Model Minority Under Duress: Chinese Student Immigrants to the U.S. and Houston, 1978-2000 Open Access
Wang, Jane (Spring 2022)
Published
Abstract
This thesis tells the story of a recent cohort of immigrants whose circumstances and lives have thus far remained relatively understudied: Chinese students who came to the U.S. in the late twentieth century. The eighties and nineties provide a significant time period for my project because it presents a time at which Chinese student immigration had spiked to never-before-seen highs; as evidence, the 1990 census found that people of Chinese descent numbered over one million for the first time in American history. In my research, I make two primary arguments about the new students who contributed to this uptick. Chapter 1 contends that Chinese students offer a case study on how lawmakers utilize immigration policy to shape population demographics. More specifically, both China and the U.S. implemented various programs and laws such as the Gao Kao, the Immigration Act of 1990, and the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992, which incentivized a highly skilled group of Chinese students to seek out an American education and career primarily in STEM fields. Chapter 2 then examines and contextualizes the lives of six Chinese student immigrants in Houston. I argue that the requirements foisted upon them by contemporary immigration laws essentially compelled other Chinese students like them to exhibit many of the qualities of the model minority. Their collective need to survive through visa hurdles, financial issues, language barriers, labor exploitation, and more in the United States therefore added to the preexisting perception of model minorities, creating the cycle of expectation that still exists today. Throughout the piece, I also include testimonies and historical facts relevant to Houston, Texas as a way of illustrating how one microcosmic U.S. community reacted to and shaped the particular Chinese student immigrants that I interviewed.
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Immigration Policy and the Design of Modern America………………..13
Chapter 2: The Lives and Struggles of the New Model Minority…………………….40
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………… 76
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………. 81
About this Honors Thesis
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Model Minority Under Duress: Chinese Student Immigrants to the U.S. and Houston, 1978-2000 () | 2022-04-05 12:27:21 -0400 |
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