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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it  [/quote]

This is not an elephant - this is just the narrative white folks use to keep their privileges intact. Half of you white folks need a white privilege workshop - STAT!

http://www.mtv.com/shows/white-people/white-people-full-episode/1736982/playlist/#id=1736982
[/quote]

daughter of african immigants here...grew up in housing project in a big city watching bunches of my neighbors kids fail wondering the exact same thing. it comes down to many little factors but the chief one imo is institutionalized racism. I assume we've all been slighted in the small hundreds of times with the  racial perceptions of others, for white folks can't see that I am first generation and that my neighbors kids are descendants of slaves and the kids of the great migration. they just see were black and its all the same. but for me growing up without the shackles of that lowered expectation was a tupe of freedom. the persistent and pervasive racism, it could only psychically blight me in small ways. It didn't compound the generations of slights that must be felt by the african american community as a whole after generations of living poor, disrespected lives. living less than a generation past codified laws that made it a crime to use the same drinking fountain as a white person or having to sit behind some white person on public transport. or getting the shitty books or schools while white kids got first pick. how humiliating and degrading and stripping or all your humanity....
when immigrants get here they feel that pressure as well but they do not bear the scars of those hundreds of years of underclass status. It's just another injustice to get through, like the ones that my parents were fleeing back in their home country. another hurdle to jump, and they are free to jump. they do not feel encumbered by this immobility that seems to be yoked around the neck of the black lower class in america. so they leap, to better school and then better houses and then their kids keep moving on, just like me and my sibs did. 
and yet...just the other day in my practice i am talking to a patient, a very sweet older white lady and doing some basic neurological testing and I ask her who the president is ....she says "oh it's that nigger", like it was on the tip of her tongue and she says it everyday, because she probably does. this is the pervasive, causal  cancer that racism is in the US. it didnt stamp us out but it has been stomping on the dreams of others, quiet and poisonous for generations. try and ignore it, but it lives on...in its many subtle and direct ways. 
one generation requires that freedom to leap which does not happen if the schools are all poor people who still don't feel like they merit the investment of resources their wealthier counterparts do.[/quote]

Well said doctor!! 
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