As always people on here bitching about the US. As an outsider one thing I find to be really good in the US is inclusion. Americans really don't know how backwards the rest of the world is.
For example, I currently live in Germany. Germany is currently importing boatloads of Latino and South East Asian STEM workers. Now if you look at the structure of German companies two things stand out:
1. there is a huge disparity between management and workers and this is reflected also in the salaries
2. all management are German (99.9% ethnic with maybe one 3rd generation ethnic Slav/Turk)
This situation is very likely true for most of Europe, except for maybe the UK.
So of course migrants in the US are more productive. In most countries immigrants are imported to fill a niche and the glass ceiling is held firmly just above that niche. And let's not even talk about entrepreneurial opportunities for immigrants.
> There are 179 people on the management or executive boards of Germany’s 29 Fortune Global 500 companies. Just two of them are not white—both hailing from South Asia—and none is black.
Yes, I am always shocked to hear how "non-racist" Germany is when I have friends who failed to climb the corporate ladder their because of their Greek last name, as they were explicitly told by their coworkers. In America, they are doing well now as an executive at a F500.
You also lose a lot of the cultural baggage when you go somewhere new, which when it's holding you back is a great thing to be rid of.
As a guy from northern England I have been held back in my career when working in the south because of my accent, which is not very strong anyway. For example not being allowed to give presentations, or meet clients, as there was someone who "Would give the right impression".
In the US I just have a weird accent. No cultural baggage, no jokes about being thick etc. If you can get past people trying to get you to say lines from Game of Thrones, you're accent doesn't mean anything.
Questions from someone that knows very little about Germany:
How much of this is the German culture to be educated to a master/PhD level in order to get into management roles? Perhaps that increases the barriers to entry into these levels for immigrants.
How much of this is a language barrier? Immigrants to English-speaking countries have often learned some English before they arrive (often from their schooling) which might put them in a more advantageous position relatively speaking.
It's hilarious how a thread about US immigration studies turned into discussion on German corporate ladder. And, various european attitudes about ethnicities.
Germany is not US. Europe is not US. How they deal with societal situations will be different from how US deals with societal situations.
Are there lots of German/Europe HN users? I am US centric so I tend to think HN is US thing, specifically tech cities, mainly, San Francisco.
Yet the US is is the most racist country in the world with "systemic racism", so much so that even China asked the US in UN to reflect upon their systemic racism instead of attacking other country's human rights.
Seriously, the US is a really fair country. You want to assert that the US is a racist country, do please define what qualifies "systemic racism". Don't be like that URI professor who hates everyone who "asks for data".
I am a non immigrant. I just came here to study and want to return once I am done. But one thing I can say for sure, back in my home country I never worked as hard as I did in America. In America, I worked my ass off, I feel like its the robust education system that made me this person. I enjoy studying/working more than going outside and partying. I feel America helped me discover more about myself than I would have ever learned in another country. I thank America and its predecessors who created such a beautiful country.
Basically he says we have the luxury of time and leisure to be self-critical and we believe we can achieve a utopian ideal but we fall short in so many ways.
Some people do not like VDH because he's a conservative Trump supporter, but that doesn't make him a bad historian.
This paper examines only those who are extraordinarily able: Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medalists, and International Math Olympiad medalists.
It's interesting, but the current HN headline ("Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere") seems misleading. The paper is taking up < 0.01% of "migrants to the U.S."
The submitted title broke the HN guidelines against editorializing titles. Cherry-picking a detail from an article and making that the title is a form of editorializing—the most common form, in fact.
I've replaced it with the first sentence of the abstract, which does a slightly more accurate and neutral job of expressing what the article is about than the primary title does.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Also, the 'six times more productive' stat turns out to mean Math Olympiad medallists who migrate to the US are six times more likely to get a speaking slot at the International Congress of Mathematicians than people who stay at home; an impressive accomplishment but hardly what most people would call 'productivity'. On the slightly less arcane measure of weighted academic citations, migrants to the US have twice as many as migrants to other countries, or four times as many as those who stay at home.
Or put another way: moving to country with best funded and most prestigious research institutions turns out to be useful if you want a high-profile academic career
One of those groups is not like the other :) Thanks anyway, but IMO medals (even Gold) does not make migrating to the US easier.
As for the paper, why doesn't it compare US citizen performance? The Team Selection Test is pretty competitive, and I guess there are at least 20 US citizens each year who are of similar skill.
I beat 1/6 members of the US team at my IMO showing, but I'm pretty sure every single USA TST participant has a brighter future ahead than most of the general cohort of "IMO medallists", including me.
Thats true. I would like to know if the demographics of those high performing migrants are representative of the US’s entire migrant population. If not, then it’s critically more accurate to say that some specific migrant groups are 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere.
Listen, this isn't all that difficult to understand.
Migrating to US is much higher effort than migrating practically anywhere else in the world. You don't expend that effort if you don't plan on making the best of it.
Also US makes it very hard or impossible to migrate if you are not already high earner in your country of origin. Being high earner would normally correlate with being productive, at least when it comes to jobs requiring high level of expertise, ie. practically the only ones that US lets in.
I know a lot of poor immigrants in my home town in NJ (my family for example when we got here). I know there are countries in Europe/Asia that are much harder than the US to get into.
IMHO the US is more about making money than it is about where you come from or your ethnicity or your nationality. We just want to get paid. I know in the news you see a lot of parts of the US that makes it seem like they do not want immigrants, but I think the truth is that the US welcomes immigrants more than other countries.
> Migrating to US is much higher effort than migrating practically anywhere else in the world.
This is a surprising statement to me. Maybe it's true. But my understanding (which might be wrong) is that it's considerably more difficult to receive legal status in most other OECD nations.
PISA standardized testing (I think 15 year olds) differentiates between migrants and non migrants.
In the Anglosphere aka US, UK, Can, Au, Nz - migrants do only a little bit worse on standardized test than local kids, but once accommodating for income, migrants to a little better than local kids.
Everywhere else, migrants to far below the regular average.
Everywhere in Europe especially, they are far below.
People don't often make this distinction but the Anglo world tends to be far more 'open'. If you can speak English, that's fine.
In places like Germany and Sweden, irrespective of how educated someone might be, there are larger barriers to integration and migrants are often social outsiders.
This isn't driven mostly by 'hate' or anything deeply nefarious, rather it's by strong association of 'in-group' dynamics.
The Paradox is that in the US and even in the UK (i.e. Brexit) people are lambasted as 'xenophobic' by certain parts of the political spectrum when this is demonstrably false. UK/US are actually much more likely to believe in the economic value of migrants than elsewhere. They are generally welcoming places, however, due to larger rates of migration - much more existential discussions arise.
Of course Anglosphere countries are also much more likley to be aspirational targets for migration in general (though it's clearly not always true: kids Maghreb especially want to got to France, and Germany/Sweden were popular among Syrian refugees).
I have been having similar discussions with my friends. My key takeaway is that if you are in the top 5 or 10%, US is a great place for you. Every place is open and your hard work (and a bit of luck) will take you a long way up. However, if you are average, US sucks for you. There is just so much burden to just keep working, even more so, if you have family. Between lack of public transport, healthcare, exploitative workplace and strong victim blaming attitude, you carry on just hoping that your kids will become one of the top 10%. For every example of successful immigrant, I think about the thousands of farm workers and hard laborers who make a trip here, and struggle to make a good life. And yes, they make more money that they make in their homeland.. but that does not make their current situation better.
Are any of your friends immigrants in America? Because "public transportation" has never come up in any conversation I have had with an average immigrant.
This is an anecdote but I think it's illustrative. I met a cab driver in Texas who immigrated from Morocco. He was extolling the virtues of Texas. He and his cab driver friends had been able to buy 3BR houses with pools on their cab driver incomes, put their kids in decent schools, etc. If you go to East Texas, you see tons of working class Latinos who work solid jobs in the booming oil and chemical industries there. It's not fancy, but you see brand new strip malls, shiny new pickup trucks, and big families everywhere. Tons of middle class prosperity among the immigrant population.
I'm from Bangladesh, and while my parents immigrated to the U.S. under pretty good circumstances (my dad has a white collar job), not everyone in my family did. And their view of achieving "the American Dream" is very much in line with what this Moroccan cab driver was saying. They want a big house and good schools for their kids. America provides that, including to immigrants. 75% of lawful immigrants have health insurance, mostly through their employer, or through Medicare/Medicaid/ACA. (The rate is over 90% for native-born Americans.) The median size of a new house in the United States is over 2,600 square feet. (Half of Latinos own their own homes, despite a median age of just 30, over 14 years younger than the median age of whites.) The median price of a new car in America is $38,000. This is what most Americans, and most working-class immigrants to America, consider the "American Dream." "Public transportation" is something that only a minority of college-educated elite actually think is a good thing.
It depends on where you from. If you are average, you may still be better off in US comparing to where you are from. It is all relative.
And if you are top 5 or 10% and still face problems, it is actually good for the world. Which means some people will make a decision moving to another place and create opportunities for everyone to grow.
More productive in "knowledge production" according to "novel survey data" and "hand-curated life-histories of International Math Olympiad (IMO) medalists."
The headline makes this sound like a broad finding, but in fact it’s very narrow.
Just to be clear, after a quick read: This paper applies to science and innovation only. Citation-weighted publications are used to compare.
There are countries where migrants are much more productive than the U.S. in non-STEM areas, but it is essentially accomplished by means of almost-forced-labor, and the working conditions are atrocious[1].
The main take away is that there is advancement for global scientific community by having a significant portion of the smart people migrate to one part of the world and collaborate.
What is not discussed
1. The fact that it happens a to be USA is a minor turn in the history in favor of this particular country
2. Post COVID world could be significantly different
I can’t easily download this paper but it is measuring specific things in research scientists and mathematicians and doesn’t really say much about us migrants in general or what you may think of as productivity. The title feels like a bit of an overstatement of the results.
This is not difficult, looking at the kind of migration e.g. Germany has in the millions. When taking averages and means of migrant KPI over the migrant population at large, any good will be cancelled out by the negative aspects of 3rd world pauper migration. Because the subpopulations are vastly differently sized.
Any 1st world country with more tightly controlled migration should do better.
The US has many of the most prestigious universities in the world. Relatively few citizens want to get into academia because our brightest minds would rather pursue more lucrative careers. As a result, our elite instructions end up recruiting the brightest minds from around the globe instead.
The way I see it: the more skilled labor we can import, the better. The U.S. owes its success largely due to migration (be it through merchants, slaves, or otherwise).
I don't agree with the notion that we must "close off" the country in order to preserve said success.
Title is using the wrong word. The paper is about "US Immigration Restrictions" and it's about knowledge workers, that is normal legal immigrants with visas (e.g. H1B, etc...).
The term "migrant" is generally used to refer to unskilled workers entering the country to follow jobs in temporary or seasonal industries. Very often this therefore becomes a euphemism for "illegal immigrant". That's not what this paper is studying.
[+] [-] orange_tee|5 years ago|reply
For example, I currently live in Germany. Germany is currently importing boatloads of Latino and South East Asian STEM workers. Now if you look at the structure of German companies two things stand out:
1. there is a huge disparity between management and workers and this is reflected also in the salaries 2. all management are German (99.9% ethnic with maybe one 3rd generation ethnic Slav/Turk)
This situation is very likely true for most of Europe, except for maybe the UK.
So of course migrants in the US are more productive. In most countries immigrants are imported to fill a niche and the glass ceiling is held firmly just above that niche. And let's not even talk about entrepreneurial opportunities for immigrants.
[+] [-] rayiner|5 years ago|reply
> There are 179 people on the management or executive boards of Germany’s 29 Fortune Global 500 companies. Just two of them are not white—both hailing from South Asia—and none is black.
Contrast the US: https://deloitte.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2019/03/12/women-...
> Total minority representation increased to 16.1 percent (912 board seats) from 12.8 percent in 2010, the first year Fortune 500 data were captured.
[+] [-] DetroitThrow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balero|5 years ago|reply
As a guy from northern England I have been held back in my career when working in the south because of my accent, which is not very strong anyway. For example not being allowed to give presentations, or meet clients, as there was someone who "Would give the right impression".
In the US I just have a weird accent. No cultural baggage, no jokes about being thick etc. If you can get past people trying to get you to say lines from Game of Thrones, you're accent doesn't mean anything.
[+] [-] hntrader|5 years ago|reply
Questions from someone that knows very little about Germany:
How much of this is the German culture to be educated to a master/PhD level in order to get into management roles? Perhaps that increases the barriers to entry into these levels for immigrants.
How much of this is a language barrier? Immigrants to English-speaking countries have often learned some English before they arrive (often from their schooling) which might put them in a more advantageous position relatively speaking.
[+] [-] cccc4all|5 years ago|reply
Germany is not US. Europe is not US. How they deal with societal situations will be different from how US deals with societal situations.
Are there lots of German/Europe HN users? I am US centric so I tend to think HN is US thing, specifically tech cities, mainly, San Francisco.
[+] [-] semanticsbitch|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hintymad|5 years ago|reply
Seriously, the US is a really fair country. You want to assert that the US is a racist country, do please define what qualifies "systemic racism". Don't be like that URI professor who hates everyone who "asks for data".
[+] [-] throw2838|5 years ago|reply
Compared to most european countries, US is very xenophobic. We offer clear path to citizenships, after 5 years you get passport. Not this dreamer BS.
[+] [-] exodus04|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boxmonster|5 years ago|reply
"Critics of the West: From Tacitus to Michael Moore"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bao_YeH14RM
Basically he says we have the luxury of time and leisure to be self-critical and we believe we can achieve a utopian ideal but we fall short in so many ways.
Some people do not like VDH because he's a conservative Trump supporter, but that doesn't make him a bad historian.
[+] [-] jbullock35|5 years ago|reply
It's interesting, but the current HN headline ("Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere") seems misleading. The paper is taking up < 0.01% of "migrants to the U.S."
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
I've replaced it with the first sentence of the abstract, which does a slightly more accurate and neutral job of expressing what the article is about than the primary title does.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] notahacker|5 years ago|reply
Or put another way: moving to country with best funded and most prestigious research institutions turns out to be useful if you want a high-profile academic career
[+] [-] double_descent|5 years ago|reply
As for the paper, why doesn't it compare US citizen performance? The Team Selection Test is pretty competitive, and I guess there are at least 20 US citizens each year who are of similar skill.
I beat 1/6 members of the US team at my IMO showing, but I'm pretty sure every single USA TST participant has a brighter future ahead than most of the general cohort of "IMO medallists", including me.
[+] [-] CyberRabbi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lmilcin|5 years ago|reply
Migrating to US is much higher effort than migrating practically anywhere else in the world. You don't expend that effort if you don't plan on making the best of it.
Also US makes it very hard or impossible to migrate if you are not already high earner in your country of origin. Being high earner would normally correlate with being productive, at least when it comes to jobs requiring high level of expertise, ie. practically the only ones that US lets in.
[+] [-] jmartrican|5 years ago|reply
IMHO the US is more about making money than it is about where you come from or your ethnicity or your nationality. We just want to get paid. I know in the news you see a lot of parts of the US that makes it seem like they do not want immigrants, but I think the truth is that the US welcomes immigrants more than other countries.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|5 years ago|reply
This is a surprising statement to me. Maybe it's true. But my understanding (which might be wrong) is that it's considerably more difficult to receive legal status in most other OECD nations.
[+] [-] drocer88|5 years ago|reply
World per capita GDP ~= $10000
US/World ~= 6
So, yeah, labor performed in the US is 6x world labor.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DoctorNick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
In the Anglosphere aka US, UK, Can, Au, Nz - migrants do only a little bit worse on standardized test than local kids, but once accommodating for income, migrants to a little better than local kids.
Everywhere else, migrants to far below the regular average.
Everywhere in Europe especially, they are far below.
People don't often make this distinction but the Anglo world tends to be far more 'open'. If you can speak English, that's fine.
In places like Germany and Sweden, irrespective of how educated someone might be, there are larger barriers to integration and migrants are often social outsiders.
This isn't driven mostly by 'hate' or anything deeply nefarious, rather it's by strong association of 'in-group' dynamics.
The Paradox is that in the US and even in the UK (i.e. Brexit) people are lambasted as 'xenophobic' by certain parts of the political spectrum when this is demonstrably false. UK/US are actually much more likely to believe in the economic value of migrants than elsewhere. They are generally welcoming places, however, due to larger rates of migration - much more existential discussions arise.
Of course Anglosphere countries are also much more likley to be aspirational targets for migration in general (though it's clearly not always true: kids Maghreb especially want to got to France, and Germany/Sweden were popular among Syrian refugees).
[+] [-] vaidhy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|5 years ago|reply
This is an anecdote but I think it's illustrative. I met a cab driver in Texas who immigrated from Morocco. He was extolling the virtues of Texas. He and his cab driver friends had been able to buy 3BR houses with pools on their cab driver incomes, put their kids in decent schools, etc. If you go to East Texas, you see tons of working class Latinos who work solid jobs in the booming oil and chemical industries there. It's not fancy, but you see brand new strip malls, shiny new pickup trucks, and big families everywhere. Tons of middle class prosperity among the immigrant population.
I'm from Bangladesh, and while my parents immigrated to the U.S. under pretty good circumstances (my dad has a white collar job), not everyone in my family did. And their view of achieving "the American Dream" is very much in line with what this Moroccan cab driver was saying. They want a big house and good schools for their kids. America provides that, including to immigrants. 75% of lawful immigrants have health insurance, mostly through their employer, or through Medicare/Medicaid/ACA. (The rate is over 90% for native-born Americans.) The median size of a new house in the United States is over 2,600 square feet. (Half of Latinos own their own homes, despite a median age of just 30, over 14 years younger than the median age of whites.) The median price of a new car in America is $38,000. This is what most Americans, and most working-class immigrants to America, consider the "American Dream." "Public transportation" is something that only a minority of college-educated elite actually think is a good thing.
[+] [-] powerapple|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|5 years ago|reply
More productive in "knowledge production" according to "novel survey data" and "hand-curated life-histories of International Math Olympiad (IMO) medalists."
The headline makes this sound like a broad finding, but in fact it’s very narrow.
[+] [-] pdevr|5 years ago|reply
There are countries where migrants are much more productive than the U.S. in non-STEM areas, but it is essentially accomplished by means of almost-forced-labor, and the working conditions are atrocious[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969442
Edit: Original title of this submission was "Migrants to the US are up to 6 times more productive than migrants elsewhere", until dang edited it.
[+] [-] harikb|5 years ago|reply
What is not discussed
1. The fact that it happens a to be USA is a minor turn in the history in favor of this particular country
2. Post COVID world could be significantly different
[+] [-] dan-robertson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|5 years ago|reply
Or just the fact that everything in the US is overpriced?
Or, related to H1-B, their managers feel the need to overstate their contribution so they'll be allowed to import more serfs in the future?
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
Will disagree, US is all over the place, but it is faaaar from the most expensive countries around.
[+] [-] golemiprague|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 2ion|5 years ago|reply
Any 1st world country with more tightly controlled migration should do better.
[+] [-] Aunche|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oji0hub|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finolex1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digdigdag|5 years ago|reply
I don't agree with the notion that we must "close off" the country in order to preserve said success.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
The term "migrant" is generally used to refer to unskilled workers entering the country to follow jobs in temporary or seasonal industries. Very often this therefore becomes a euphemism for "illegal immigrant". That's not what this paper is studying.
[+] [-] Kharvok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply