A Self-fulfilling Prophecy

In Nancy Foner’s From Ellis Island to JFK, she devotes an entire chapter to describing the education of immigrants and how it has changed since the turn of the twentieth century. She debunks the myth that the immigrants of today are doing much worse than the immigrants of the past.
The immigrants of the past came in different circumstances and to a different America than immigrants in the current times. In the past immigrant children had to help work to help out their family financially, the age for employment was lower and even if they were not of age papers could be falsified. Also, the standards of education today are much higher than the standards set in the beginning of the twentieth century. So while the programs developed to assimilate immigrants today are more helpful than the way immigrants were expected to assimilate before, the current wave of immigrants also have much more to learn. Education today also holds much more weight. Nowadays one cannot get a good job without a high school diploma, this was not the case in the past. Now education is a path to upward mobility more than ever, it is more of a necessity than it was back then.
What I found interesting was that some immigrant groups do better than others academically. Foner attributes social class, race, ethnicity, and the education of parents.
This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. Asians are more likely to assimilate into middle class white neighborhoods whereas West Indians tend to assimilate in neighborhoods that are worse off. This fuels the stereotypes that Asians are intelligent, which aids them in climbing up the social ladder. Also, schools in Asian countries tend to be better which helps put the children ahead. Asian families tend to be better off financially as well, so they can afford send their children to extra classes to improve their scores. This creates a cycle in which Asians assimilate into better neighborhoods, go to better schools, and move upward whereas West Indians and immigrants of other ethnicities assimilate into lower class neighborhoods, attend worse schools and stay at the same level as their parents. This is partly why Asians continue to do better and other ethnicities stay the same: segmented assimilation.