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Title: "Other Asian: Taiwanese": Patterns, Determinants and Implications of Ethnic Self-Identification among Immigrants from Taiwan in the United States, 1990-2000
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2009
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Abstract: Social scientists have long understood ethnicity to be socially constructed, contextually dependent and temporally fluid, but even in scholarly works, ethnicity is presumed to spring spontaneously from blood descent in particular instances. An especially widespread case is the inference of Chinese ethnicity for all descendants of the global Chinese diaspora. Although immigration scholars have documented differential contexts of emigration and divergent patterns of settlement among immigrants from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, it remains taken for granted that all members of these disparate groups of immigrants are ethnically bound by a shared sense of Chinese identity. In this paper, I use 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census Long Form data obtained from the University of Minnesotas IPUMS-USA website to show that immigrants from Taiwan, like their counterparts in the country of origin, are heterogeneous, and increasingly so, in their self-identification. I also demonstrate that ethnic choice among Taiwan-origin immigrants is shaped by the confluence of historical and current events in Taiwan and contextual conditions in the U.S., and that ethnic choice matters for political outcomes such as U.S. citizenship acquisition. The lessons of these findings are twofold: (1) the uncritical designation of all Taiwan-origin immigrants as Chinese in academic research leads to inaccurate conclusions about the Chinese American population properly understood, as well as to deficient knowledge about a relatively new, but growing, Asian American ethnic population; (2) beyond the particular case of Taiwan-origin immigrants, knowledge about immigrant incorporation more generally may be enhanced by closer examination of the historical
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Authors: Hsu, Naomi
Publisher: University of California, Berkeley
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity
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