take one for the team.
Oeth, bonus points for getting nincompoop into your comment. Good work. Kush Tandon, you weren’t listening to me!
Bongo
Your first post is hilarious dude!
I wonder if we should all start wearing t-shirts and sweatshirts saying “Infidel and Proud” on the front and back…..
Travelling on the Tube here in London’s certainly an interesting experience these days. Suspicious sideways glances from the majority population notwithstanding, it’s funny (in a grim has-it-finally-come-to-this kinda way) how the South Asians scattered throughout the train carriage quickly glance at each other, check if anyone’s carrying a rucksack, then deliberately try (and fail) to avoid making eye-contact with each other.
While of course absolutely everyone — other South Asians included — keeps looking at the crop-haired, bearded/goateed, young Muslim guy with the holdhall in the corner who probably feels like he has a cross-hairs sign painted on the front of his shirt….
With incidents like this, who do you blame? Desi Canadians, your time to be strip-searched has come.
M. Nam
i’ve thought people disliked me my whole life especially on public transportation, and now that its true, its good to know i’m not making it up
Some bits that were left out of the block quotation that might be useful to know — this isn’t your typical “woe is me” rant, but much more tongue in cheek:
Verdict: good sense of humor, right overall idea. Now if we could just improve his punctuation…
Gujari Girl puts it well:
How exactly does a group go about ‘model minoritying’? Is a familial focus on education now evil?
Of course! Don’t you know that the desi kids who are winning spelling bees are only doing so because the white oppressor has stereotyped them as verbally fluent? It’s just the opposite of blacks and Hispanics, who generally do badly in school because they’re expected to do so — and exactly the same as those Chinese Americans who rock the math SAT because they’ve been stereotyped as nerds.
Causality couldn’t possibly run the other way, because clearly the stereotype determines their behavior rather than vice versa. Clearly.
its hard for us to know what to do unless told. my parents would never have told me to study and helped me get an education at the cost of other things, and would never have been resourceful and persistent if not for steroetypes.
its got nothing to do with, coming to another country and not fully knowing the language means a person has to be as persistent and driven as possible, and this gets imparted to their kids
it might be that other people saw us as model minorities, but we ourselves were hardly going to be allowed to get C’s and not try hard. Our parents hardly did all that work for that. And on some level maybe we knew it
Compete ferociously with Chinese-Americans for more-model-minority-than-thou status.
Saurav’s got the right plan. Desis should instead compete ferociously with African Americans and Hispanics for the more-oppressed-than-thou title.
I can see it now: hire Dr. Dre as a consultant. Fremont might be a leafy suburb now, full of desis living the American dream…but post-Sauravation it’ll be a Compton-like wasteland. Glowering H1B’s on the corner, fondling their
AK47’sTI89’s… And the songs — oh, the songs!Straight outta Fremont! Desi mothaf**** named Raju! From a company called Google or Yahoo!
Ah…I can see it now. With the oppression comes the moral purity of the ostensible victim. Because in the Saurav worldview the troubles of blacks and Hispanics are not their fault, while the successes of Indians and Chinese are to be faulted.
I thangyu Punjabi Boy.
Hell if we’re deciding to bite back and get militant, I’m getting my ‘FEAR OF A BROWN PLANET’ T-shirt out. I’ve kept it out of sight since July.
My, my! That was quite an extrapolation from one sentence and a link by Saurav. You must really know him and his opinions really well!
By the way, how is my punctuation?
“Is a familial focus on education now evil”?
Hello? If the familial focus on education is a desi thing why is education back in india in such a bad shape? Don’t you see that the second generation desis in america are a skewed sample where most of them have at least one parent with a college degree? Don’t you know that the most important predictor of SAT score is parent’s education status (something like 80% of those with SAT scores less than 1000 have NONE of the parents with college degrees)? Don’t you know that many black’s parents were barred from entering college campuses in states like Alabama and Mississippi? Dishonest wingnuts like dinesh d’souza have used the success of an utterly skewed sample of indians to show blacks and hispanics in poor light.
Yeah, the immigration sieve is why I said familial and not cultural. But don’t try and imply that a focus on education and fiscal security is a bad thing. It’s exactly what blacks and Hispanics are working for.
If you don’t think a cultural premium for education has something to do with it, you’re deluded. I abhor many of D’Souza’s views, blacks and Hispanics suffer a lot of discrimination, and there are lot of other factors (e.g. it’s difficult comparing small groups to large). But several refugee groups in the U.S. have gone from barely speaking English to solidly middle-class within a generation or two.
Even if you compare countries, structural factors dominate in the short run and cultural ones in the long run. Just look at the island empires.
Desis should instead compete ferociously with African Americans and Hispanics for the more-oppressed-than-thou title.
you missed the point…being a “model minority” is not about aceing spelling bees, it’s about distancing ourselves (south asians) from other minorities, and acting like their problems are their fault, when really it isn’t so simple…
Manish if you meant the Hmong, they are statistically the poorest and least educated Asian American group.
You are right, although the way the anti-model minority rhetoric gets played out, there is disdain against any depiction of desis and east Asians as successful because it supposedly perpetuates the model minority myth. I don’t have any problem with highlighting our successes, as long as it doesn’t translate to looking down on other groups. As sparky mentioned, I think that is the underlying concern.
The Mariel Cuban refugees came with very little but now have an income 50% higher than the average in their area.
Like almost all Cubans who came from the island before and after them, Mariel refugees came with almost nothing. Eighty-eight percent had less than $100 in their pockets, and they averaged about $7,000 in income their first year here. Today, Mariel refugees have an average annual income of $32,210 per person… while the average individual income in Miami-Dade is $21,947.
How could you look down on those who opened the gates? It was in the ferment of the Civil Rights Movement that the ’65 immigration liberalization passed Congress.
That was quite an extrapolation from one sentence and a link by Saurav. You must really know him and his opinions really well!
Ummm, slightly more than one. Saurav and I disagree on virtually everything, but I think we both know where the other stands by now.
And even from that solitary link, it was clear that Saurav doesn’t like the fact that Indian Americans are a model minority. How much more morally pure it would be to be a victim…then AALDEF could be arguing death row cases rather than moping about the community’s comparative wealth and status.
Manish if you meant the Hmong, they are statistically the poorest and least educated Asian American group.
This is true, vurdlife, but they are actually posting big gains right now. See for example here:
You can see a significant upward trend with the Hmong. Note the staggering drop in the poverty rate and the tremendous increase in housing and median income over the past 10 years.
acting like their problems are their fault
But this is the thing: if you maintain that their problems are not their doing, then by implication neither are their successes. You’re devolving all agency from the individuals in the group to others. But how exactly is white racism causing black on black crime? It’s not an America-specific thing — you see the same high crime rates among blacks in the favelas of Brazil, in Haiti, in South Africa, and in the UK. Any purely cultural explanation is stretched to the breaking point.
I mean, the underlying idea here is that a thumbs up or down from the white majority is what determines the fate of an ethnic group. Why would whites decide to give a thumbs up to Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and Iranian immigrants…but not to new citizens from sub-Saharan Africa, or Hispanics of primarily Amerindian descent?
It’s not like all the immigrants from India and China and Vietnam came over with money in their pockets. The Vietnamese fled Communist mass murderers and were mostly penniless when they arrived. Yet their income is now above the American mean. Ditto with the Chinese railroad workers. And ditto with the Ashkenazi Jews of the shtetl around the turn of the century.
Which gets to a larger point: if past oppression really predicted current performance, Jewish Holocaust survivors and Israelis would have terrible economic problems. But they don’t…so how exactly are separate water fountains worse than millions dead?
vurdlife, thanks for getting my back. I love Bihar. (this is what I’ll say everytime you get my back from now on 🙂
gc, it’s not quite clear what you’re saying. I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s both agency involved on an individual and community level and there are structural factors and history involved. Why is that controversial? All you have to do is hold two ideas in your head at once and understand that the world is kind of complicated. Dubois did it–why can’t you?
In any case, the points I probably try to make most frequently on this blog are: 1) don’t overrely on identity politics and symbolic instances of oppression 2) don’t pretend that all desis are professionals, wealthy, citizens, etc. rather than a really diverse group of people and 3) care about $hit that’s going on. And also I get annoyed when people conflate terms like “Indian” and “South Asian” 😉
Finally, it’s annoying that you would attribute a view to me that South Asians need to claim moral purity on the basis of oppression. I actually constantly argue the opposite of what you’re saying in terms of where desis should place themselves (although my thinking has changed on this over the year(s) so I can see how you might think this about me); for example, I recently linked this article in a comment which goes into some depth about why pretending that South Asians are oppressed in the same ways as Black and Latino people (on race grounds alone) is problematic. Again, it’s not impossible to argue that desi people have faced race oppression (particularly on a global scale) and at the same time that some/many of them are more privileged than other people (particularly on a U.S. scale). And all that without denying individual agency. It’s not rocket science–just where you choose to put your point of emphasis at a given moment in a given context.
It is a sorry state that our country’s in. Just yesterday, I read an article in the L.A. Times about a photographer snapping photos of a “…person of Middle Eastern descent videotaping the Santa Monica Pier and its underpinnings.” The photographer gave the photos to S.M.P.D. for follow-up. Our society gets crazier and scarier everyday.
Hey I agree with you. But tell that to Piyush Jindal and Dinesh D’Souza. The MMM in their hands is dangerous.
It is sort of a side point and plus I don’t want to hate on any group, but to be fair, that extra 10K in average income may be accounted for by the Scarface-effect.
Say hello to my little friend, the 1040. I doubt any ‘Scarface effect’ would be reported to the census.
gc–it’s not that the “white majority is what determines the fate of an ethnic group,” rather it seems like how well a certain group is doing now, today is 2005 is somwhat propotrional to how much they were trampled upon by imperialism. People of African (Blacks) and Native American (Hispanic) descent had it the worst, thus today they are pretty much doing the worst as a group. Sure, South Asian countries also suffered from imperalism, but not to the extent that Native Americans and Africans did.
Conversely, countries that were not as affected by imperialsim, e.g. Japan, are more or less considered economic super powers. Even looking at the different Asian countries, the more they were influenced by imperalims, the worst off the people are today, like the Philipines.
Part of the disparity may be explained by selective v.s. non-selective immigration. The Chinese, Indians, Iranians, and Vietnamese are highy selected immigrant groups. Blacks and Hispanics are not.
Large parts of India, China, and Vietnam are extremely backward and undeveloped. It’s easy to forget that when we’re discussing Indian software programmers and Chinese doctors.
I think that a lot of those Vietnamese refugees were eligible for extremely generous special welfare benefits. So it’s not like they climbed into the middle-class without any help.
Not to mention that they emigrated here in large numbers when race relations were somewhat better than the days of widespread, well-publicized organized lynchings, sanctioned segregation, etc. And generally speaking, the U.S. policy on nonWhite immigration has not been “give me your talented, your initiative-taking, your hardworking masses”–professional and non-professional. Think about the wherewithal it takes to acquire a visa in Bangladesh or Nigeria, mortgage your house to pay for the costs, accumulate money, deal with being undocumented (if you are) and the insult of being a trained engineer who now sells goods on the street, and facing the possibility of deportaiton (and thereby losing the financial investment you put downt hrought he mortgate on your home in Bangladesh or Nigeria). Regardless of whether you think that’s politically okay, surely you can acknowledge that it’s a feat of some wonder.
But this is the thing: if you maintain that their problems are not their doing, then by implication neither are their successes
exactly, there is too much ‘feeling sorry’ for blacks and hispanics these days. They have A LOT of benefits that many other minorities cannot get a whiff of. Financial aid for education is heavily aimed at promoting blacks and hispanic enrollment. So many undergraduate and graduate programs blatantly set aside spots for blacks and hispanics w/ entrance scores well below the mean. Try being an Indian and apply to a bschool or law school etc…you think your 700 GMAT is being compared fairly to all scores? No way, it’s being compared to other Chinese and Indian folks who pull in at that figure. Look at the corporate landscape now. Jobs are specifically being filled by less deserving blacks and hispanics under the ‘diversity’ blanket. Sure not in mass numbers like regular jobs, but giving handouts isn’t going to help any race overcome their issues. All this talk of ‘poor them’ sickens me, yes they’ve had it really rough but for the last 10 yrs there has been an astronomical rise in opportunity and exposure for them and for the most part they choose to squander their opportunities.
the single mother pregnancy rate in the black population is estimated at almost 70%! This is not anyone else’s fault. Illiteracy, last I read for blacks, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% (i could be wrong). What it boils down to is values and the sustained teaching of those values. Many blacks and hispanics don’t value education, they find it more convenient to keep a chip on their shoulder and moan about being victimes and in today’s PC climate, they get the attn they crave. Desi population does value and stress education above all else. We understand that it is the way to ensure your future. It’s not our fault that some other cultures don’t do this. I hate the model minority insinuations, as if we’re selling out as a people to do what we’re supposed to do. this whole argument about ‘the US govt selects the best’ is invalid too. Most ppl who come here from other poor countries have just enough to get here and that’s it. I have known ppl who ate once a day here just to save money to make ends meet. I have known immigrants working 3 jobs and going to school full time to make ends meet. I have seen doctors working in hotels, engineers working at Wal Mart etc just to get a start and then go from there. it’s ridiculous to downplay our accomplishments as a people as if we’re doing some disservice to other minorities or as if we owe blacks and hispanics something. If white ppl like us for whatever reason, who cares, they don’t define our culture/ppl anyways. This “indians selling out’ stuff has to stop.
Keep posting gc, you make a lot of sense, and sense isn’t tolerated in the PC world of today.
Problems with this theory abound. For ex., no matter how bad you think brit occupation was, I can readily assure you that Japanese occupation of S. Korea was worse. FAR worse. And yet, despite India and S. Korea gaining their independence about the same time, the S. Koreans are FAR better off. Similar story with other victims of Japanese imperialism including Taiwan, Singapore, etc. etc. etc.
Imperialism sucks, for sure, but other things affect current outcomes more.
I note here that you are acknowledging that the South & East Asians who come over are economically competent — and that hence their success is their own doing.
Part of the disparity may be explained by selective v.s. non-selective immigration. The Chinese, Indians, Iranians, and Vietnamese are highy selected immigrant groups. Blacks and Hispanics are not.
Your hypothesis is that unskilled Chinese immigrants would not have been successful in the US. Fortunately, there is a controlled experiment to test this theory. It’s going on in Russia right now:
Note those all important bolded passages! A left-winger blindly extrapolating the US-Mexico situation would predict that the Chinese, coming from a poorer country and streaming across the border, would be exploited by the Russians and condemned to poverty. But that’s not what happened.
It doesn’t matter that these Chinese were illegals, that they didn’t speak the language (at first), or that they were initially exploited. Within one generation they rose to the top of the economic ladder, in the face of open ethnic antagonism and without any sort of “antiracist” campaign.
The implications for America’s current immigration policy should be apparent.
the U.S. policy on nonWhite immigration has not been “give me your talented, your initiative-taking, your hardworking masses”–professional and non-professional.
Saurav — we might see eye to eye for once, if the above “has not been” isn’t a typo. It seems to me you are suggesting a policy revision. Do you agree that the US should — like Canada and Singapore — move to a system that prioritizes the immigration of skilled workers?
It seems that the primary counterarguments above have been that the successful immigrant groups have been those with some set of skills beforehand. While I think the Russian Far East shows that this is not a necessary condition, I agree that it is a sufficient condition. Leaving aside the implications for the community’s responsibility**, do you concur that it would be better for the US if we gave Nigerians with PhDs and South Americans with EE degrees priority over their countrymen?
It would certainly reduce racism in the US if there was less reality behind it — that is, if the Hispanic community in the US had an influx of engineers from Latin America rather than migrant laborers, stereotypes would change over time.
** — implication being: if you agree that skilled immigrant communities are successful, then you are agreeing that the conduct of immigrants has something to do with their success — indicating that immigrant success is not entirely a function of “white racism” but rather also a function of community education level, behavior, and mores. Right?
I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s both agency involved on an individual and community level and there are structural factors and history involved. Why is that controversial?
Hey, so if I get you right: you are agreeing that blacks and Hispanics are at least partially responsible for their current socioeconomic condition?
That is, that individuals within those communities might be doing things that are not to their benefit at a greater rate than individuals in other communities?
If you can grant that, I think we’re making some progress.
Sorry—it was a typo 🙂 I think the U.S. already prioritizes and has for a long time the immigration of skilled workers and talented individuals who can come and serve as marginal labor (i.e. the undocumented it lets stay).
I don’t agree in those terms. What I meant is that there are individuals in all communities who are not as hard-working as others, who have mental health problems that pull them down in SES, who have certain talents and not others. Black and Latino people have agency just like everyone else; that doesn’t mean that the obstacles they face are the same as other people’s (similar to how a woman’s or a poor person’s or an immigrant’s obstacles are different even though all those people have agency too)
btw, that’s a separate question from “responsibility,” which is a very loaded term in this context because of the moral overtones to it, the history of the “deserving” vs. “undeserving” poor in the U.S., racism, and all kinds of other stuff.
I’m not an expert on the situation in the Russian Far East, but the news articles I’ve found do indicate that non-laborers from Chinese have also gone there in sizable numbers. Many Chinese entrapaneurs are there specifically to open stores and sell goods.
This is what one article from People Daily claimed.
http://english.people.com.cn/200401/01/eng20040101_131677.shtml
“Currently, there are around 100,000-200,000 permanent Chinese living in the Far East region as approved by Russian and Chinese governments. Except a few students and staff sent there by domestic companies, others are basically small retailers and labor service workers. They mainly deal in articles of daily use, clothes, shoes and hats or are engaged in agricultural planting, tree-felling and construction. In terms of regional distribution, Chinese are concentrated in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Irkutsk and Chita. There are even thousands of Chinese retailers in Chinese markets in some of the cities. Although most of them are doing small businesses, there are locally well-known Chinese entrepreneurs in almost every Far Eastern city.”
It’s impressive that they’ve been able to economically dominate the RFE in only a few years, but it’s not neccessarily true that Russians are cheap laborers now.
“In refuting some Russian media’s reports about Chinese causing increase in the unemployment of residents in the Far East, director of the Market Research Institute of the Far East Academy under Russia’s Economic and Trade Ministry said that is sheer nonsense. The unemployment in the Far East is a kind of structural unemployment. Russians are mainly engaged in technical work while Chinese in manual work such as construction, lumbering and planting which Russian are not willing to do. Therefore it must be Chinese who fill in the vacancy. And “the all-round cooperation between the Far East and north China is determined by the natural geographic conditions of the two countries.” “
What I meant is that there are individuals in all communities who are not as hard-working as others, who have mental health problems that pull them down in SES, who have certain talents and not others.
Ok — this is at least some progress. Agree or disagree: setting race aside for now, those who are not as hard working or talented tend to not make as much money as those who are hard working and/or talented, right?
“responsibility,” which is a very loaded term in this context
But discussion of responsibility is unavoidable. It is the crux of the issue. If I get you right, you think whites are primarily responsible for the state of black America, while I think blacks are primarily responsible for the state of black America.
Here, by “X responsible for Y”, I mean “X is the primary determinant of Y”, and any attempts at changing Y must go through X. You think whites are to blame for the crime, drugs, illegitimacy, etc. that plagues Af-Am communities. Hence you talk about racism. Is that a fair statement of your position?
I would add “focused on making money to that”, but yes. I don’t think it’s a very profound statement.
I think there is a difference between using the words responsibility” and “causality” but lets set that aside for a second.
If you want to know what I think about how to solve race problems in the U.S. and other issues in the Black community and other disempowered communites, I have no idea what a comprehensive solution would be or if such a thing even exists. Indeed, I find it uncomfortable and odd to even try and come up with policy prescriptions for another group of people altogether with whom I have little connection and close to no personal knowledge of what their lives are like day to day.
This isn’t solely or even primarily an issue of Black vs. White for me although racism has pervaded American society from the beginning; none of us are free from it, whether we’re White, Black, Desi, East Asian, Southeast Asian, etc. So White people aren’t the problem–it’s the system of values and ideas that privileges being White that’s the problem (and also privileges to a different degree being East Asian, South Asian, and generally constructs a hierarchy). This probably goes hand in hand with other questions of power–like money, labor relations, sexuality, women’s rights, and other things.
So what I do feel comfortable saying, instead of offering a prescription for how to solve the specific problems in someonee else’s community that I haven’t dealt with closely, is that there are a group of people that have accumulated a lot of power and are trying to accumulate more. Ultimately, the way for the people who are getting f@#ked over in this process (which is probably most people, in one form or another) is to build power around issues and in other ways and gradually redevelop the political agenda in the U.S. so that the policy debates really are about what’s in the best interests of people instead of stand-ins for racism, homophobia, and other tools that allow the powerful to stay powerful (or become more so). It’s fundamentally a question of personal ties and movement building, and I think the more ways you’re screwed over and the more your life experience conditions you to look at things that way and the more receptive you are to seeing other people’s pain, the more likely you are to enlist yourself.
Model Minorityism is ultimately about prentending that none of this situation exists and that we don’t need to be a part of it. It’s about enlisting yourself on the other side in matters of import.
Manish, Its hard for a multi-billion dollar business to avoid manifesting itself on legitimate tax returns somewhere or another.
Vinod, apples and oranges. That analogy b/w S. Korea and India is valid only if all other variables and differences between the countries are held constant. India has a billion people, for instance, while Korea doesn’t. Even if Japanese imperialism were worse than the British version (which I’m not convinced of…look at the respective durations of occupation and the attendant stultification of economy and society, not just amount of torture, # of heads chopped off, etc.), there may be other factors that inform Korea’s economic superiority over India (even that…by how much are the Koreans better off? This is, after all, the post-Collapse of Asian Tigers period).
All in all, its too complicated a scenario to devalue the impact of imperalism.
GC, interesting article. However JJs post seriously undercuts the point. If the Chinese were already business-minded from before (more so than the average human), their relative success says nothing useful as an indictment of less successful immigrants here.
Plus, one thing a left-winger would expect in the Chinese-Russian scenario is, just like here, the following attitude prevails:
Also regarding the complicity of White people, I agree with Saurav its not a simple White vs. Black issue. White people in the South and Midwest are probably getting screwed over as bad as anyone else, and they keep doing it to themselves further by voting for the party of Enron and Haliburton.
There is absolutely no question that the US grossly favors the immigration of skilled/educated worker. Now more than at any other time in the Nation’s history.
Ah, but if you flip that around, the logical contrapositive of “if hard work/talent then money” is that people without money tend not to be talented or hard working.
That, I think, is a profound statement as it gets to the core difference in our respective worldviews. It is not just that those who work hard will earn money; it is that those who do not have money were not working hard.
And this gets to the point of responsibility.
There is absolutely no question that the US grossly favors the immigration of skilled/educated worker. Now more than at any other time in the Nation’s history.
I think we’re looking at two different policies — the written and unwritten. I’m referring to our national security disaster on the Southern border. Only Bush knows why we fingerprint legal visitors at airports while promising citizenship to illegal aliens. Certainly the influx of illegals dwarfs the influx of H1B’s and skilled workers in absolute terms.
Changing the unwritten policy is what we need to do.
But I’m curious — everyone seems to agree that skilled workers tend to assimilate better, make more money, have kids who are better educated, etc. So why wouldn’t you favor a skilled immigration policy? After all, even if we took a million legal immigrants per year — a number we could easily fill given the 7.3 million applicants for 50000 diversity lottery spots — we could fill every spot with engineers, scientists, and PhDs of various stripes. Why wouldn’t that be a good thing? Canada and Singapore do it that way.
Plus, one thing a left-winger would expect in the Chinese-Russian scenario is: [quote of Russian racist]
Oh, granted, granted. Though I think the whole outsourcing kerfuffle is instructive — the upper classes will tut-tut about xenophobia until it affects them .
That is, a New York Times reporter is far more likely to have a brother who is a computer scientist — and competing with Indians and Chinese — than a brother who is a dock laborer — and hence competing with Mexicans.
Even though the effect of millions of illegal aliens on the unskilled labor pool dwarfs the short term effect of outsourcing and H1B’s on the skilled labor pool (see for ex. Harvard’s Borjas or the NAS study), it is outsourcing which receives the frantic headlines.
This is doubly ironic as it’s much easier for skilled workers to retrain and find a new trade than it is for a 40 year old machinist to become a web designer.
Thus, when someone points out the xenophobia of group X with respect to group Y, it is often useful to ask whether that same someone is economically/criminally troubled in the same way by group Y. If not — if they have, in Wolfe’s words, “insulated, insulated, insulated” from the effects of group X — then one must question the sincerity of their critique. For it is this inconsistency that leads many liberals to denounce free trade and outsourcing while supporting mass immigration of unskilled workers, largely because the former involves foreigners competing with them while the latter involves foreigners serving them.
The recent Hollywood ad for “Best Nanny in a Supporting Role” made this point more tellingly than any parody I could essay.
Hi,
Canada has a point system and higher degrees gets more points. They donot exclude non-PhDs.
I have a PhD. I got my green card in US through exceptional category. With all this said, I will never preach elitism. I am dead against “self-selection” propaganda. I have same respect for a fellow immigrant, irrespective of their trappings.
The heart of immigration policy is diversity. The diversity lottery has more to do facilitate immigration from former eastern bloc countries, and countries that were historically excluded from immigration. That is very fair.
Kush
I don’t think mass immigration of ph.d’s enigneers is necessarily ‘a good thing’. Since you brought in Canada, you cannot ignore that there are a huge number of engineers here from reputed universities like IIT , BHU etc and yet not only is there a shortage of jobs in their fields, but also jobs that are offered to them are usually at lower posts/wages with Canadian degrees being given a preference.
This does create problems when you have countless engineers without jobs. I know of a few capable, experienced, mid-late 30’s engineers here who are working as truck drivers ,real estate agents as they prefer these alternatives to being unemployed/underpaid.
It then makes more sense to bring in skilled labourers if they have better job opportunities available for them than to bring in professionals who can’t find employment.
although racism has pervaded American society from the beginning; none of us are free from it, whether we’re White, Black, Desi, East Asian, Southeast Asian, etc.
Don’t you think the above is operationally equivalent to the doctrine of original sin?
If the Chinese were already business-minded from before (more so than the average human), their relative success says nothing useful as an indictment of less successful immigrants here.
Well, if we’re willing to countenance the idea that the billion plus Chinese might be “more business minded than the average human” — an assertion I don’t disagree with, by the by — one must also entertain the possibility that there are groups which are less business minded than the average human.
This hypothetical group would not be expected to be particularly good at making money. They might have other talents, of course. But if they were indeed “less business minded than the average human”, then one their relative lack of wealth would mostly be a function of their own actions rather than those of other people, no?
[meta comment: I’m actually enjoying this relatively civil discussion, and am attempting to rein in the sarcasm. My apologies if any offense was taken above…what can I say, I just couldn’t resist the lilting euphony of “Desi muthaf**** named Raju”.]
then one their
hmmm, strike the “one” in that bit.