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

and half–African American. In all, 12 of the 18 had at least one foreign-born parent.
    Among black immigrants, Nigerians are the largest and most successful group. In 2010, there were some260,000 Nigerians in the U.S., a mere 0.7 percent of the black American population. Yet in 2013, 20 to 25 percent of the 120 black students atHarvard Business School were Nigerian. As early as 1999, Nigerians were overrepresented among black students at elite American colleges and universities by afactor of about ten.
    As Nigerians graduate from these schools, they have predictably flourished. Nigerians have doneparticularly well in medicine. Overall, Nigerian Americans probably make up around 10 percent of the nation’s black physicians. And medicine may not even be the real Nigerian forte. By comparison with other blacks in the United States, according to a PhD dissertation on high-achieving second-generation Nigerian Americans, “Nigerians dominate” investment banking. Or as one African American analyst at Goldman Sachs recently joked, “If my only life experiences were at Goldman, my impression would be that Nigeria must have a billion people, because most of the blackpeople I met were Nigerian.” In addition, Nigerians appear to beoverrepresented at America’s top law firms by a factor of at least seven, as compared to their percentage of the U.S. black population as a whole.
    The success of Nigerians—as well as Ghanaians and certain other African immigrant communities—continues a trend observed decades ago in America’s black West Indian immigrants. Several of the country’s most famous 1960s civil rights and black power activists, including Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm (America’s first black congresswoman), and Stokely Carmichael, wereWest Indian by birth or descent. In 1999,only Jamaica sent more blacks to America’s selective colleges than did Nigeria. In 2001, the son of two Jamaican immigrants,Colin Powell, became America’s first black secretary of state. And the man who promoted Powell to general in 1978 wasClifford Alexander, the country’s first black secretary of the Army; Mr. Alexander’s father was a Jamaican immigrant. For decades, at least in America’s northern states, West Indians and their children “have been disproportionately represented in thebusiness, professional, and political elites.”
    It’s important to emphasize that West Indian and African immigrant success in the United States is not at all uniform and in any event is not comparable to that of, say, Indian or Jewish Americans, whose incomes are the highest of any groups in the country. Several African immigrant groups, particularly those from Somalia, Sudan, or other countries with large refugee populations, areamong the nation’s poorest. And even the most successful groups are not (yet) topping the income charts, although they are doing better than the national average.
    For example, in terms of income,Nigerian Americans dramatically outperform black Americansand also outperform Americans in general. Almost 25 percent of Nigerian households make over $100,000 a year; only 10.6 percent of black American householdsoverall do. Five percent of Nigerian American households earn over $200,000 a year; the figure is only about 1.3 percent for black America overall. The median Nigerian American household income is $58,000 a year; the national median is $51,000. In 2010, Nigerian men working full-time earned a median income of $50,000, while the figure for all U.S.-born men was $46,000.
    Given that Nigerian Americans obtain college and advanced degrees at one of the highest rates in the country, the fact that they only somewhat out-earn the national average is noteworthy. A number of factors almost certainly contribute. For one thing, the Nigerian communityincludes a significant number of new arrivals and their children. Some of these new arrivals are very poor (pulling down the overall income statistics); many are in the