Asian Americans in Silicon Valley: High Technology Industrial Development and Community Transformation

Traditional scholarship in immigration study views immigration largely as the result of “a unidimensional process of uneven economic exchange between states of origin and destination” (Zolberg 1981, 4). Immigrants are viewed as mostly uprooted manual laborers, often people with poor educations and minimum job skills, seeking job opportunities in the destination countries along with their families. Their residential areas often take the form of ghettos and ethnic enclaves and are located in run-down neighborhoods, mostly inner cities. Numerous classic studies have been done on such immigrant neighborhoods and leave a rich legacy, describing immigrants’ adaptation, assimilation, and integration to the destination countries (see, for instance, Bolaria 1984; Kwong 1987, 1996; J. Lin 1998; M. Zhou 1992). At the same time, white middle-class families—composed of a working dad, a stay-at-home mom, and their children—dominate the traditional suburbs in metropolitan areas, especially those in North America. In cases where racial and ethnic minorities, Asians included, do achieve their dream of social and economic upward mobility by suburbanizing, they are expected to be, and likely are, spatially dispersed and socioeconomically assimilated into the mainstream society. As a result, within an ethnic group those who live in inner-city enclaves are usually poor, less educated, spatially concentrated, and more likely to be low-skilled workers in an ethnic job market, whereas residents of the suburbs are well o≈, are professionally trained, and live in racially or ethnically mixed residential areas—as portrayed by the two traditional spatial models of ethnic settlements, the “invasion and succession” and “downtown versus uptown” models (Park and Miller 1921; Kwong 1987, 1996).