That doesn’t make it a myth, it just means that not every immigrant group has an equal chance. Do you think there is some super granular discrimination going on though? Seems more correlated with how developed the country of origin is.
I think, it's more like, it's not pure meritocracy as well. It's kind of a mix between meritocracy, community role model and a sprinkle of nepotisms.
While it's ingrained in the culture, to be the best you can be for certain communities, having tons of people with the same ethnicity/community/caste benefit you as well. People don't go climbing up the higher echelons on pure meritocracy.
There is a reason Indians are over-represented among other Asian ethnicities and that is not pure meritocracy.
this is a myth. even if you just look at asian immigrant groups alone, many groups do very poorly economically - the burmese, hmongs, nepalis etc are all poorer than the average american. in fact, i think the only asian ethnicity that is over-represented in business leadership are not the chinese nor the japanese but the indians, and i don't even think that's true specifically for first-generation or even second-generation americans of indian origin.