Why Asian Americans - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Why Asian Americans
are Becoming Mainstream

Victor Nee & Hilary Holbrow

Astratto: In contrast to earlier waves of immigration, the post–1965 Asian immigration to the United
States has not spawned an exclusionist backlash among native whites. Piuttosto, the new Asian immigrants
and their children are rapidly gaining access to the American mainstream. Whether in integrated resi-
dential communities, in colleges and universities, or in mainstream workplaces, Asian Americans’ pres-
ence is ever more the rule, not the exception. The success of so many Asian American immigrants suggests
that race may not be as decisive a factor in shaping socioeconomic attainment as it was in the American
past; civil rights reform has been incorporated in a more inclusive American mainstream. As a group in
which those of legal status predominate, Asian Americans have enjoyed more open access to mainstream
istituzioni, paving the way to their rapid assimilation.

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Until 1965, immigration from Asia served as the

crucible for a politics of exclusion that involved
both the legal framework and a social consensus
backing a national-origin quota for immigration.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the arrival of a siz-
able Chinese population in communities across the
western states provoked widespread nativist senti-
ment and anti-Chinese hostility. Competition in
labor markets spurred union-led protests and vio-
lent demands for the government to restrict Chi-
nese immigration. The subsequent passage of the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively ended
immigration from China, while Chinese residing in
America were barred from naturalized citizenship.
Japanese immigration to the West Coast, Quale
followed the exclusion of Chinese laborers, incited
similar mobilization of nativist sentiment and leg-
islative politics, culminating in the Immigration
Act of 1924. This legislation limited free immigra-
tion to the United States to those from Northern
and Western Europe, with restrictive quotas set for
Southern and Eastern Europeans. Immigration

VICTOR NEE is the Frank and
Rosa Rhodes Professor of Sociology
at Cornell University, where he is
also Director of the Center for the
Study of Economy and Society.
HILARY HOLBROW is a Ph.D. stu-
dent in the Sociology Department
at Cornell University.

(*See endnotes for complete contributor
biographies.)

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Why
Asian
Americans
are
Becoming
Mainstream

from Asia was closed down, and the rule
of exclusion extended to a wide range of
discriminatory legislation in the western
states designed to drive Asians into ra –
cially segregated enclaves.

It took the emergence of a new political
consensus born in the civil rights move-
ment for the federal government to enact
the watershed legislation that guided
institutional change and extended equal
rights and opportunities to nonwhite
Americans. This civil rights legislation
af½rmed principles of open access to
political and economic institutions for all
Americans, regardless of race and gender.
Concomitantly, Congress passed with bi –
partisan support the Immigration Act of
1965, an international counterpart to the
far-reaching Civil Rights Act of 1964 E
Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Immigra-
tion Act repealed national-origin rules
and opened legal immigration to all
countries.

Once legal immigration was open to all
countries, documented entry was then
directly connected with access to inclusive
political and economic institutions. Im –
migrants with appropriate visa documents
could enter the United States as perma-
nent residents and, through a sequential
transition culminating in approved appli-
cation for naturalized citizenship, could
gain access to mainstream American in –
stitutions.

In combination, these sweeping legal
changes have reshaped American society.
Though not anticipated by political elites
in the 1960s, the new immigration law
opened the way for mass immigration
from Asia, and as a very unintended con-
sequence, from Latin America as well.
And in light of the rapidly changing de –
mographic composition of the American
population, immigration is once again
inspiring national debate. There is again
a rising tide of nativist backlash, particolarmente
in the states that share borders with Mex-

ico. The debate has focused on the new
immigration from Latin America, IL
region sending the largest flow of immi-
grants, many of them unauthorized.1

High-volume Asian immigration to the
United States has now been continuous
for nearly a half-century, constituting the
longest lasting legal immigration from
Asia in American history. In an exponen-
tial increase over the 1970 census count of
1.5 million, Asian Americans grew to
exceed 17.2 million by 2010, making up
5.6 percent of the U.S. population.2 This
rapid increase is primarily due to contin-
uous and now accelerating immigration,
such that in 2010, foreign-born Asians
outnumbered native-born Asian Ameri-
cans by a ratio of two to one. Since 2008,
40 percent of new immigrants are Asian,
up from 27 percent of new arrivals before
2005.3 If present population trends con-
tinue, the Asian American population
has been estimated to grow to around
9.2 percent of the American population
by 2050.4

Unlike previous waves of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, IL
new Asian immigration has not spawned
reactive nativist social movements and
politics demanding the exclusion of
Asians. Piuttosto, Asian immigrants and the
second generation are assimilating into the
American mainstream more rapidly than
earlier immigrants to the United States.5
Whether in integrated residential com-
munities, in colleges and universities, O
in mainstream workplaces, Asian Ameri-
cans’ presence is ever more the rule than
the exception. What accounts for their
success?

It is commonplace to portray Asian

Americans as a model minority. Socio-
logical accounts of Japanese American
assimilation, Per esempio, emphasize that
through acculturation, the nisei second
generation adopted the cultural attri –

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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butes of the Anglo Protestant majority
group, which then led to their assimila-
tion into the American mainstream after
World War II.6 During that war, Japanese
Americans responded to racial prejudice
and internment by exemplifying the
American creed, evidenced in the patri-
otism and sacri½ce of nisei soldiers on the
battle½elds of Europe. Retelling a variant
of the model minority story for the new
Asian immigration relies on a ready-made
conceptual template identifying group-
level attributes that enable the group’s
acceptance and entry into the main-
stream.7 Various accounts invoke “Asian
values” such as a reverence for learning,
emphasis on the family, or dedication to
hard work as the explanation for Asian
Americans’ high levels of educational and
professional attainment.

What is overlooked in model minority
accounts and in narratives of discrimina-
tion is the fact that institutional mecha-
nisms–the forces that set the rules of the
game–play a signi½cant role in explain-
ing differential patterns of socioeconomic
attainment and assimilation of immi-
grants and their children. In light of the
long history of racial discrimination and
exclusion of Asians, it took the institu-
tional changes of the civil rights era to
restart high-volume immigration from
Asia, and to extend legal rights to all
Americans. This has enabled and moti-
vated the economic and social assimilation
of Asian immigrants and their children.8
Although Asian immigrants include
many different national-origin, cultural,
and ethnic groups with considerable socio –
economic diversity, a shared distinguish-
ing feature of new immigrants from Asia
is that they have overwhelmingly entered
through legal channels. Only an estimated
8 percent are undocumented, in sharp
contrast to nearly 43 percent of the foreign-
born from the Americas.9 A geographical
explanation is more plausible than a

model minority account–it’s much harder
to cross the ocean than to walk across a
border. Accordingly, formal rules govern-
ing immigration have played a far greater
role in shaping the flow of Asian immi-
grants and their subsequent experience
than has been the case for immigration
from Mexico and Central America. While
immigration law speci½es the initial selec-
tion mechanisms, entry through formal
channels also provides immigrants with
the bene½ts and protection of equality of
rights and other civil laws.

In a democratic polity governed by the
rule of law, legal equality matters not
only because of, but also despite the persis –
tence of racial prejudice embedded in
cultural beliefs, informal norms, social
networks, and organizations.10 This is
be cause the rule of law is widely accepted
and supported as a bedrock assumption
by ordinary Americans, despite frequent
outbursts of partisan politics and con-
tentious differences over the content of
speci½c laws. Although most Americans
may not have agreed with the content of
congressional civil rights legislation,
once those initiatives were enacted as law,
institutional mechanisms implemented
the changes over time and worked them
into the American mainstream.

A centerpiece of the civil rights era leg-
islative struggle was the passage of Title
VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Quale
speci½ed the rules of equal employment
opportunity to address institutionalized
discrimination in the workplace against
women and minorities. The law was the
product of a protracted battle by commit-
ted social activists that sought equal
treatment in the American mainstream–
in education, public accommodation,
government programs, politica, and other
domains of civic life.11 Through a process
of cumulative causation, a long-term bat-
tle for equal employment opportunity
induced changes in cultural beliefs that

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& Hilary
Holbrow

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Why
Asian
Americans
are
Becoming
Mainstream

led to greater corporate and public ac –
ceptance of these laws. Though racial and
gender stereotypes persist and can influ-
ence hiring decisions, a self-reinforcing
compliance with Title VII in corporations,
public agencies, and nonpro½t organiza-
tions has helped open mainstream insti-
tutions to women and minorities.12

Studies that contrast differential pat-
terns of socioeconomic attainment and
outcomes of assimilation without taking
into account the relative proportion of
documented and undocumented new-
comers in an immigrant group confound
the persistent influence of legal–or ille-
gal–status with the putative effects of
discrimination and cultural difference.
Causal factors that influence mode of
incorporation are both complex and sub-
tle in the manner they interact and com-
bine to shape the economic and social
assimilation of immigrants. But in and of
itself, legal–or illegal–status clearly has
potentially far-reaching effects on incor-
poration into U.S. society.

Whereas immigrants who enter the
United States through legal channels
bene½t from the civil rights era legisla-
tion that extends to racial minorities
equal rights and formal access to eco-
nomic and social institutions of the
American mainstream, undocumented
immigrants do not bene½t from the same
open access to these institutions. They
are signi½cantly disadvantaged in this
and other respects.

First of all, in illegal entry, the de facto
selection mechanism recruits labor mi –
grants particularly likely to have low lev-
els of formal schooling and skill. Profes-
sional and technical immigrants with
university education are unlikely candi-
dates for entry without a proper visa, for
they would not be able to ½nd more gain-
ful employment without documentation
in the United States than what they could
½nd in their native society. This is not the

case for unskilled laborers with little for-
mal education. Such workers do not risk
lower returns on their human capital
through undocumented border crossing.13
But low-skilled immigrants face particu-
lar dif½culties in America’s twenty-½rst-
century knowledge-based economy, con
far-reaching implications for inequality.14
Secondo, illegal border entry leaves
immigrants vulnerable to exploitation in
informal labor markets, where they can
become locked into dead-end and irregu-
lar jobs.15 Undocumented immigrants
typically try to avoid contact with main-
stream political and economic institu-
tions and instead concentrate in unregu-
lated labor markets, controlled by co-
ethnic labor contractors, in order to
lower the risk of discovery by authorities.
Accordingly, the wage growth for illegal
immigrants is low compared to that for
natives or legal immigrants.16 Further-
more, undocumented immigrants lack the
access to legal recourse that documented
immigrants possess.

Third, the many disadvantages that
come with undocumented status are in –
evitably passed on by immigrant parents
to their children, adversely influencing
the sec ond generation’s prospects for
school ing and assimilation.17 Not only
do the children of poorly educated par-
ents start out their lives at relative disad-
vantage com pared to most Americans,
but even in households with greater cul-
tural capital, the constant danger of
deportation disrupts children’s school
and family life. Further, parents’ immi-
gration status may block the children’s
access to public institutions and re –
sources useful to their education and
well-being. Children of unauthorized
immigrants are much more likely to live
in poverty, and less likely to have health
insurance, Per esempio, than children of
documented immigrants and the native
born.18 Illegal entry thus has a long-lasting

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influence on the second-generation chil-
dren.

Lastly, a very high ratio of undocu-
mented immigration casts a long shadow
of illegitimacy and stigma on even legal
immigrants of the same ethnicity.19
Although more than 1 million illegal
immigrants from China, the Philippines,
India, South Korea, and Vietnam also
contribute to the Asian immigrant popu-
lation of more than 17.2 million, the great
majority of Asian newcomers enter the
United States as legal immigrants, E
they de½ne the dominant pro½le of Asian
immigration.20 Suppose the opposite
were true, and undocumented Asian
immigrants by far exceeded the number
of legal immigrants. This scenario would
suggest a very different pro½le for the
immigrant group–in terms of public
perception, in terms of immigrant char-
acteristics, and in terms of opportunity in
American society.

Asian Americans are the most educated

ethnic group in the United States, con
mean education levels that have risen
rapidly over the past decades. Nel 1970
census, 20 percent of Asian Americans
reported that they had earned college
degrees, but by the 2010 census, the col-
lege educated rose to 52 per cento, includ-
ing both native and foreign born.21 This
rise is even sharper than that for native-
born whites, and demonstrates the scale
and impact of human capital immigrants
from Asia after 1965.22 Of these new
immigrants, Asian Indians are the best
educato, with a remarkable 70 per cento
of the ½rst generation being university
educato. Chinese, Korean, Japanese,
and Filipino immigrants also stand out
with college graduation rates at around
50 per cento, still well above the U.S.
mean.23 The trend in recent years is
toward still higher levels of education
among new arrivals, with a full 61 per cento

of recent Asian immigrants holding
bachelor’s degrees.24

These remarkably high levels spring
from the selectivity and incentives em –
bedded in the rules, guidelines, and pri-
orities of U.S. immigration laws, as well
as the allure of an advanced degree in the
United States. None of the Asian soci-
eties contributing to the flow of immi-
grants have anything close to the percent-
age of professional and technical workers
with college and postgraduate education
as foreign-born Asians in the United
States. Many of the best educated, best
prepared, and most motivated from these
countries choose to come to America
because of opportunities secured by equal
opportunity laws and the sequential
process of work permissions, green cards,
and naturalization that grants immi-
grants the bene½ts of these legal protec-
zioni. Outside the framework of legal
immigration and the normative regime
emerging from the civil rights movement,
such high levels of educated immigrants
would be unthinkable.

Although Asian Americans make up
only 5.5 percent of the workforce, Essi
are disproportionately concentrated in
the core technological occupations, Dove
there is a persistent shortage of skilled
labor.25 It is commonplace for high-tech
½rms to recruit skilled workers and engi-
neers from the Asian foreign-student pop –
ulation in American universities. These
workers are vital to the high-tech sectors
where America’s innovative edge creates
an advantage in the global economy;
high-tech industry leaders and research
universities constantly lobby for legisla-
tion that will enable a high flow of
human capital immigrants to meet this
demand.

Asian immigrants are not just valuable
employees–they are also job creators.
Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New
York City, called for bipartisan support in

Victor Nee
& Hilary
Holbrow

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Why
Asian
Americans
are
Becoming
Mainstream

the presidential election season for new
legislation to make it easier for immi-
grants to secure visas. He underscored
the selectivity for entrepreneurial talent
linked to immigration, pointing to a new
study showing that immigrant entrepre-
neurs start up 28 percent of new ½rms in
the United States, which employ one in
ten workers in the American economy.26
Asian entrepreneurs are an important
contributor to this total. Per esempio, In
Silicon Valley, 17 percent of the high-tech
start-up ½rms in the last two decades of
the twentieth century were led by Chi-
nese immigrant entrepreneurs.27

One comparative advantage of immi-
grant entrepreneurs in high-tech start-
ups is that they typically have business
know-how and strategic connections in
their homeland as well as in the United
States.28 Chinese and Indian immigrant
entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are bro-
kers who occupy “structural holes,” bridg-
ing gaps between independent regional
clusters of resources and markets.29
Their language competencies, cultural
capital, and transnational-network ties
enable immigrant entrepreneurs to func-
tion as “visible hands” in the globaliza-
tion of the knowledge-based economy.

The professional attainments and edu-
cational backgrounds of many Asian
immigrants provide the second genera-
tion with a head start in socioeconomic
attainment and assimilation.30 As par-
ents, they have high educational expecta-
tions for their American-born children,
and their high socioeconomic status
means that lateral mobility suf½ces for
their children to achieve higher mean
educational attainment than non-His-
panic whites. Not surprisingly, second-
generation Asian Indian and Chinese
human capital immigrants are overrepre-
sented in selective colleges and universi-
ties, where they accumulate the cultural
capital and network ties that fast-track

their assimilation into the American
mainstream.31

Further, within many Asian ethnic
communities, the sheer volume of human
capital immigration has a spillover effect
in the high educational expectations of
immigrant parents with less formal edu-
cation.32 When the ethnic community is
well-educated on the whole and when un –
documented immigrants are a small pro-
portion of the overall immigrant group,
random interactions with coethnics are
more likely to yield information identify-
ing open-access pathways to legitimate
opportunities for their native-born chil-
dren.33

For example, while 50 percent of Chi-
nese immigrants have earned at least a
bachelor’s degree, Sopra 17 percent lack
high school diplomas, showing a sub-
group of poor, and in some cases illegal,
working-class immigrants. By the second
generation, Tuttavia, Chinese Americans
are among the best educated of the Asian
ethnic groups, con 61.5 percent of U.S.-
born Chinese completing college educa-
tion.34 A study of the immigrant second
generation in New York City reports that
working-class Chinese parents in China-
town, where undocumented immigrants
generally reside, have been surprisingly
effective in placing their American-born
children in good public schools.35

These young people–the American-
born children of post-1965 immigrants–
are coming of age. They and the genera-
tion of Asian Americans who came to
America as children (generation one-
and-a-half ) are entering the workforce in
ever-larger numbers, well positioned to
meet the growing demand for skilled and
professional workers in the U.S. knowl-
edge-based economy.36 Relatively few
are taking the low-skilled service jobs
where their immigrant parents some-
times found employment. In New York
Città, the children of Chinese immigrants

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for the most part are not in the low-status
jobs in Chinatown.37 Instead, with native-
English language competence and cultural
capital, second-generation Asian Ameri-
cans are moving into occupational ½elds
outside the tech industry, where Asians
have historically been underrepresented,
including law, media and arts, community
services, and even the military. Although
Asian American representation in these
occupational ½elds–except for media and
the arts–remains lower than the overall
Asian share of the workforce, the native-
born Asian population is signi½cantly
overrepresented in these sectors.38

The rapid integration of the second
generation clearly shows an American
mainstream where institutions have
become more inclusive. In the post–civil
rights era, cultural beliefs and norms sup-
porting diversity in workplaces are be –
coming self-reinforcing expectations.
Analysis of earnings likewise demon-
strates the far-reaching effects of institu-
tional change on employment and the
economy. In the 1950s, U.S.-born Japanese
American and Chinese American men
respectively earned 37 percent and 44 per-
cent less than comparable native whites.39
Today, this historical earnings gap has all
but vanished. In part because many Asian
Americans work in highly remunerative
½elds, native-born Asians from the largest
ethnic groups earn incomes that surpass
those of whites. This is not only an arti-
fact of Asians’ high educational achieve-
ment, but also a reflection of the vast
progress toward equal pay for equal work
guaranteed under the law. In sharp con-
trast to the 1950s, native-born Asians’
incomes are at parity, or nearly so, con
whites of similar occupation and human
capital.40

Although ½rst-generation immigrants
(with the notable exception of Indians)
earn lower personal incomes on average
than native-born whites, this fact does

not point to discrimination as much as to
subtle human capital differences between
immigrants and natives. Poor English
skills, lack of connections, insuf½cient
knowledge of U.S. society, and the mis-
match between a foreign education and
the expectations of U.S. employers can all
adversely affect newcomers’ employ-
ment opportunities and wages. When
immigrants’ place of education is taken
into account, the apparent earnings dis-
parity vanishes.41 This, along with the
near parity achieved in the second gener-
ation, shows that institutional changes in
education and the economy have moved
American society away from the histori-
cal exclusion of and harsh discrimination
against Asian Americans.

The assimilation of Asian immigrants is

testament to the institutional changes
that link civil rights and immigration
reform. On one hand, immigration law
and policy have enabled millions of well-
educated Asians to immigrate legally to
this country; on the other hand, inclusive
institutions mandated by civil rights leg-
islation have lowered barriers and paved
the way for these immigrants to enter the
mainstream of civil society. The success
of Asian immigrants and their children in
a new era of high-volume immigration
suggests that institutional changes of the
civil rights era have led to a more inclu-
sive and open American society–at least
for those whose legal status enables them
to access mainstream institutions.

The legal status of immigrants at the
point of entry is signi½cant in explaining
their socioeconomic attainment and as –
simulazione. To contrast differential pat-
terns of socioeconomic attainment and
assimilation in immigrant groups without
considering the relative proportion of
documented and undocumented immi-
grants is to confuse the persistent influ-
ence of documentation, or lack thereof,

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142 (3) Estate 2013

Why
Asian
Americans
are
Becoming
Mainstream

with the putative effects of societal dis-
crimination. “Downward” or “segmented”
assimilation should not be attributed
solely to discrimination and historical
ethnoracial hierarchies, but also to en –
dogenous selectivity in undocumented
entry and the attendant economic and
legal barriers that result from violating
the rules of the game.

The predominance of nonwhite immi-
gration since 1965 has led some to focus
on race as a decisive factor in the incor-
poration of immigrants and their chil-
dren. In Who Are We?, the late political
scientist Samuel Huntington conjectured
that America is becoming a society in

which ethnoracial boundaries harden,
leading to a balkanized American future.
But the mainstream success of so many
Asian American immigrants suggests
that race may not be such a decisive fac-
tor in shaping socioeconomic attainment
as it was in the American past, and that
assimilation still is as characteristic of
the course of contemporary immigration
as it was for earlier immigration from
Europe. In an increasingly inclusive
mainstream, the signi½cance of race has
declined considerably. Piuttosto, patterns
of legal and illegal entry are more consis-
tently determinative of immigrant access
to mainstream opportunities.

endnotes
* Contributor Biographies: VICTOR NEE is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Sociology
at Cornell University, where he is also Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and
Società. His publications include Capitalism From Below: Markets and Institutional Change in
China (with Sonja Opper, 2012), Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Con-
temporary Immigration (with Richard Alba, 2003), and The Economic Sociology of Capitalism
(edited with Richard Swedberg, 2005).
HILARY HOLBROW is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Cornell University.
Her research interests include sociology of immigration, norm diffusion, economic sociology,
and East Asian societies.

1 Controversy over immigration is focused on illegal immigration, estimated to involve eleven
million people. American national identity and ideology are inexorably linked to cultural
beliefs of a nation peopled through immigration. Così, public support for legal immigration
remains strong despite the contentious politics centered on illegal immigration. In 2011,
59 percent of Americans said that immigration is a good thing for America; see Jeffrey M.
Jones, “Americans’ Views on Immigration Holding Steady,” Gallup Politics, Giugno 22, 2011,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/148154/Americans-Views-Immigration-Holding-Steady.aspx.

2 This ½gure includes a growing biracial population of 2.6 million.
3 Nathan P. Walters and Edward N. Trevelyan, “The Newly Arrived Foreign-Born Population
of the United States: 2010" (Washington, D.C.: NOI. Census Bureau, novembre 2011),
http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acsbr10-16.pdf.

4 The U.S. Census Bureau projects 9.2 per cento, but in the General Social Survey, Americans
already believe that Asians make up 10 percent of the American population; see “An Older
and More Diverse Nation by Midcentury” (Washington, D.C.: U.S Census Bureau, agosto
2008), http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population/cb08-123.html; E
Richard Alba, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Karen Marotz, “A Distorted Nation: Perceptions of
Racial/Ethnic Group Sizes and Attitudes toward Immigrants and Other Minorities,” Social
Forces 84 (2) (2005): 901–919.

5 Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contempo-
rary Immigration (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2003); John Iceland, Where

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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We Live Now: Immigration and Race in the United States (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Università
of California Press, 2009); and Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean, The Diversity Paradox: Immi-
gration and the Color Line in 21st Century America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).
6 Harry H.L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Upper Saddle River, N.J.:

Victor Nee
& Hilary
Holbrow

Prentice Hall, 1976).

7 Won M. Hurh and Kwang C. Kim, “The ‘Success’ Image of Asian Americans: Its Validity, E
Its Practical and Theoretical Implications,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 12 (1989): 512–538;
Grace Kao, “Asian-Americans as Model Minorities? A Look at Their Academic Perfor –
mance,” American Journal of Education 103 (1995): 121–159; and Kimberly Goyette and Yu
Xie, “Educational Expectations of Asian American Youths: Determinants and Ethnic Dif-
ferences,” Sociology of Education 72 (1999): 22–36.

8 Victor Nee and Richard Alba, “Assimilation as Rational Action in Contexts De½ned by Insti-
tutions and Boundaries,” in Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research, ed. Rafael Wittek,
Thomas Snijders, and Victor Nee (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), 355–380.
9 Calculated from U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates of illegal immigrants and
U.S Census Bureau estimates of the foreign-born population; see Michael Hoefer, Nancy
Rytina, and Bryan C. Baker, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing
in the United States: January 2010” (Washington, D.C.: NOI. Department of Homeland
Sicurezza, Febbraio 2011), http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois
_ill_pe_2010.pdf; and Elizabeth M. Grieco et al., “The Foreign-Born Population in the United
States: 2010" (Washington, D.C.: NOI. Census Bureau, May 2012), http://www.census.gov/
prod/2012pubs/acs-19.pdf.

10 Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream.
11 Paul Burstein, Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity

in the United States since the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

12 Frank Dobbin, Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).
13 Over 29 percent of illegal immigrants never graduated from high school, compared to 12 per-
cent among legal immigrants; and only 15 percent of illegal immigrants have college degrees,
compared to 35 percent among legal immigrants. See Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, "UN
Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research
Hispanic Center, April 14, 2009), http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/a-portrait-of
-unauthorized-immigrants-in-the-united-states/.

14 George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1999).

15 Jimy M. Sanders and Victor Nee, “Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Enclave Economy,"
American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 745–773; Reynolds Farley, The New American Reality:
Who We Are, How We Got Here, Where We Are Going (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1996), 191; Terry Hum, “A Protected Niche? Immigrant Ethnic Economies and Labor Mar-
ket Segmentation,” in Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles, ed. Lawrence D. Bobo,
Melvin L. Oliver, James H. Johnson Jr., and Abel Valensuela Jr. (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 2000); Edna Bonacich and Richard P. Appelbaum, Behind the Label: Inequality in
the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2000); and Yu Xie and Margaret Gough, “Ethnic Enclaves and the Earnings of Immigrants,"
Demography 48 (2011): 1293–1315.

16 Passel and Cohn, “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States.”
17 Frank D. Bean, Mark A. Leach, Susan K. Brown, James D. Bachmeier, and John R. Hipp, "IL
Educational Legacy of Unauthorized Migration: Comparisons Across U.S.-Immigrant Groups
in How Parents’ Status Affects Their Offspring,” International Migration Review 45 (2011):
348–385.

18 Passel and Cohn, “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States.”

142 (3) Estate 2013

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Why
Asian
Americans
are
Becoming
Mainstream

19 Douglas Massey shows that the volume of undocumented immigrants entering from Mexi-
co increased sharply in the late 1980s and through the 1990s after the passage of the Immi-
gration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Consistent with the stigma hypothesis, as the
undocumented immigrant population approached 50 percent of the Mexican American
population, the wages for documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants converged;
see Douglas S. Massey, “Understanding America’s Immigration ‘Crisis,’” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 151 (settembre 2007): 309–327.

20 The Department of Homeland Security estimates that in 2011 there were 280,000 illegal
immigrants from China, 270,000 from the Philippines, 240,000 from India, 230,000 from
Korea, E 170,000 from Vietnam. Together, all undocumented Asian immigrants make up
approximately 11 percent of the unauthorized immigrant population. By contrast, an esti-
mated 8.9 million (77 per cento) of the total 11.5 million undocumented immigrants were from
North America (including Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America). The largest
source of undocumented immigrants was Mexico, estimated at 6.8 million, or about 59 per-
cent of the unauthorized immigrant population. See Michael Hoefer, Nancy Rytina, E
Bryan C. Baker, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United
States: January 2011” (Washington, D.C.: NOI. Department of Homeland Security, Marzo
2012), http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2011.pdf.
21 Tavolo 1, “Educational Attainment of the Population 18 Years and Over, by Age, Sex, Race,
and Hispanic Origin: 2010" (Washington, D.C.: NOI. Census Bureau, 2011), http://www
.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/2010/tables.html.

22 Not all ethnicities share these human capital characteristics. Reflecting the legacy of America’s
war in Indochina, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Hmong refugees have also settled
in the United States. In the ½rst generation, the educational pro½les for these groups are not
only lower than those of other Asian immigrants, but also lower than that of the United
States as a whole.

23 From authors’ analysis of pums data; Steven Ruggles, J. T. Alexander, Katie Genadek,
Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata
Series: Version 5.0, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2010 [Machine-Readable
Database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010), https://usa.ipums.org/usa/.
24 “The Rise of Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, Giugno 19, 2012, http://www.pewsocial

trends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/.

25 From authors’ analysis of pums data; Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.
26 “Open for Business: How Immigrants are Driving Small Business Creation in the United
States,” The Partnership for a New American Economy, agosto 2012, http://www.renew
oureconomy.org/index.php?q=open-for-business.

27 Jennifer Holdaway, “China Outside the People’s Republic of China,” in The New Americans:
A Guide to Immigration since 1965, ed. Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda (Cambridge, Massa.:
Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2007).

28 AnnaLee Saxenian, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Cambridge,

Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2006).

29 Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge, Massa.: Har-

vard University Press, 1995).

30 Bean et al., “The Educational Legacy of Unauthorized Immigration.”
31 Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream; and Yu Xie and Kimberly Goyette, “Social
Mobility and the Educational Choices of Asian Americans,” Social Science Research 32 (2003):
467–498.

32 Goyette and Xie, “Educational Expectations of Asian American Youths.”
33 Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway, Inheriting the
Città: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; and Cam-

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ponte, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2008); and Clemens Kroneberg, “Ethnic Commu-
nities and School Performance among the New Second Generation in the United States:
Testing the Theory of Segmented Assimilation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 620 (2008): 138–160.

Victor Nee
& Hilary
Holbrow

34 For foreign-born Asian U.S. residents twenty-½ve and older, from authors’ analysis of pums

dati; Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.

35 Kasinitz et al., Inheriting the City.
36 The professional and white-collar jobs left vacant by retiring baby boomers open up vacancy
chains; see Richard D. Alba, Blurring the Color Line: The New Change for a More Integrated
America (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard, 2009).

37 Kasinitz et al., Inheriting the City.
38 From authors’ analysis of pums data; Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.
39 Arthur Sakamoto, Huei-Hsia Wu, and Jessie M. Tzeng, “The Declining Signi½cance of Race
among American Men during the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century,” Demography 37
(2000): 41–51.

40 John Iceland, “Earnings Returns to Occupational Status: Are Asian Americans Disadvantaged?"
Social Science Research 28 (1999): 45–65; Sakamoto et al., “The Declining Signi½cance of Race
among American Men during the Latter Half of the Twentieth Century”; and Chang Hwan
Kim and Arthur Sakamoto, “Have Asian American Men Achieved Labor Market Parity with
White Men?” American Sociological Review 75 (2010): 934–957.

41 Zhen Zeng and Yu Xie, “Asian-Americans’ Earnings Disadvantage Reexamined: The Role of

Place of Education,” American Journal of Sociology 109 (2004): 1075–1108.

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