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Comment by namirez | Hacker News Reader

> There's also significant selection bias on the entry side. U.S. immigration policies are heavily biased towards people with unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country

Categorically false! Most of immigration to the US is family based; actually about two-third of them.

source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/17/key-facts-a...

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You take an initial immigrant who gets in because of the merit categories and then have them bring over all their family members, whose gene pool ends up in the U.S? Whose family values?

This article is about upward mobility in the children of immigrants. What traits do children get from their parents? Most people would say it's nature (their genes) and nurture (their upbringing). All of these are widely shared with the family members of the initial immigrant, so most immigration being family-based does not invalidate this conclusion.

As far as I'm aware, there's no strong link between motivation and generics.

Or as Vincent said in Gattaca: "There is no gene for the human spirit."

it is a whole constellation of genetic, epi-genetic, environmental factors, and experiences in concert. to say that there is no genetic predisposition for behavior is... not confirmed by the science.

I don't know if "motivation" per se is studied in this context, but the genetic links for at least "self-regulation"[1], "self-control"[2], and "political ambition"[3] have been studied:

[1]https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000224

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...

[3]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1

A lot of what "motivation" is comes from being able and healthy, and a lot of that certainly comes from genetics, I'd say. If my family's health history didn't prevent me from sleeping more than a few hours a night, I'd certainly be much, much more motivated. No idea how it translates in statistics.

As genetics leads to different body types, so does it lead to distinct individual cultures to adapt to genetically defined physiology. So genetics can directly inform culture that way.

The two are inextricably tied. How you think about yourself and your world is based on how you experience it, which is rooted in your genetics and how you were (and weren't) taught to experience it.

We at least learn to motivate ourselves based on how we're taught to do so through the cultures the people around us carry. If some of that is informed by genetics, then it's possible for you to learn to motivate yourself based on someone else's genetics.

It's hard to argue for nature when the immigrants come from among the most diverse ethnic groups. There is literally no homogeneity among them apart from the fact that their parents weren't American citizens.

I don't believe the assertion was that these genes are ethnogenetic. I find gp's assertion dubious as well, but I think you may have misunderstood it.

While I definitely buy the nurture side of that argument more than the nature side, it's still possible to be selecting for a set of genetic traits across a diverse group as long as those traits are distributed pretty evenly.

Much like a randomized controlled trial, the high-pass filters tend to render the nature-nurture argument a moot point. In fact, raising it mostly makes me worry about the more racist aspects of anthropology leaking into the discussion.

That brings up a slightly different aspect in my mind, that children of immigrants might be more than likely to be surrounded by large amounts of family members which probably tends to have a positive effect?

This is probably a quite important point.

I think that the classic "western" approach to family residences is becoming more obviously damaging to everyone involved as time goes by. Growing up in a multi-generational household is a significantly different experience compared to having either two parents - or having one primary parent and a bread earner. Being exposed to more diverse opinions on a regular basis is probably healthy - seeing authority as imbued and transferable instead of being the exclusive domain of a parent is probably healthy - living in a household with more access to people (less technology filling the gap) is probably healthy - and living in a household with lower overall stress (since there are more people to bear the burden) is probably healthy.

I think single children end up doing poorer for much the same reasons that older siblings serve to lessen the reliance on parents while also being imbued with trust and responsibility... but, I think having more adults present as "caretakers" is just a good thing. So, even if we keep nuclear families internally - it might be beneficial to children to open up more community trust for communal custody of children's development.

I grew up an only child[1] and I have a lot of pleasant memories but I especially treasure some times I went off with a random Aunt, or a random neighbor and got to watch them for a day do their art stuff, or go for hikes in a different way - it helped shake up my mental monoculture. I had friends that grew up in multi-generational households but didn't myself, and it was quite a different experience being over there... learning that just because parents were away it wasn't anarchy - getting to interact with different adults different days and doing different activities that interested them.

I really think the nuclear family approach could use some real improvement.

1. Essentially... both me and my brother were only children at 13 years apart.

> and living in a household with lower overall stress (since there are more people to bear the burden) is probably healthy.

Some people have a lot of conflict with their parents and/or parents-in-law. But, since they live in different residences and only see them once every few weeks, it is manageable. If they were under the same roof, the stress might be a lot worse.

I don't know how relevant that is. Some people will always get divorced and while there are ways to address that (and, multi-generational houses that lower the stress of child rearing may reduce it) I think we can treat them as independent and still see benefits in multi-generational household. Instead of having either one parent or the other and placing the full responsibility on that single person, a multi-generational household of a divorcee might still include that person's parents and unmarried siblings to help raise the child.

I don't understand what divorce has to do with my comment? I was talking about people who don't get along with their own parents and/or with their spouse's parents. Neither has any necessary connection to the topic of divorce. Plenty of people remain married despite the fact that they have a poor relationship with their own parents or with their spouse's parents.

Nobody is forced to stay in the multigenerational home unless they cannot afford something else.

But you cannot choose to stay if there's no space... Modern houses are often too small to fit a multigenerational family.

One major effect is that when grandparents are there to watch the kids, the parents can devote more time and effort to their career, especially women. Have you ever noticed that in IT, women are more proportionally represented among immigrants, often from countries that are more socially conservative overall (Eastern Europe, South and East Asia etc).

Even if family-based, you need to be on the more ambitious side to make the move to a different country, most likely a quarter to half the world away. Many Americans seem to think that everyone in a third-world country wants to move to the US. This is not true. Only a small subset is actually willing to uproot themselves into a new nation with a different language, culture and society for the sake of their future generations. Even if you ask the people here on H1B, many of them will tell you that they want to go back and don't think the stress of adapting and staying away from family is worth it. There is a lot of sacrifice involved. And these are people who are ambitious and entrepreneurial enough.

In order for something to be "categorically false" it needs to be false for the whole category. Two thirds is....not the whole.

But you need one family member in the US for you to pull in the rest, and the first one tends to have

> unique skills, high levels of education, and a fair amount of money in their home country

I find it strange that you're able to define it as categorically false given that the parent didn't specify what U.S immigration selection bias was being compared against.

> what U.S immigration selection bias was being compared against

If it's not clear to you, take a look at immigration policies of Canada and Australia. In the US, only 12% of visas are employment based which are very strict in terms of skills.

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