So my hostile open-borders commenter is back, eager to jump into my comments about the University of Illinois\u2019s pursuit of full-pay Chinese students, and accuse me of racism. <\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with personal experience: \u00a0three Chinese roommates in grad school, one of whom I\u2019m still in touch with, two of whom I \u201cnamed\u201d (that is, suggested the English name which bore the closest resemblance to their actual given name). \u00a0Two 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. <\/p>\n
But I\u2019ve also read a great deal, in newspapers, online, and in books, and the message is pretty consistent: \u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n
In any case, another commenter observed that \u201cI 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.\u201d \u00a0And my open-borders commenter replied, \u201cDoes your your claim hold as robustly, sampling distribution \u2013 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\u2019re very competent in spoken English, equal if not better than the average American student, let alone European.\u201d<\/p>\n
And \u2014 well, I\u2019ll 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\u2019t entirely figured out whether their, to put it nicely, peculiar way of expressing things, is a matter of idiom or simply poor writing ability.<\/p>\n
But what\u2019s striking to me is that it seems as if our government\u2019s determination to bean-count and place everyone in their tightly-defined but very broad racial\/ethnic group makes us all a little stupid. \u00a0Of course Indians and Chinese and Filipinos and the Japanese, while all fitting into the assigned category of \u201cAsian\u201d or, if they\u2019re immigrants to the U.S. or descendants of immigrants, \u201cAsian-American\u201d (unless they\u2019re the children of an interracial marriage and become white), are not all the same. \u00a0We used to have the category \u201cOriental\u201d for people from China\/Korea\/Japan, until that became politically incorrect, and, of course, I remember people saying \u201cIndian from India\u201d to distinguish, though in my suburb growing up there was a fairly substantial Indian immigrant population so that no one would think that \u201cIndian\u201d meant Native American anyway. \u00a0But it seems that the popularization of the term \u201cAsia-American\u201d has meant that everyone\u2019s been lumped together \u2014 in the same way as everyone from, or with ancestors from, a country which speaks Spanish or Portugese is now very blandly \u201cHispanic\u201d even though an Argentine with German ancestors has fairly little in common with a Mexican of mixed Spanish\/indigenous ancestry.<\/p>\n
So \u2014 look: \u00a0my guess is that most Europeans think of themselves as culturally similar, especially now with the European Union. \u00a0The countries are mostly contiguous and not that distant \u2014 on our trip back two years ago, driving into Italy, we were surrounded by Dutch license plates. \u00a0But do an Indian and an Indonesian, for instance, think of themselves as having \u201cAsianness\u201d in common? \u00a0I\u2019d be surprised.<\/p>\n
And what\u2019s even flakier is that, according to the government<\/a>, White European, but is defined as \u201cA person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.\u201d \u00a0Which means that, if we had an influx of Egyptians, for instance, or Iraqi refugees, they wouldn\u2019t count for a hill of beans as far as affirmative action\/quotas are concerned.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So my hostile open-borders commenter is back, eager to jump into my comments about the University of Illinois\u2019s pursuit of full-pay Chinese students, and accuse me of racism. Let\u2019s start with personal experience: \u00a0three Chinese roommates in grad school, one of whom I\u2019m still in touch with, two of whom I \u201cnamed\u201d (that is, suggested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n