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-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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
It's really the same argument that public schools make about private schools. We basically discard a third or more of our population, and import the cream of the crop from India.
You combine that with natural ethnic affiliations and social connections and you have a smart and powerful minority. Honestly, it's the same phenomenon as my Irish family had 40 years ago in municipal government. We had cops, firemen, tradesmen. If something needed to be done, you asked my grandfather and it happened. The difference is that those relatives had great high school educations (through the catholic church) in blue collar-ish jobs, while the Indian phenomenon is high end engineering.
I am an emigrant and even I find it unfair to local population. Basically you are getting the 1% best prepared of India or other countries. Of course locals can't compete.
Saying Brits are not prepared to work is not correct. Many migrants are coming in temporarily and are saving for a home back where they came from. For them UK wages represent a fair deal per hour relative to land prices in their country of origin.
If you live in the UK land prices have detached from wages. Really my only motivation for working hard in the UK was to gain the qualifications to emigrate.
The UK has big problems due to a collapsing economy propped up by land prices which it is using to print money. This then has knock-on consequences such as social tensions.
Or perhaps any anti-immigration sentiment is a result of other factors, such as the rise of unwanted religious extremism, or support for and the acceptance by some groups of Sharia law.
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.
>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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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), 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?
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.
> Now if they could just learn to properly speak English.
You mean British English?
> 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.
Every country has an accent - US, Australia, Germany or France - each one of them have their own accent.
One of the fun and excellent things about America is that there is no official language (/ religion / whatever).
My housekeeper, a US citizen born in Mexico (her father was American), speaks English marginally at best (she had a high school education in Mexico). But she has put two kids through the Palo Alto schools (with another graduating next year); the oldest has a graduate degree and works overseas. She lives in Palo Alto and owns another house in the foothills. She votes, and politicians who want her vote speak to her (via TV) in Spanish. Companies who want to sell her things advertise in Spanish. Isn't that capitalism at its best?
Now I think she's made a poor choice, because I think it's self-disenfranchising to not speak English. But that's her choice to make and it's hard to argue with her success. Plus she's a citizen and it appears quite reasonable to me that my taxes pay for the government to accommodate the linguistic wishes of large blocks of citizens.
[+] [-] xianshou|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krat0sprakhar|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Retric|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|11 years ago|reply
“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.”
[+] [-] a8da6b0c91d|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertoG|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
Is it suddently OK to say such things? Denigrating country native population because they don't agree with you?
Native brits survived for thousand years so perhaps they can do so now without you worrying.
(Not a brit, but in my country this ugly tool gets applied all the time)
[+] [-] carrotleads|11 years ago|reply
The locals are not willing to work at salary levels the Biharis are willing to work..
[+] [-] Spooky23|11 years ago|reply
You combine that with natural ethnic affiliations and social connections and you have a smart and powerful minority. Honestly, it's the same phenomenon as my Irish family had 40 years ago in municipal government. We had cops, firemen, tradesmen. If something needed to be done, you asked my grandfather and it happened. The difference is that those relatives had great high school educations (through the catholic church) in blue collar-ish jobs, while the Indian phenomenon is high end engineering.
[+] [-] mrtree|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branchless|11 years ago|reply
If you live in the UK land prices have detached from wages. Really my only motivation for working hard in the UK was to gain the qualifications to emigrate.
The UK has big problems due to a collapsing economy propped up by land prices which it is using to print money. This then has knock-on consequences such as social tensions.
[+] [-] peteretep|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eye_of_Mordor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ontheroxon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] logibly|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
>>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.
[+] [-] gyardley|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] randomname2|11 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/603433973361041408
[+] [-] randomname2|11 years ago|reply
Or maybe that's just a UK thing?
[+] [-] gumby|11 years ago|reply
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_...
[+] [-] vithlani|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] josephmx|11 years ago|reply
1: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...
[+] [-] lmz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jkot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
(Submitted title was "Indians “extraordinarily successful minority in America”, “burgeoning new elite”".)
[+] [-] randomname2|11 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wahsd|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|11 years ago|reply
You mean British English?
> 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.
Every country has an accent - US, Australia, Germany or France - each one of them have their own accent.
[+] [-] gumby|11 years ago|reply
My housekeeper, a US citizen born in Mexico (her father was American), speaks English marginally at best (she had a high school education in Mexico). But she has put two kids through the Palo Alto schools (with another graduating next year); the oldest has a graduate degree and works overseas. She lives in Palo Alto and owns another house in the foothills. She votes, and politicians who want her vote speak to her (via TV) in Spanish. Companies who want to sell her things advertise in Spanish. Isn't that capitalism at its best?
Now I think she's made a poor choice, because I think it's self-disenfranchising to not speak English. But that's her choice to make and it's hard to argue with her success. Plus she's a citizen and it appears quite reasonable to me that my taxes pay for the government to accommodate the linguistic wishes of large blocks of citizens.
[+] [-] honest_joe|11 years ago|reply
translating : There are more indian immigrants than the other nationalities.
[+] [-] logibly|11 years ago|reply