Mobility Under Constraint: Spatial Relocation as a Mechanism of Intergenerational Mobility among Lower-Skilled Chinese Immigrant Families

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 14. Drivers of migration

Abstract

Children of lower-skilled Chinese immigrants often achieve educational outcomes comparable to, and sometimes surpassing, those of children from highly educated immigrant families. This pattern challenges classical status attainment models and remains insufficiently explained by dominant accounts of the Asian American achievement paradox, which emphasize either cultural transmission or hyper-selective ethnic capital spillover.
Drawing on 33 in-depth interviews with lower-skilled Chinese immigrant parents and second-generation children who relocated from New York City to the Capital Region of New York, this paper conceptualizes spatial mobility as a mechanism of capital conversion. Rather than treating relocation as a passive response to opportunity, I argue that it is a culturally organized strategy through which families actively reorganize their structural positions under constraint.
Spatial relocation operates through three interrelated mechanisms. First, it functions as an economic strategy: moving from saturated gateway enclaves to labor-scarce destinations reduces replaceability, increases bargaining power, and expands opportunities for entrepreneurship. Second, it reorganizes social reproduction: lower housing costs, car-dependent infrastructures, and reduced commuting time expand parental supervision, institutional access, and temporal coordination for intergenerational investment. Third, relocation serves as a symbolic project, allowing families to position themselves as responsible, disciplined, and deserving members of American society through suburban homeownership and child-centered narratives of sacrifice.
Importantly, these mechanisms generate advantage within unequal systems rather than outside them. Mobility depends on regional labor stratification, racialized regimes of deservingness, and gendered caregiving burdens. By converting geographic repositioning into economic, reproductive, and symbolic capital, families achieve intergenerational mobility while simultaneously navigating—and at times reproducing—the very inequalities that structure their opportunities.

Author

• Yi Lu, University at Albany, SUNY