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I could imagine that her husband, having been brought up not in this country, might have a hard time to change himself especially if he came to this country not at a very young age.</p>
<p>Regarding “working long hours”, I observe that, in the industry that I have been in at least, many first/1.5/2nd generations of Americans tend to be expected to work long hours than those Americans who have been “more established” for several generations. They are more expected to meet a more aggressive schedule and have less opportunity to move to the management. The “treatment” by the management even within the same company is often not the same. If they do not contribute more, the management may soon choose to offshore their jobs to those “more cost effective” countries they immigrated from. This is also partly due the nature of their jobs (i.e., non-management type jobs.)</p>
<p>This phenomenon is not limited to Asian Americans who are new immigrants. It is also applicable to other ethnic groups (e.g., new immigrants from East European countries, like Russia, Romania, etc.)</p>
<p>Somebody seems to have posted recently that more kids from the families newly immigrated from these countries (Russia, etc., and some Asian countries) tend to get into the magnet high schools in NYC. Are these (overworked parents and these high achieving public magnet school kids) correlated with each other? Maybe these kids will grow up to be more like the “husband” you talked about. Just a bad “behavior inheritance” cycle which may take several generations to break.</p>