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4 Suburbanization and New Trends in Community Development The Case of Chinese Ethnoburbs in the San Gabriel Valley, California WITH YEN-FEN TSENG AND REBECCA Y. KIM C lassic assimilation theories have long stressed the transitory nature of ethnically distinct urban enclaves as springboards for immigrants’ eventual integration into the mainstream. New York’s Little Italy and Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo are well-known examples of spatial assimilation, places where immigrants toiled to enable their children to “melt” into suburbia and become “indistinguishably” American. In the past three decades, however, this classic urban-to-suburban residential mobility model has been challenged.1 America’s largest metropolitan regions have witnessed trends of suburbanization not simply among native-born non-Hispanic whites but also among racial/ethnic minorities. The latter trend—the direct insertion of large numbers of new immigrants into white middle-class suburbs—does not follow the incorporation patterns predicted by classical assimilation theories. Some of the suburban communities that whites once dominated have evolved into “global” neighborhoods in which native-born groups live side by side with middle-class native minorities and immigrants of different national origins. Others have been rapidly transformed into“ethnoburbs”by new immigrants possessing higher-than-average levels of education, occupational status, and incomes, as well as social networks that branch out to tap financial resources and markets in Asia.2 In this chapter, we examine new patterns of spatial assimilation through the case of the sprawling Chinese ethnoburbs in California’s San Gabriel Valley , focusing on several questions. How have Chinese immigrants of diverse origins and socioeconomic backgrounds negotiated their way into the suburbia of an immigrant gateway metropolis? What is a Chinese ethnoburb like, 78 / Chapter 4 and how does it differ from traditional Chinatowns and from typical American suburban communities? What implications does the ethnoburb phenomenon have for our understanding of spatial assimilation? We base our analysis on census data, prior case studies in the existing literature, and our own field observations . Overall, we seek to understand the ways in which contemporary globalization and international migration challenge the notion of assimilation.We also speculate on how new patterns of immigrant settlement create new issues for the Chinese American community while contributing to our understanding of twenty-first-century urban dynamics. The Changing Contexts of International Migration: Exit versus Reception Global economic restructuring has moved people and capital, leading to sweeping changes in local economies of both sending and receiving countries. In many of the sending countries, global economic restructuring has significantly altered the structures of local economies and opportunities for social mobility, causing people and capital to move within and across borders in ways that render neoclassical economic theories of international migration inadequate. Wage differentials and access to better employment opportunities are no longer the main forces that push people to move. Other compelling causes include access to formal and informal migration networks, access to well-established institutionalized credit and insurance markets, and the need for risk diversification, as well as extreme hardships arising from war, political and religious persecutions, (de)colonization, and military involvement.3 As a result, the contexts of exit for contemporary international migrations have been substantially reshaped. Since the 1960s, international migrants to the United States constitute not only the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses “yearning to breathe free,” as is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, but also the affluent, the highly skilled, and the entrepreneurial. Contemporary immigrants from Asia, for example, include low-skilled urban workers, uneducated peasants, and penniless refugees. But they also include professionals such as engineers, scientists , physicians, entrepreneurs, and wealthy investors.4 The influx of large numbers of resource-rich immigrants creates new modes of immigrant settlement, the most remarkable of which is the detour from central-city ethnic enclaves to white middle-class suburbia. Globalization has also changed the contexts of reception. In the United States, economic restructuring divides urban labor markets into two parts: a dominant core sector characterized by knowledge-intensive or capital-intensive jobs that offer high salaries with fringe benefits, good working conditions, and ample opportunities for upward social mobility—and a marginal but sizable sector characterized by low-skilled, labor-intensive jobs that offer minimum wages with no benefits, poor working conditions, and few opportunities for Suburbanization and New Trends in Community Development / 79 upward social mobility.5 The urban employment base of unionized, blue-collar manufacturing jobs that used to facilitate intergenerational mobility for the working-class is shrinking. Consequently, the jobs available...

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