How Migration Transforms Social Inequalities: Taiwanese Christians in the United States after 1965

• In Event: Sociology of Religion Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5. Religion and the Experiences of Immigrants

Abstract

Using multi-sited and multi-lingual ethnographic and interview data in Taiwan and the United States between 2017 and 2022, this paper examines how migration can transform sending country inequalities through social and economic capital accumulation in the case of Taiwanese Christians in the United States. Under Taiwan’s martial law (1949-1988), local Taiwanese Christians experienced oppression and the prospect of a grim future as the government surveilled their actions in church and beyond as well as forbid their worship in the Taiwanese language. Immigrating to the United States represented a means of escaping an autocratic regime and a path to rebuild their lives and achieve mobility as they gained social networks in their religious life and economic capital in their professions. Prior to their migration to the United States, local Taiwanese were on the bottom of the social hierarchy. The Chinese Civil War and relocation of the Republic of China (ROC) to Taiwan is the geopolitical event that creates three new ethnic groups: those who were in Taiwan during Japanese colonization became local Taiwanese or benshengren, the newly-arrived Chinese in power are mainlanders or waishengren, and those who remained in China are the PRC Chinese or the (contested) zhongguoren or daluren.

This paper explores how, as highly educated and high-skilled local Taiwanese immigrants became middle-class Americans, their building of a transnational Taiwanese-in-name Christian network between Taiwan and the United States developed and increased their social capital. By creating hierarchical churches in the name of Taiwanese identity and forming relationships with mainline American denominations like Presbyterian Church(USA) and the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), these Taiwanese immigrants accumulated social capital alongside their economic wealth, changing their position in the ethnic hierarchy in place during Taiwan’s martial period.

Author

• Shirley Michelle Lung, University of Denver