Immigrants’ descendants are super-charged achievers, improving on their parents at a rate far exceeding natives. It’s common sense when we look at our world. For young immigrants in the US who drop out of high school, 40% of their children go beyond it. For natives, it’s half that. Roughly half of the natives children surpass their parents’ educational attainment, while two-thirds of immigrants children do.

There are many implications, but my focus is on what this means for our immigration policies. Children in relatively deprived Western families will be about as successful as they would have been with wealthier parents. Genetic and random factors account for the vast majority of a person’s outcome, regardless of their home environment (assuming an absence of abuse). However, the environment markedly harms children in deprivation outside wealthy nations. While we obsess about marginal improvements to British children’s grades, our closed borders measurably impair Sudanese children.