The Rate of Return amongst Immigrants.

 Recently I listed to this episode of Freakenomics, which is actually on the Lebanese diaspora:

Freakonomics » Who Are the Most Successful Immigrants in the World? Full Transcript

It's very interesting in and of itself, but the reason that I'm linking it in here is not for its dicsussion on the Lebanese, as interesting as that is, but for this:

KHATER: The first thing I would say is that anybody who immigrates is already a self-selecting population. In other words, when you makes the decision, and this kind of goes on a larger notion. Our understanding of immigration is of these sort of desperate souls that are sort of clinging to lifeboats and arriving here and just that’s it. It’s a very nice narrative, but it’s a false narrative. In fact, most people whether we’re talking about the Great Migration of the nineteenth century or the current migration, Hispanics and what have you, they don’t come here beyond the fact that most of them, the great majority of them come here to make money with the full intention of going back, by the way. And if you look at the rate of return in the nineteenth century, the Great Migration period, whether you’re talking about Germans with 80 percent return rate, or Northern Italians with about 60 percent, or Southern Italians with 30 percent, or even the Lebanese with about 37 percent. These people came here, they uprooted themselves from their culture, from their family, the familiar world that they exist in, many of them, especially in the turn of the twentieth century many of them with not even a word of English. And you know it’s a little bit better. But still people are arriving in this whole new alien place in which they had to adjust in all sorts of ways. They’re coming here specifically to make money. So it takes a particularly kind of individual to do that. It takes somebody who is already self-selecting. So you’re looking at a population that has, you know, has the tools, the sort of entrepreneurial, adventurous, pioneering spirit, personality, mentality. And so that already prepares them to undertake this incredibly risky process, investment if you will. I must hasten to add, by the way, that not everybody succeeded.

I'm frankly stunned by the return rates.  I had no idea of that at all.  I know that there were some immigrants who returned, but I mostly knew that indirectly.  For example, I knew a fellow whose step father descended from a Greek immigrant, and he once told me that his step father's father had immigrated, worked for awhile, disliked the US, returned to Greece and then come back.  Another Greek family I know here has kept very close ties to Greece, and in fact never sold their family farm in Greece which they still work.  I've read a little of Sicilians going back and forth, and you can find the same thing about Germans doing that.

But  didn't know 80% of the Germans went back to Germany, or that such a large percentage of Italians did. That's amazing.

I guess that says something about a person's ties to their home.