You're right. That's why people want immigration of poor people and even some illegal immigration, to have a supply of poor people ready to do poor people's work. (I'm not saying they want so many illegal immigrants that they enter construction and trades etc. in large numbers, but they don't want to be where they were a few decades ago when there were not so many migrant workers and they still had no machine to pick tomatoes with. They rushed to finish the tomato picking machine that was in the works, and they also bred tomatoes that were harder to bruise (and not as good aiui.))
Probably not to the same extent, but the same thing is true of Mexicans and other Latinos who came decades ago. But once their children speak English without an accent, that their names are Sanchez or Gonzalez is just ignored, truely not even noticed. (unless maybe all one his is a printed resume or webpage). That's why Linda Chavez and lots of others aren't seen as Mexican.
Wikipedia, which I looked at today after CJ's post, makes him sound better off than I had realized. Not just a lawyer but a promintent one. That doesn't always include more money, but often it does. And his mother served on the Board of a bank chain and the United Way. There are ways other than income to have community status, but the vast majority of people on boards are making a lot of money. I don't know if she had been working at all, but her father was a banker. Again, not all bankers do great, and Bill Gates went to a prep school which had bought a computer teletype and some computer time. I was out of college by this time so I don't know what my richest** public school in Indiana had at this time.
**Which is not saying that much. I presume we were the richest, (since we had nobody or almost nobody on welfare, and the only alternative schools were Catholic schools and one small private boys school and one small private girls school) and we had a new building with a well equipped gym, a big auditorium, air conditioning, chem labs with bunsen burners and glassware, and textbooks for eveyrone, but really, as long as everyone at another school has a text book to use, I don't know if the extra stuff puts us ahead of any other school in terms of expected results.(I've read the famous alumni from my high school and there is one astronaut and a bunch of sports "stars" I've never heard of since I moved out of state. That's all.)
We used to live in a town of 50,000, and the high school teacher or principal or guidance couselor told my mother and brother that he couldn't get a good education there, because they were so small and had no extras. But he made all A's in college except B's in science and graduated medical school anyhow. Partly because he read a lot. It's the person more than the school.
Often wealthy parents can get their kids good first jobs, or they don't even have to try, that his parents are known is enough, but that wasn't true for GAtes, was it? (OTOH Gates treated a lot of competitors very badly, ws probably ruthless, and claimed to be giving the details of the OS to people like Netscape, but held things back so Netscape crashed when the MS program didn't. That's one reason I don't use MS products except for the OS.)
Absolutley.