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Slave states treated (white) people with nothing to their name very differently from those enslaved black people, both before and after slavery ended.
So? We're well past the point of the Civil Rights Act, and since then there are non-white minorities who arrived with less than black people had at the time, and who are now doing better than white people on average.
People treat those non-white minorities differently from slaves' descendants too! Second-generations Nigerians are intensely easy to tell apart from people who've lived in Georgia for the past 250 years, and they are treated differently as much as they both arrived in the US very differently.
Well, we went from states treating the differently (which implied laws being on the books) to people treating them differently. And since you brought up Nigerians, who have the same skin color as African Americans, meaning the remaining differences are probably cultural, at this point I have to ask, how is this different than the standard conservative argument about culture?
We needn't be so anal about language to keep writing the longform 'people in X and Y states', I don't think. The people of Alabama and South Carolina treated black people differently from others than they did in 1860, and they do it in 2022 as well. Nigerians are black in the same way that both Indians and Arabs are brown: the difference is really really easy to see. Furthermore, what Africans got to America in the past fifty years aren't close to a random sample; they are extremely disproportionately people who were well off enough to chance migrating to America in the first place.
I wasn't trying to be anal, I think there's a huge difference between people people looking at you with suspicion because of your skin color, and living subject to Jim Crow laws.
Can you make a specific argument on how the mechanics of the cycle of poverty would work here? Racist people from Alabama treat African Americans badly, which explains why they're doing so poorly, but are happy to see Nigerians zoom past them?
So you are saying there isn't a single non-white group that arrived poor, and who is doing better than whites nowadays? If I find one will you change your mind on the cycle of poverty?
That's.. Kinda it, yeah. The Nigerians mostly aren't moving to the south, and when they do mostly don't get caught up in the sorts of dynamics southern black people do. Pretty much.
No, and that's so far off the mark from what I wrote that I've no idea how you could read into it that way. What the hell, man? The Africans who migrated to America over the past fifty years, disproportionately, were among the most well-off and affluent people within their own societies. The same did not hold true for the slaves carted off that way. A skilled Nigerian worker migrating for a nation more than eager to receive skilled workers is going to have extremely different outcomes from someone whose ancestors were still slaves in the 1800s and whose (white) neighbours, by and large, wish they were anywhere but near them.
Ok, then we should be able to see them perform on par, and not better, with black people in the non-racist areas they're moving to. Yes?
Well, this was in the context of the thread. I originally brought up non-white minorities who immigrated poor, who are now outperforming whites, you responded by saying the groups that immigrated were disproportionately well off. I think it's reasonable to read it as disputing my claim that they immigrated poor? At best it's completely irrelevant to the point I was raising, and I don't understand then why you brought it up.
If these Non-South US areas are so eager for skilled workers, and welcoming to everyone from any part of the world, why are they struggling so much in educating their local populations to become just as skilled? It's not like there hasn't been a ton of resources spent on precisely that goal?
No, why?
There are roughly two groups of nonwhite people who migrated to the US, the difference of which is relevant here:
Nonblack people. A bunch of these certainly arrived in the US poor, but were not on the receiving end of as much legal and cultural ill-treatment as southern black people were, and perhaps are. So, not relevant to southern blacks' lives.
Black Africans. As opposed to the former group, extremely few of these headed for the US destitute as can be, nor were these people quite so unskilled. Poor by American standards - certainly. Not so much poor by the standards of their home nation.
Well, a lot of the native skilled workers really don't want the competition, and find tacking on credentialism/licensing nonsense easier than blocking immigration, though they'd love more of that too. I don't know how much SSC you've read, but Scott certainly has spilled plenty ink on showing how this works in medicine, and it is far from the only field where this is a problem.
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