Why are Asian-Americans educationally hyper-selected? The case of Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Several Asian-American groups are more educated than their non-migrant compatriots in Asia and their native-born white competitors in America. Lee and Zhou show that this “educational hyper-selectivity” has significant implications for the socio-economic success of Asian immigrants and their children. But they devote relatively little attention to its causes. This paper develops an answer in the Taiwan case. Using interviews and statistics, it shows that the Taiwanese secured an educational advantage because those arriving before 1965 consisted almost entirely of graduate students. Although they entered on student visas, prevailing political and economic conditions led them to settle in the U.S. After the passage of the Hart–Celler Act, these movers reproduced their advantage by sponsoring the arrival of kin, most of whom were also well-educated. The paper’s conclusion assesses the ability of American immigration law to foster the formation of hyper-selected groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational migration
• international students
• hyper-selectivity
• immigrant selectivity
• Taiwanese-Americans
• Asian-Americans

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Avraham Ebenstein and Ji-Ping Lin in accessing the 1980 Census of Taiwan. Linda Arrigo, Christine Avenarius, Ken-Hou Lin and Jonathan Ying provided insightful comments on previous drafts. An earlier version was presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, Long Beach, California.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Much of the 24.4 per cent intergenerational gain was registered by women (7.0 per cent by males vs. 40.2 per cent by females). Sources are IPUMS (Ruggles et al. 2015) and the 1980 Census of Taiwan.

2 The names of respondents, schools and employers were changed to protect privacy. Surnames came from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames. Respondents were assigned Mainland or Taiwanese surnames, as appropriate. Females who married Western men were given hyphenated Asian-European surnames; for example, “Wang-Smith”. First names were obtained by using the website LinkedIn to find the most common English first name accompanying the surname previously selected from Wikipedia.

3 This paper follows Tucker (1994) in using the term “Taiwanese” for descendants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants from China; Chinese arriving after 1944 are “Mainlanders”.

4 Figures in 1990 PPP “international dollars”. The comparable 2010 figure for the U.S. is $30,491.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US Fulbright Scholar Program.