Min Zhou

Nanyang Technological University | ntu · Division of Sociology

Transnationalism is often perceived as an agentic practice in migration studies. While acknowledging such agency, we argue that transnationalism also involves forced‐choice decision‐making by migrants whose work and daily lives are subjected to structural constraints beyond individual control. We employ the concept of ‘involuntary transnationalism’...

Based on a systematic review of literature on the sociology of international migration and empirical studies on immigrant entrepreneurship, this article critically examines the major concepts and theoretical models in this area of inquiry, such as the ethnic economy theory, the competitive disadvantage theory, the dual-layered interactive model, an...

Singapore is known for differentiating highly skilled and low-skilled migrants by regulating their social rights, employment, and pathways to permanent residency and citizenship. Since 2009, the city-state has made further differentiation between highly skilled migrants and natives, that is, native-born citizens. Existing studies on migrant differe...

Immigrant enterprises, especially small businesses in the service sector of urban economies, are often highly gendered. This article, based on a previous case study of the Chinese nail salon industry in New York City, employs a new analytical framework constructed from theories of multiple embeddedness and transnationalism—termed "simultaneous embe...

In this study, we examine the Vietnamese population of the United States as a case study in the integration of a refugee group. We first offer a brief review of Vietnamese refugee resettlement in the US and the making of a new ethnic community. We then provide a quantitative analysis of socioeconomic mobility among Vietnamese refugees using America...

The emerging literature on multinational migration highlights migratory journeys that involve more than one country of destination. This article focuses on the lived experiences of new Chinese and Indian migrants in Singapore and Los Angeles. We conduct a novel three‐way comparison to examine personal choices to engage in additional migration(s) an...

A central issue in contemporary debates over immigration concerns how immigrants from diverse origins become integrated into their host nation. The children of Asian immigrants in the United States often give the impression of fitting neatly into American society and therefore into the American nation as a model minority. We argue, however, that su...

This paper examines the challenges that highly skilled immigrant workers face and their strategies of adaptation. We employ the term “precarious talent” to capture an often neglected aspect of skilled migration. Using both survey data and interviews on skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants in Singapore, we find that these migrants confront varying...

This article investigates how global forces influence immigrant entrepreneurship. Research in the United States generally assumes that immigrant enterprises, especially those in the service sector of the urban economy, are largely low-end and highly localized. Our case study of Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City suggests that immigrant ente...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on immigrant entrepreneurship since the mid-2000s to examine the changing trends, variations and theoretical advances in immigrant entrepreneurship in Western societies. Design/methodology/approach Using the SocIndex and Proquest Business Premium databases, the authors conduc...

This paper focuses on a special type of remittances — monetary remittances sent by international migrants to their hometowns to build symbolic structures and cultural facilities for collective consumption. We develop an analytical framework to examine the motives behind migrants’ remitting behavior and the mechanisms for realizing their remitting o...

This chapter traces the histories of long-standing Chinese migrations to the United States to examine the link between immigrant entrepreneurship and diasporic development. Based on data collected from two parallel research projects and multisite fieldwork in the United States and China, Zhou and Liu show that immigrant entrepreneurship has continu...

Asian-Americans are 6% of the U.S. population but comprise more than one-fifth of the entering classes in the country’s Ivy League universities. At prestigious public universities like the University of California, Berkeley, they constitute more than 40% of the student body. Figures like these would be unremarkable if Asian-Americans students unifo...

Asian Americans are frequently deployed as racial mascots by pundits who fixate on their extraordinary levels of educational attainment. They comprise only 5.5% of the U.S. population, yet about one fifth of the entering classes in Ivy League universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Pundits have attributed these educational outcomes to cultu...

Downloaded by [Professor Min Zhou] at 20:48 12 July 2016 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/I0.1080/01419870.20l6.l200743 E Roufledge Taylor & Francis Group REJOINDER Unravelling the link between culture and achievement Jennifer Lee‘ and Min Zhou“ *‘Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, USA; ‘Department of Sociolo...

We consider cross-space consumption as a form of transnational practice among international migrants. In this paper, we develop the idea of the social value of consumption and use it to explain this particular form of transnationalism. We consider the act of consumption to have not only functional value that satisfies material needs but also a set...

African migration to China has emerged as a significant sociological phenomenon only very recently. Africans in China are predominantly self-made entrepreneurs doing business face-to-face with Chinese entrepreneurs and living among local Chinese residents. Their encounters with the Chinese in local markets, residential neighborhoods, and on the str...

This paper focuses on a special type of remittances - monetary remittances sent by international migrants to their hometowns to build symbolic structures and cultural facilities for collective consumption. We develop an analytical framework to examine the motives behind migrants' remitting behavior and the mechanisms for realizing their remitting o...

This article addresses three main questions through a comparative study of new Chinese immigrants in the United States and Singapore: (1) How do contexts of emigration and reception affect the ways in which new immigrants are tied to their homeland? (2) How do diasporic communities help members engage with the homeland? (3) What effects does transn...

Guangzhou is the most popular gateway city for African migration to China. Unlike stereotypical international migrants, Africans in Guangzhou are predominantly self-made entrepreneurs, doing business face-to-face with Chinese entrepreneurs who are mostly internal migrants with truncated citizenship rights. African-Chinese encounters in local market...

This essay offers a review of the scholarly literature on immigrant assimilation, looking at how classical assimilation theories explain the processes and outcomes of assimilation among contemporary immigrants and their offspring and how alternative theories are developed to address assimilation's discontents. The essay first revisits the commonly...

PurposeThe study aims to examine the causes of the divergent patterns of contemporary transnational engagement with China among new Chinese immigrants and the effect of transnational entrepreneurship on migrants’ integration into their host societies. Methodology/approachIt is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study that contains interviews, part...

This article examines the causes and consequences of generational formation in the Chinese diaspora in America. Based on a review of the existing literature and a reanalysis of data collected from my prior research on China-born immigrants in the United States, I document the formation of immigrant cohorts in four historical periods of Chinese immi...

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of uni...

This article examines the causes and consequences of generational formation in the Chinese diaspora in America. Based on a review of the existing literature and a reanalysis of data collected from my prior research on China-born immigrants in the United States, I document the formation of immigrant cohorts in four historical periods of Chinese immi...

Scholars have long debated the reasons underlying Asian Americans’ exceptional educational outcomes. Psychologists emphasize individual cognitive ability and the effects of stereotypes on performance (1). Culturalists point to values, beliefs, norms, and behavioral patterns unique and intrinsic to ethnicity (2). Structuralists focus on socioeconomi...

Research on the new second generation has paid much attention to testing one of the hypotheses posed by segmented assimilation theory – downward assimilation into America's underclass – and has neglected to examine other possible outcomes. In this paper, I address a much understudied pathway – assimilation by way of the ethnic community – based on...

The status attainment model highlights the role of family socioeconomic status (SES) in the intergenerational reproduction of educational attainment; however, the model falls short in predicting the educational outcomes of the children of Asian immigrants, whose attainment exceeds that which would have been predicted based on family SES alone. On t...

An emergent literature on transnationalism has been burgeoning since the 1990s to examine new patterns of immigrant settlement. Research to date has emphasized the effects of transnationalism on the development in sending countries rather than receiving countries, focused on immigrant groups from Latin America rather than Asia, and examined individ...

Ethnic enclaves are urban neighborhoods in which immigrant groups or ethnic minorities are residentially concentrated, while ethnic niches are where particular types of businesses are disproportionately owned and/or staffed by ethnic minorities. Many ethnic enclaves seem to be unambiguously identified by the name associated with a sending country,...

The literature on development in economics and sociology has tended to focus on capital flows, investments, and, more recently, institutions as key causal factors. Nor does it consider important developmental synergies produced by the rising interactions between immigrant organizations and sending-country governments. Using data from a recently com...

The literature on development in economics and sociology has tended to focus on capital flows, investments, and, more recently, institutions as key causal factors. International migration, when discussed, is relegated to the status of a symptom of underdevelopment and even a factor contributing to it. The more recent literature on migrant remittanc...

Scholars have given considerable attention to the educational pathways of the new second generation, the children of immigrants to the United States and western Europe who came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. Social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have consistently reported significant differences in academic outcomes among...

Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America is a quantitative study of immigrants' assimilation and their impacts on social and racial inequality in the United States. Using repeated national survey data, Lingxin Hao thoughtfully and meticulously examines the patterns of wealth by various national origins, ch...

In this article, we aim to develop a conceptual framework from a community perspective to examine the noneconomic effects of ethnic entrepreneurship, paying close attention to the linkage between entrepreneurship and community building. We base our analysis on ethnographic data from our comparative case studies of the Chinese and Korean enclave eco...

Post-1965 immigration to the United States has given rise to a vigorous literature focused on adult newcomers. There is, however, a growing new second generation whose prospects of adap tation cannot be gleaned from the experience of their parents or from that of children of European immigrants arriving at the turn of the century. We present data o...

Informal social settings outside of school are as important as formal educational settings for children's learning and achievement. In the United States, informal settings are often organized by ethnicity and socioeconomic status in order to mediate the processes of individual learning, which consequently leads to intergroup differences in educatio...

This study examines the specific ways in which local institutions in inner-city neighbourhoods affect the formation of educational resources for immigrant children. Local institutions here refer to observable neighbourhood-based formal and informal organisations. Based on an ethnographic study of three Los Angeles immigrant neighbourhoods—Chinatown...

While the bulk of this chapter focuses on conflict, coping, and conciliation when parents and children live together, the author also considers intergenerational relations in the context of an altogether new type of living arrangement that has arisen in the Chinese immigrant community: "parachute kids." These are children who have come to the Unite...

Contemporary Chinese America is the most comprehensive sociological investigation of the experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States-and of their offspring-in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The author, Min Zhou, is a well-known sociologist of the Chinese American experience. In this volume she collects her original...

History and historiography have been central in the emerging field of Chinese American studies. This anthology, edited by Sucheng Chan and Madeline Hsu, uses a cultural history framework that weaves together personal narratives, family histories, case studies, and event analyses to show the lives of Chinese Americans “in more complex, intricate, an...

This article highlights divergent pathways to mobility among members of the new second generation, identifies key mechanisms affecting the choices they make in their pursuit of success, and explains how specific choices were pivotal in determining outcomes of segmented assimilation. First, the authors evaluate definitions of success and pathways to...

IntroductionMigrant Workers in the Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development DistrictResidential Patterns of Migrant Workers in the GETDDAnalysis: Adaptation or MarginalizationDiscussion: Reflection on TheoryConclusion AcknowledgmentsNotesReferences

In this paper, we re-examine new patterns of residential assimilation through the case of a sprawling Chinese ethnoburb in the San Gabriel Valley, California, focusing on the following questions: How have Chinese immigrants of diverse origins and socioeconomic backgrounds negotiated their way into the suburbia of an immigrant gateway metropolis? Wh...

As the new second generation comes of age in the twenty-first century, it is making an indelible imprint in cities across the country, compelling immigration scholars to turn their attention to this growing population. In this essay, we first review the extant literature on immigrant incorporation, with a particular focus on the mobility patterns o...

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Incl. bibl. references Extraordinary Asian American educational achievement has often been credited to a common cultural influence of Confucianism that emphasizes education, family honor, discipline, and respect for authority. In this article, Min Zhou and Susan Kim argue that immigration selectivity, higher than average levels of premigration and...

Our studies of Vietnamese youth in an ethnic enclave in New Orleans during the mid- 1990's showed a growing trend of "bifurcation," a situation in which youth were diverging in two distinct directions—valedictorian (or achiever) versus delinquent. As predicted by the segmented assimilation theory, we found that Vietnamese youth with close connectio...

The Chinese immigrant community has gone through several significant historical periods since the late 1840s: unrestricted immigration (1848-81), Chinese exclusion (1882-1943), immigration on restricted quotas (1944-67), and immigration on equal basis (1968-present). During each historical period, unique patterns of socio-economic adaptation and co...

This article aims to problematize the model minority image of Asian Americans. We argue that America's racial and class systems of stratification have shaped and, to an important extent, determined second-generation Asian Americans' multifaceted experiences and life chances. Consistent with the existing research, we find that assimilation outcomes...

In this article, we attempt to develop a conceptual framework of “ethnic capital” in order to examine the dynamics of immigrant communities. Building on the theories of social capital and the enclave economy, we argue that ethnic capital is not a thing but involves interactive processes of ethnic-specific financial capital, human capital, and socia...

This article addresses the role of religion in immigrant adaptation through the case of Vietnamese adolescents. Our results show that religious participation consistently makes a significant contribution to ethnic identification, which, in turn, facilitates positive adaptation of immigrant adolescents to American society by increasing the probabili...

This article examines simultaneously three theoretical explanations—assimilation, human capital, and discrimination—on the earnings attainment process of Chines, Japanese, and non-Hispanic white males in the United States. The analyses are conducted by level of education, by state of residence, and by nativety. We first apply the earnings determina...

Asian American Youth covers topics such as Asian immigration, acculturation, assimilation, intermarriage, socialization, sexuality, and ethnic identification. The distinguished contributors show how Asian American youth have created an identity and space for themselves historically and in contemporary multicultural America.

In the past thirty years, many concepts and theories on ethnic entrepreneurship have been developed, challenged, and revised to provide a fuller account of the phenomenon. This article revisits the existing literature to address some of the conceptual and methodological issues and the controversies that have lingered around them and to highlight im...

Describes patterns of labour-market insertion among foreign-born workers in the US. Using the Labour Utilization Framework (LUF) and the 1990 US Census data, it shows that nationality groups differ in how they are integrated into the labour force and that there are differential economic consequences associated with different patterns of labour forc...

Asian Americans have been labeled a “model minority” for their high rates of achievement, and some say they are on their way to becoming “white.” But these expectations can be a burden, and the predictions are surely premature. Even today, many Americans see Asians as “forever foreign.”

Este artículo presenta una visión general de las tendencias contemporáneas de inmigración a los Estados Unidos, y un análisis descriptivo por género de patrones de la incorporación económica de los inmigrantes. A partir de los setenta, la inmigración femenina legal e ilegal a los Estados Unidos ha aumentado ininterrumpidamente, sugiriendo una tende...

Since the 1980s, immigrant children and children of immigrant parentage have become the fastest growing and the most extraordinarily diverse segment of America's child population. Until the recent past, however, scholarly attention has focused on adult immigrants to the neglect of their offspring, creating a profound gap between the strategic impor...

This article provides an overview of America's urban population based on the 2000 Census and the implications of increasing cultural diversity for urban public schools. It addresses three basic questions: 1. What does America's population look like at the beginning of the 21st century? 2. What challenges do children and their families face in this...

This chapter seeks to unpack ethnicity through a close examination of ethnic language schools and the ethnic system of supplementary education in the immigrant Chinese community in the United States. It sheds light on the specific ways in which ethnic community organizations contribute to educational achievement.

This article explores the issue of gender role changes encountered by young Vietnamese‐American women based on our ethnographic study of Versailles Village, a low‐income ethnic community in New Orleans, US. We examine how female Vietnamese high school students deal with conflicts between the stubborn traditionalism of parents and the desire for per...

Investigating the relationship between immigration, middleman minority status, transnationalism, and U.S. foreign trade, the authors assembled a census-based data file that contains aggregate-level variables for 88 foreign-born groups by national origin between 1980 and 1990. They regressed immigrant characteristics and immigration volume upon time...

It has frequently been suggested that the academic achievement of minority students may be hindered by low self-esteem in a white-dominated society. Some researchers and theorists, however, have questioned such assumptions. The self-esteem-academic achievement issue is further complicated by the relatively strong performance of children of immigran...

In this study, we suggest that the difficulty in defining, locating, and measuring social capital is at core a philosophical confusion of language, and not just a consequence of excessively wide application. The term “capital” refers to resources for investment. Financial capital consists of specific quantities of assets. Human capital, a metaphori...

The upsurge of Chinese language media—publications, radio, television, and the Internet—mirrors the linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity of the Chinese immigrant community, its vibrant ethnic enclave economy, and its multifaceted life in the United States. This article explores the causes and consequences of the ethnic media and its im...

This chapter explores the complex, multidimensional process of acculturation, as understood and experienced by Vietnamese refugee children and as captured by the San Diego portion of CILS. It provides a historical account of why the Vietnamese fled their country, how they resettled in the United States, and how resettlement affected the adjustment...

The Chinese immigrant community in the United States has gone through several historically significant periods: unrestricted immigration, Chinese exclusion, immigration on restricted quotas, and immigration on equal basis. Each historical period marks a unique pattern of immigrant adaptation and community development, which influences the formation...

Social Forces 79.4 (2001) 1550-1552 Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. By Mary C. Waters. Harvard University Press, 1999. 413 pp. Cloth, $35.00. Black Identities tells an extraordinary story of how West Indian immigrants and their children find themselves in America and struggle to become American. Based on in-de...

Sociologist R. Stephen Warner has recently proposed that immigrant religious organizations in the United States tend to take on a de facto congregational form. By this, he means that they tend to become voluntary gatherings with lay involvement and control and professionalized clergies. In this study, we provide descriptions of two Southeast Asian...

The fall Stated Meeting of the Western Center was presided over by Western Center Cochair Jack Peltason. At the regional induction ceremony, Academy Executive Officer Leslie Berlowitz joined Western Center Cochair John Hogness and Western Center Executive Associate Paul Silverman in welcoming newly elected members. The meeting featured a panel disc...

Based on the industrial sectors in which group members are concentrated, the ethnic economies of various racial and ethnic groups became more distinctive from one another during the 1980s. Non-Hispanic whites continued to dominate key sectors in every metropolitan area studied. Their withdrawal from some others, however, left openings for other gro...

Based on the industrial sectors in which group members are concentrated, the ethnic economies of various racial and ethnic groups became more distinctive from one another during the 1980s. Non-Hispanic whites continued to dominate key sectors in every metropolitan area studied. Their withdrawal from some others, however, left openings for other gro...

This monograph examines the current state of Vietnamese America, summarizing research findings on Vietnamese children, both those who are native born and those born in Vietnam and raised in the United States. It provides insight into the unique experience of these children in order to help educators, administrators, and social workers deal effectiv...

"Parachute kids " are a highly select group of foreign students who have come to the United States to seek a better education in American elementary or high schools. Upon arrival in America, these children were typically between ages 8 and 17; many were admitted on F-i student visas; some were on B-2 visitor visas but later adjusted to F-i student...