Ethnic Origins: The Adaptation of Cambodian and Hmong Refugees in Four American Cities (review)

One of the most critical debates in the current scholarship on immigration is about the effects of transnationalism on immigrants' adaptation and incorporation in the contemporary United States. Some who adhere to the continual importance of the assimilation framework suggest that transnationalism is a first generation phenomenon that should disappear over time, while others insist that assimilation and transnationalism are not mutually exclusive processes. One understudied dimension in these discussions is the extent to which pre-migration factors affect immigrants' understanding of social identities and discrimination once they migrate. In Ethnic Origins, Jeremy Hein explores this issue by looking at events in countries of origin that may help predict how and why immigrants accept or reject various types of social identities and their resistance, or lack thereof, to various forms of discrimination in the United States.

Hein's powerfully underscores what Lisa Lowe calls "heterogeneity" in studying racialized immigrants. Drawing on a survey that Hein and his colleagues administered with 179 individuals, supplemented with 28 in-depth interviews, four focused-group interviews, and a content analysis of newspapers written about two groups of immigrants, the book is an ambitious comparative study of the situations of Cambodian and Hmong refugees in four different American cities in the United States. This task is a particularly important one as immigrants are beginning to find their sense of place in unexpected corners of the U.S. economy. Hein explains that suburban towns and urban cities will affect the two refugee groups differently, and that variations in homeland experiences will affect their access to institutional power and mobilization. These factors help explain why they develop competing understandings of personal and institutional discrimination as they settle. For example, Hein shows that Cambodians tend to have more immigrant optimism and are less inclined to see American institutions as discriminatory than the Hmongs. One key explanation for this is that the very reason why Cambodians emigrated in the first place was because they were oppressed by their own countrymen (the Pol Pot regime), whereas the Hmong were living peacefully in Laos before they were used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Hein found these experiences vary depending on whether the immigrants settled in suburban towns or the urban pecking order of the United States. In studying the Hmongs in Eau Claire and the Cambodians in Rochester (the groups in suburbia) and the Hmongs in Milwaukee versus the Cambodians in Chicago, he found that those living in urban centers of the United States perceive less discrimination because of resources available within their ethnic communities and with other minorities in urban centers. The book offers one of the best comparative studies of immigration in recent times, and is written with striking lucidity.

Hein echoes what many scholars have pushed for a very long time in studying Asian America – to critically explore the effects of national origins on adaptation in Asian America because different ethnic groups confront different kinds of institutional barriers, such as housing and occupational segregation, depending on their contexts of reception in the United States. But Hein moves this discussion further – in a way that perhaps no one has ever done on studies of Asian Americans – by offering a careful examination of pre-migration contexts that affect the very "contexts of reception," upon which many sociologists have fixated. The book is divided into six sections beginning with a highly informative chapter in section one that highlights competing explanations of immigrant adaptation. Hein advances a theory of "ethnic origins," arguing that immigrants emigrate with a set of factors from their homeland that can predict their differences in adaptation. This "ethnic origin" hypothesis includes four dimensions which include religious values, kinship norms, history and politics. Hein suggests that "each of these components of immigrants' ethnic origins contributes to a particular conception of societal membership and what it means to belong to a people."(31) The second section of the book explores...