Beancounting

Last updated on: August 6, 2014 at 9:36 pm by Jane the Actuary

Beancounting 2014-08-06T21:36:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So my hostile open-borders commenter is back, eager to jump into my comments about the University of Illinois’s pursuit of full-pay Chinese students, and accuse me of racism.

Let’s start with personal experience: three Chinese roommates in grad school, one of whom I’m still in touch with, two of whom I “named” (that is, suggested the English name which bore the closest resemblance to their actual given name). Two had mostly Chinese friends, except for us roommates, but we did hang out together, and one, a law student, was actually socially more Law Student than Chinese student in terms of study groups, nightlife, etc.

But I’ve also read a great deal, in newspapers, online, and in books, and the message is pretty consistent: the emphasis in China is on learning to read English and memorizing vocabulary and even students who are successful enough on the TOEFL to qualify for admission still arrive in the U.S. with very poor verbal skills.

In any case, another commenter observed that “I never had a German (or other European) student who was less fluent in English than the average American student. The same is not true of Asian students.” And my open-borders commenter replied, “Does your your claim hold as robustly, sampling distribution – wise,in terms of Asian students, as you indicate it does for you experientially? If one takes into account fluency levels of vast swaths of the intl student popn from from India, they’re very competent in spoken English, equal if not better than the average American student, let alone European.”

And — well, I’ll start by saying that, among the Indians I deal with at work (that is, they are in India, not immigrants to the U.S.), I haven’t entirely figured out whether their, to put it nicely, peculiar way of expressing things, is a matter of idiom or simply poor writing ability.

But what’s striking to me is that it seems as if our government’s determination to bean-count and place everyone in their tightly-defined but very broad racial/ethnic group makes us all a little stupid. Of course Indians and Chinese and Filipinos and the Japanese, while all fitting into the assigned category of “Asian” or, if they’re immigrants to the U.S. or descendants of immigrants, “Asian-American” (unless they’re the children of an interracial marriage and become white), are not all the same. We used to have the category “Oriental” for people from China/Korea/Japan, until that became politically incorrect, and, of course, I remember people saying “Indian from India” to distinguish, though in my suburb growing up there was a fairly substantial Indian immigrant population so that no one would think that “Indian” meant Native American anyway. But it seems that the popularization of the term “Asia-American” has meant that everyone’s been lumped together — in the same way as everyone from, or with ancestors from, a country which speaks Spanish or Portugese is now very blandly “Hispanic” even though an Argentine with German ancestors has fairly little in common with a Mexican of mixed Spanish/indigenous ancestry.

So — look: my guess is that most Europeans think of themselves as culturally similar, especially now with the European Union. The countries are mostly contiguous and not that distant — on our trip back two years ago, driving into Italy, we were surrounded by Dutch license plates. But do an Indian and an Indonesian, for instance, think of themselves as having “Asianness” in common? I’d be surprised.

And what’s even flakier is that, according to the government, White European, but is defined as “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” Which means that, if we had an influx of Egyptians, for instance, or Iraqi refugees, they wouldn’t count for a hill of beans as far as affirmative action/quotas are concerned.

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