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and like i said, i dont really believe that this is the true picture. a lot of of the foreign nationals that came here didn't come here only performing menial labor. the fact is a lot of them were top students with degrees already that left due to economic or political problems with their respective countries. almost all of my parents friends came here ALREADY having med degrees/ multiple bachelor's degrees/phD's. in turn, asian parents i believe cultivate grounds for their children to be better. asian parents tend to be less accepting of their children's weaknesses than caucasian parents (generallyl speaking). if your not good at something, that meant you stayed up later and woke up earlier. a lot of asian parents give their kids homework and send them to all sorts of academic related things (i know i've been there). taking all of this into account i'm saying it just doesn't really surprise me all that much that asians as a minority tend to outscore a lot of other nationalities when i comes to academic things. in fact i even read in a psych book that asians tend to "act" (this is inaccurate word) about 15-20 IQ pts higher than their actual IQ. lastly i think that asians tend to major in science/engineering related fields because their parents were, and a lot of the people they knew growing up were. asians dont really have too many role models in the media or sports, and the environment cultivated by a lot of asian parents doesn't really encourage them into going into these fields. i don't believe that a lack of talent is the barrier of entry into engineering, but rather beliefs and general attitude of students entering into college.
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<p>I believe your last statement is on the mark, and that attitudes and general beliefs are far more telling than role models or what degrees your parents may or may not have, or family wealth, or any of those other factors. </p>
<p>Thomas Sowell has written extensively about the success of Asian students throughout the world, particularly in science and engineering. For example, he has noted that back when Hong Kong was a British colony, Hong Kong Chinese students would, on average, perform better on standardized math tests than the white British students in Hong Kong, despite the fact that the Hong Kong Chinese came from, on average, significantly poorer and less educated backgrounds then did the white Hong Kong students. The history of Chinese immigrants throughout the nations of SouthEast Asia like Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc. has been a constant story of poverty stricken, illiterate Chinese immigrants who arrived literally with barely more than the shirts on their backs, yet pushed their children to study hard and get educated, despite numerous obstacles to doing so. Colonial masters like the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, etc. would generally treat the immigrant Chinese as legally third-class citizens, with fewer rights than either the whites or the native Malays/Indonesians/Filipinos, etc. But that didn't stop the Chinese - they simply plowed ahead with the rights they did have. When the British, who controlled Malaysia, built public free schools for the Malays, but not the Chinese, the Chinese simply built and ran their own schools. In all cases, it is a matter of attitudes towards education and hard work that counted the most. In fact, former Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir of Malaysia, an ardent Malay nationalist, justified affirmative action for Malays (and against the Chinese in Malaysia) because he admitted, candidly, that the Chinese in Malaysia simply work and study harder than the Malays do such that the Malays could not win in a fair competition, and he attributed these attitudes to the fact that the Malays lived in a land of plenty for centuries whereas the Chinese immigrated from a hardscrabble, poverty-stricken existence in China so over the centuries the Chinese learned to value hard work in a way that the Malays did not, and he exhorted his fellow Malays to learn to work harder. This is all covered in Mahathir's book "The Malay dilemma". </p>
<p>The same can also be said of attitudes of the Chinese in the US. Thomas Sowell has noted that the children of poverty-stricken and poorly educated Chinese immigrants (often illegal immigrants who arrive by boats run by Chinese gangsters) who live in the ghetto and go to bad inner-city schools nonetheless enjoy significantly greater academic success than the other students at that same bad school. The same could be said for the children of the waves of Japanese immigrants of the 1800's and early 1900's who almost all arrived as penniless, illiterate farmers in Hawaii and the West Coast, yet whose children managed to enjoy astounding academic success. In fact, Sowell noted that these Japanese-American children formed a great wave of doctors, engineers, scientists, and the like despite the fact that practically none of those children would have had a well-educated Japanese-American role model to emulate, and in fact, many would have never known a single literate Japanese person in their entire childhoods. </p>
<p>In fact, the whole history of Asian immigration demonstrates the general themes of culture and attitudes. To paraphrase Sowell, one might say that if Chinese-Americans are so heavily represented in the science, math, and engineering disciplines, this might be because of something peculiar to the particular Chinese who immigrated here. That holds far less water when you discover the same patterns of science and math achievement among Chinese-Canadians, or Chinese-British, or Chinese-Australians, or all the Chinese who immigrated to the various nations of SouthEast Asia. For example, in the 1960's, more than 400 engineering degrees were conferred to Chinese students in Malaysia, yet only 4 Malays earned engineering degrees, despite the fact that the Chinese are a minority of the total population of Malaysia. Nor was this particularly unusual - in almost every year since then, the Chinese-Malays have consistently earned more engineering degrees than the Malays do, despite strong affirmative action to set aside university spots for Malays, and despite the fact that Malaysia has a far larger population of Malays than Chinese. </p>
<p>I could go on and on, but basically, what I will say is that anybody who wants to know about this subject ought to read some of the books by Sowell.</p>