Filipino Americans: A Case for an Immigration Perspective on Social Class

• In Event: 392 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Interrogating Race

Abstract

“Puzzling”, “counterintuitive”, “a troubling paradox” (Kim 2006; Ocampo 2010; Okamura 1997). The case of Filipino Americans has remained a mystery for scholars: although most second generation Filipino Americans are children of professional, college-educated, English-speaking parents, they graduate from college at lower rates than the first generation and their seemingly less advantaged Asian American counterparts. Second generation Filipino Americans contradict what most theories of assimilation would predict, suggesting that there is something missing in our current frameworks. In this paper, I contend that these gaps are created, in part, to our narrow understanding of social class in immigrant families. Literature on education and immigration has failed to seriously consider how migration shapes social class among immigrants and their children. I offer an alternative framework, an immigration perspective on social class, which 1) integrates pre-migration processes, 2) considers the specific ways immigrants and their children accumulate various forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social capital, for example), and 3) analyzes how immigrants and their children interact with, integrate into, and quite often alter, current structures of inequality. The above processes can shape class reproduction among immigrant parents and their children and, therefore, impact life chances. This perspective, I argue, will broaden our understanding of the way social class works for immigrants and their children and may, perhaps, help explain paradoxical cases, such as the one of Filipino Americans.

Author

• Brenda Gambol, City University of New York-Graduate Center