Social Capital In Becoming America

478 Words2 Pages

At least once in one’s life they will hear the phrase, “It is not what you know, but who you know,” and in many cases this true. Through an anthropologic sense, that phrase is an example of human capital and social capital. Human capital is what you know whereas social capital is who you know. In addition, when it comes to human capital, one is institutionalized in a certain way for a specific task/job, and this usually starts at a young age either consciously or nonconsciously. For example, being on time, from a young age, one it is taught to be on time. And as one gets older, depending on the field he or she goes into, they might be told to arrive earlier to be more courteous. In a similar sense, through social capital, one sees rather than improving oneself for a job, he or she would migrate somewhere else because he or she was notified of a job opening from someone in his or her social network, thus creating a chain-migration situation. …show more content…

From an employer’s point of view he is under qualified from certain jobs because of the human capital he currently possessed, which was of a hillside farmer in Laos with little to no conversable English. In this situation, all he can rely on is his social capital, whether it may be the refugees services available to him and his family, his relatives who arrived to America before him, or almost any other Hmong person who is able to speak both Hmong and English and is willing to help Hang out. It is safe to assume he was able to find work and support his family one way or another, however one cannot say for certain whether or not he partook in a chain-migration, which typically occurred with many other Hmong

Open Document