The United States of America, arguably the least racist country on the planet, continues to draw would-be immigrants of all backgrounds from all over the world. Unfortunately the U.S. may now be turning away too many of them, but new research affirms that the aspiring entrants are not crazy—this really is a land where your ethnicity does not dictate your success.
In a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Oded Galor of Brown and Daniel Wainstock of Oxford explore conditions that correlate with economic success in the U.S. Like many academics, the authors appear to be focused on income inequality as a problem to be solved, which perhaps will make their findings especially compelling. The authors first make their case for the importance of determining whether income inequality is driven by membership in particular ethnic groups: