Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation (II)

Our country has the largest Chinese population outside of Asia. This article tells how they have spread across California and the whole country.
- - Donna Poisl

By Min Zhou

The majority of the Chinese American population is spreading out in outer areas or suburbs in traditional gateway cities as well as in new urban centers of Asian settlement across the country. Small suburban cities in Los Angeles and the Bay Area have also seen extraordinarily high proportions of the Chinese Americans in the general population.

As shown in Table 2.3, there are 11 cities (with at least 10,000 people) in the United States in which Chinese Americans share over 20 percent of the city’s population, all but two of these cities are in the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles. All cities, except for San Francisco, shown in Table 2.3 are suburban cities that have emerged as visible middle class immigrant ethnoburbs only after 1980. However, recent residential movements of affluent Chinese Americans into white middle class suburban communities have tipped the balance of power, raising nativist anxiety of ethnic “invasion” and anti-immigrant sentiment.
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