Bounded Autonomy: How Information Asymmetries Enable Career Negotiation in High-Achieving Immigrant Families

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 5: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Family

Abstract

How do high-achieving children of immigrants navigate career choices that diverge from parental expectations? Drawing on interviews with 15 second-generation Indian American doctoral students, this paper reveals that elite credentials provide bargaining power in family negotiations through informational asymmetries. Parents define success through two frames: STEM-focused occupational expectations and moral-cultural norms around work ethic and conduct. Children leverage their achievements through two mechanisms – demonstration (providing salary data and prestige markers to translate unfamiliar careers into parental metrics) and withholding (delaying disclosure until outcomes are secured) –both exploiting the gap between parents' limited knowledge of U.S. labour markets and children's superior understanding of credential values and career trajectories.
This paper makes four contributions. First, it documents and categorizes Indian American parental success frames as either STEM-based occupational or moral-cultural. Second, it identifies information asymmetry as a crucial but understudied negotiation mechanism: parents who immigrated via H1B pathways possess limited knowledge of occupational diversity, and children exploit these gaps strategically. Third, it reveals the processes of negotiation through the demonstration and withholding mechanisms described above. Fourth, it shows that elite credentials enable these strategies by establishing trust, legitimacy, and reducing parental anxiety, though the resulting autonomy remains bounded, succeeding only when choices stay defensible within frameworks of prestige, income, and stability. These findings extend assimilation scholarship by showing that intergenerational negotiation involves strategic information management rather than wholesale adoption or rejection of parental values.
The paper also contributes to transnational Asian American studies by examining how H1B migration trajectories produce informational asymmetries that transcend American-centric frameworks. It deconstructs the model minority myth by revealing the constrained negotiation even "successful" second-generation individuals must undertake, and frames career negotiations as sites of world-making, where new possibilities are created within and against expectations shaped by transnational migration.

Author

• Aanchal Manuja, Columbia University