Having taught in a Queens JHS with a 55% Hispanic and 32% Asian population I can address your point.For the most part Asian kids arrive here generally well educated except for English and History. There is a strong desire to improve both socially and financially. Many of my Latino kids arrived here uneducated. It was not unusual to have a new 7th grader for whom we were his first scholastic experience. Latino kids have cultural issues as many are stigmatized for acting white. Asians have bad kids but they are not celebrated except in bad Mickey Rourke films. Finally there is distance. NYC to the New Delhi, Seoul or Shanghaiis an obstacle compared to NYC to the DR or Cartegena. Distance makes the country of origin into the old country not my country.
Thanks for that perspective...
I suppose the closer one is to the southern border, the more true your anecdote becomes.
This is not very clear. Could you rewrite this part more clearly? I never heard of Mickey Rourke.
A while back, George Will created a nice phrase for that when he explained why early Europeans assimilated in America where current Hispanics don't. He said the Europeans were "psychologically guillotined" and because of the distance from the homeland, faced a sink-or-swim scenario that those weeping across the border didn't.
[sidebar]When I saw the article, the first thing that popped into my mind was "Well, that's one group who won't be fighting with the Blacks or Hispanics (some of them) for a piece of the welfare pie." From personal experience, where the others band together to fight "The Man", the Asians band together to put their people through school or to start businesses. Yeah, I know there are some bad ones, but they seem to me to be a minority in the numerical sense.