ETHNIC IDENTITY AND SEGMENTED ASSIMILATION AMONG SECOND-GENERATION CHINESE YOUTH

The recent wave of immigration to North American society from new source countries challenges old theories of acculturation that were based on European immigration streams that assumed that ethnic retention was generationally conditioned. For Caucasian immigrants, it was assumed that assimilation was linear and that by the third generation, all traces of ethnic origin would be absent, save for a nostalgic interest in quaint and ephemeral aspects of an ethnic past labeled symbolic ethnicity (Child, 1943; Gans, 1979; Rumbaut, 1997; Waters, 1990). Since 1965 in the United States, and 1967 in Canada, changes in immigration policy suggest that alternative assimilation patterns may exist. Whereas previous immigration policy had discouraged non-Caucasian immigration, the new policy brought with it large-scale immigration from Asia in particular which introduced a different element of race into assimilation expectations. For these new immigrants, race continues to be a marker whereby prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination produce assumptions of “foreignness” regardless of generational status (Neckerman, Carter & Lee, 1999; Tuan, 1999).