The Triple Package by Jed Rubenfeld, Amy Chua Read Free Book Online

Marielitos and post-1990New Cubans were black or of mixed race.
    The Cuban American “economic miracle” has been primarily a phenomenon of the Exiles and their children. Cuba’s pre-Castro social stratifications have been replicated in the United States. The Marielitos
and New Cubans frequently received acold shoulder from the Exiles. They are not prominent in business and are largelyabsent from Miami’s power elite.
    Thus the Cuban American story is a complex one. Statistically, the New Cubans have fared no better—indeed on some dimensions worse—than other Hispanics. Only 13 percent of the Marielitos have college degrees—about the same percentage as other Hispanics. Some 70 to 80 percent of New Cubans speak English “less than very well.” Their poverty rates (about 15 percent of adults under the age of sixty-five; almost 40 percent over the age of sixty-five) are roughly double that of the Exiles, and their overall median income is below that of other Hispanics.
    By contrast, the Exiles have distanced themselves from America’s other Hispanic groups in both their self-identification and their bank accounts. Not only did the Exile community far outperform other Hispanic groups in the U.S.; by 1990, nearly 37 percent ofthe Exiles’ U.S.-born children earned more than $50,000 a year, whereas only 18 percent of Anglo-Americans did.
    Themajority of the nonwhite Marielitos chose to resettle outside Miami. Many live
in New York City and Los Angeles, joining the large populations of other Hispanics in those cities. By contrast, theExiles live in a world of upward mobility, thriving business success, exclusive Miami private clubs, outsize political influence, and rising representation on Ivy League campuses—a group that can justifiably boast of having joined America’s elite.
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    T HE DISPROPORTIONATE SUCCESS OF certain West Indian and African immigrant groups, as compared with non-immigrant American blacks, has been the subject of intense debate for some time. Although immigrants make up only 8 percent of America’s black population, * their overrepresentation at America’s best universities and on Wall Street is well-known. Hard numbers, however, are surprisingly hard to come by.
    Ivy League universities, for example, every year announce the “African American” percentage of their incoming class, but they will not disclose how many of these students are from immigrant families or provide national-origin information about them. Investment banks are in general extremely secretive about who works for them. They don’t make public any information about the racial composition of their employees. As a result, researchers are obliged to rely on sample surveys and are sometimes consigned to poring over lists of surnames trying to decide which ones “sound African.”
    The most comprehensive and reliable survey on the black immigrant presence at American universities, conducted by Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey in 1999, indicated that41 percent of black Ivy League freshmen had at least one foreign-born parent. In 2004, Harvard professors Henry LouisGates Jr. and Lani Guinier assertedthat by their reckoning, a majority of Harvard’s black students were immigrants or their children. Today, if Yale Law School is any measure, the overrepresentation of first- and second-generation black immigrants at top U.S. schools may be even higher.
    In the first-year class of 2011–2012 atYale Law, 18 students out of total class of 205 were members of the Black Law Students Association. Of these 18 students, only 2 were African American (a term we’ll use—unideally—to refer to blacks in the United States who are neither immigrants nor the children of immigrants) on both sides. Of the other 16, 3 were Nigerian, 2 Ethiopian, 1 Liberian, 1 Haitian, 1 half-Ethiopian and half-Jewish, 1 half-Haitian and half-Korean, 1 half-Jamaican and half–Puerto Rican, 1 half-Panamanian and half–African American, and 1 half-Swedish