Why mexicans work hard

On the basis of paid labor only, Japanese work the most, spending just over six hours a day at work on average, followed by South Koreans and then Mexicans. The Danish spend the least time -- less than four hours a day --in paid employment. Looking at unpaid work, the OECD found Mexicans spend the most time doing housework, at more than three hours a day, and South Koreans the least -- one hour and 19 minutes a day.

Not all Mexicans came to the United States for reasons of poverty. Lately, upper-class Mexicans have thrown their moneybags over the fence into La Jolla or Aspen or Houston.

Like other Third-World rich in time of fiscal woe at home, they save themselves by saving their money. The United States understands them and takes them in. There is no work at home.

They come for jobs. They do not otherwise want America as they perceive America. They do not want American children. Mexicans perceive America as a place of dangerous confusions, dangerous freedoms--a Miltonic Tijuana. Every village in Mexico can name sons and daughters who have not come back.

They nonetheless realize the risk by its proper name: a job. Five hundred Mexicans wait on a blasted ridge in Tijuana to become invisible--this night it will happen at They are not discussing Thomas Jefferson or the Bill of Rights. Someone has an uncle in Reno who knows of a job. Another knows a farmer near Tracy who always hires at this time of year.

Washington is beginning, just beginning, to interpret correctly the single-minded purpose for Mexicans entering the United States. But for a long time now America has lured Mexicans up to work, whether illegally or legally is not the point. To offer a job, any job, is already to have invited Mexico into the very center, the working center, of American culture.

American culture is based on the job. Late in the 19th Century, Americans reached into Mexico for cheap labor, to build America or to harvest America.

There were American towns in the Southwest that engaged Mexican laborers rather than bring in American blacks. During wartime Mexicans were invited to replace American men who had gone off to fight. Mexicans were hired for work considered too dangerous or too hard or too demeaning for Americans to do. Get an outsider to do it. When America had done with the Mexican, America expected the Mexican to disappear. In a new book, The Triple Package, Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, argue that some groups—namely Chinese, Jews, Cubans, and Nigerians—are more successful than others because they possess certain cultural traits that enable them to be.

Combined, the authors assert, these traits drive the groups to succeed within a broader American culture that is comparatively lackadaisical. They base their argument on an analysis of test scores, educational achievement, median household income, and other factors. Most parents do. But the reason Chinese-Americans get ahead is because they start ahead. Way ahead, in many cases.

Of the Chinese-American college graduates, 22 percent went on to attain graduate degrees. Asian-American kids, the study found, have good role models and extra help from family and community when it comes to schooling. They also benefit from well-educated parents who put them in good schools and push them into high-income, high-status professions, including medicine, pharmacy, engineering, and law. I overhear my porcelain teachers clink their teeth together like a toast in celebration of their tongues, proud to be so kind.

My father borrows a name so he can feed us. In the temple, ama and I leave our bibles at the end of the bench near the aisle so we can find our seats every Sunday. Prayers only work if you close your eyes.

At home, the men pluck their eyes out while they eat dinner.