HVGIQ: Cambodia

8 Comments

1. 

   JayMan

   June 12, 2014 at 12:45 am

   Good post.

   To the extent the results from Clarke et al (1993) represent the scores of new immigrants, and the results from the post-1990s Californian state exams are mostly second generation, we might take this as evidence that when Cambodians are nurtured in the high quality U.S. environment their standard scores rise to the low or mid 90s: similar to the scores of closely-related populations like the Thais or Vietnamese.

   But why assume that these immigrants were representative of the Cambodian population? (Immigrants to the U.S. usually aren’t, save Mexicans.)

   Reply
   • 

     Jason Malloy (Post author)

     June 12, 2014 at 2:36 am

     But why assume that these immigrants were representative of the Cambodian population?

     There was significant elite immigration from Vietnam, but the refugees from Cambodia were mostly rural peasants. Maybe they were below average, but when your GDP is $50 per capita, how can you even tell?

     Reply
     • 

       T. Greer

       June 21, 2014 at 3:22 pm

       A reference on this point:

       Arthur Sakamoto and. Hyeyoung Woo, “The Socioeconomic Attainments of Second-Generation Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese Americans,* Sociological Inquiry, Volume 77, Issue 1, pages 44–75 (February 2007).

       To quote:

       In short, unlike most other Asian immigrants, Southeast Asians typically arrived in the United States as refugees under duress with essentially no economic assets or well-devised plans for the future. Many of the first arrivals had no prior family connections. Nor were they particularly selective in terms of possessing high levels of educational attainment or scarce occupational skills as stipulated by immigration law (Kao 1995). Refugees tend to have lower socioeconomic statuses than immigrants who are admitted for their labor market skills.

       The initial immigration of Southeast Asians is usually divided into two major waves. The first are those who entered the United States in 1975 or earlier (i.e., Wave 1), while the second (i.e., Wave 2) are those who entered after 1975. Wave 1 immigrants are mostly persons who entered the United States in 1975 (with the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal of U.S. military forces in Vietnam) because the immigration of these groups before 1975 was highly limited (Rumbaut 1995). Wave 2 immigrants are mostly from 1979 and later as the immigration of these groups between 1976 and 1978 was comparatively minor (Rumbaut 1995).

       Wave 1 Vietnamese immigrants tended to have somewhat higher socioeconomic origins than Wave 2 Vietnamese immigrants. As discussed by Rumbaut (1995), Wave 1 Vietnamese immigrants were substantially more likely than Wave 2 Vietnamese immigrants to have completed high school, to know some English, to be from an urban background, and to have had an upper white-collar occupation. Wave 1 Vietnamese immigrants were more likely to be associated with the South Vietnamese military or the U.S. military or to have been employed by the U.S. government. By contrast, Wave 2 Vietnamese immigrants were more likely to have never attended school, to have been farmers or fishermen, to know no English, and to have a rural background. Wave 2 Vietnamese immigrants were also sometimes known as the “boat people” in the American popular press during the 1980s because of their precarious and often tragic exodus via boats from Vietnam to nearby asylum countries.3

       Wave 1 Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian immigrants also tended to have slightly higher socioeconomic origins than their Wave 2 counterparts. Both waves of these groups, however, tended to have lower levels of education than even Wave 2 Vietnamese. The school system in Laos at that time did not offer schooling beyond the 12th grade. Only tiny proportions of these populations were urban. The Wave 2 Cambodians have very low levels of education because many are the survivors of the “killing fields” controlled by the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. The Hmong are particularly disadvantaged in part because the Laotian government at that time did not develop a school system in Hmong communities. The Hmong were mostly illiterate, and were engaged in hunting and in traditional slash-and-burn agriculture (Chan 1994; Kitano and Daniels 1995; Rumbaut 1995).

       As noted above, we focus our analysis on the second generation rather than on persons who immigrated to the United States as adults. Our investigation therefore does not include Wave 1 or Wave 2 adult immigrants per se but rather their children who were educated in the United States. It is a well-established finding, however, that children tend to have higher educational attainment to the extent that their parents have higher educational attainment and socioeconomic status (Featherman and Hauser 1978; Goyette and Xie 1999; Mare and Winship 1988). Furthermore, persons who complete more education tend to have higher incomes and wages (e.g., Farley 1996). We therefore expect that

       second-generation Southeast Asian Americans who have Wave 1 parents to tend to have higher socioeconomic attainments than those who have Wave 2 parents.

       The results:

       Among Cambodians, Wave 1 immigrants have a mean years of schooling of 11.91, while Wave 2 immigrants have a mean of 7.15. The difference between the two waves is thus 4.76 years which is the largest difference for any of the Southeast Asian groups. While Wave 1 Cambodians have mean years of

       schooling that is fairly similar to African Americans (i.e., 11.91 versus 12.14 for African Americans), the 7.15 mean years of schooling for Wave 2 Cambodians is quite low by U.S. standards. Wave 1 Cambodians of the “parental generation” have a poverty rate that is substantially lower than that for African Americans, while among Wave 2 Cambodians poverty is about 10 percentage points higher than among African Americans. Only one of five Wave 1 Cambodians speaks English poorly, while among Wave 2 Cambodians the corresponding figure is about two of three. It should be noted, however, that the sample sizes shown in Table 1 imply that slightly less than 10 percent of the “parental generation” of Cambodians is Wave 1 (over 90% are Wave 2).

       The rest of the paper has other data & insights germane to this discussion and worth reading in full.

       Reply
2. 

   Chuck

   June 12, 2014 at 2:02 am

   You missed:
   http://www.mankindquarterly.org/spring_summer2014_lynn2.html
   (delete)

   Reply
   • 

     Jason Malloy (Post author)

     June 12, 2014 at 1:25 pm

     I did miss that, but it contains no new information. Lynn’s paper simply summarizes the results from Janssen & Geiser (2012). He is attempting to use the IQ of University students for the average IQ of Cambodia. If he used this as a consistent inclusion criteria for his dataset he would get all kinds of wonky results. Many nations would have inflated national IQs.

     Reply
3. 

   ckp

   June 12, 2014 at 12:40 pm

   How does Achievement Quotient translate to IQ?

   Reply
4. 

   Steve Sailer

   June 16, 2014 at 2:55 am

   Thanks.

   How about doing Ukrainians, another region subjected in the 20th Century to massacres and exiling of people with above average intelligences: Jews, kulaks, aristocrats, and Communist Party officials (both by Stalin in the Great Terror and by Hitler in 1941)? And no doubt there has been some selective migration outward since the late 1980s: my son’s one Ukrainian friend in grade school, Andy, was the son of a genius aerospace engineer who owned the single nicest piece of land I’ve ever been on in the San Fernando Valley.

   The lone Ukrainian figure I’ve seen from Rindermann is 95, which sounds reasonable, but you are amazing at digging up more numbers.

   Reply
5. 

   John

   October 16, 2024 at 11:27 am

   Why does Cambodia on worldpopulationreview have much higher IQs when all other third world countries were updated to have lower IQs?

   Reply