Does "Ethnic Convenience" Make Cultural Integration More Difficult?

There are certain areas of San Diego one can go to feel completely Asian.  Beside the palm tree-lined boulevards, Asian supermarkets, restaurants, and living goods stores completely fill malls and shopping centers, with only the ubiquitous American fast-food chains (which are also ubiquitous in major Asian cities these days) the only non-Asian physical presence.  Signs in Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean predominate, with English signs in much smaller fonts as translations for the Asian language signs.  Asian cars carrying Asian families stream in and out of the parking lots.

In these little Asian enclaves, English language is optional.  From workers to the customers, most speak some Asian language as their native language, and many have difficulty stringing together the simplest of sentences in English.  With many new immigrants from Asia inundating America (especially California), proportions of those who cannot speak English has been growing fast at the expense of Asian-Americans born and bred in the country.  The demand for Asian language fluency among staff members, as a consequence, has been rising steadily at the expense of need for English.

Of course, the very concept of Asian enclaves in America is not a particularly new phenomenon.  The oldest Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, and Little Saigons go back decades, if not centuries.  In many cases, their presence changed local business atmospheres, and led to creation of original Asian communities that used their business acumen to prosper in foreign lands.  But the idea of Asian enclaves itself is changing with the continued increase in Asian populations.  They are no longer communities that were dependent on non-Asian money to thrive.

Instead, with the streaming in of large numbers of Asian immigrants who already had money before they came to America, these Asian communities have become more and more financially self-sustaining.  Instead of relying on non-Asian customers to bring in revenues, they have quickly reoriented themselves to prosperous Asia, with commercial links with Asia the main source of income for many people.  By tapping into commercial success in Asia, through individual business relationships of new immigrants, the need for catering to non-Asian traffic has been declining.

The shift to commercial links with Asia is best reflected in the types of businesses that now dominate Asian shopping centers.  There are now large numbers of travel agencies and business agents that specialize in transporting people, goods, and capital back and forth between the US and Asian countries.  Gone are Asian restaurants that specialize in modifying Asian foods to the tastes of non-Asians. Replacing them are Asian restaurants that survive based on how authentic (i.e. unchanged from the original in Asia) they are.  Many of the shops are overseas branches of already successful businesses in Asia.

The fact that Asian enclaves in America are becoming much more Asian and much less American would affect how the new waves of Asian immigrants to America interact with the US as a country.  Because new immigrants with inevitably first come in contact with Asian communities upon their initial arrival, how American culture is filtered through the Asian communities with color how they perceive, and then become, culturally American over time.  But if Asian-American communities are becoming more exclusively Asian, what comes out of that cultural filtering will be much more minimal than it was the case decades ago.

Now as it has always been, Asians initially migrate to America not because they want to become American per se, but because they want to make American money.  The idea of becoming American was just a necessary step for many of these economic migrants.  But as the lure of American money become much less over time as the prospect of Asian money increases, America has become just a "platform" and not a "destination" for many.  New immigrants simply use America for its legal institutions, clean air, and cheap products to protect their assets, standards of living, and themselves.

And those protections can be obtained without ever having to step outside the Asian enclaves.  The conveniences provided by Asian communities that increasingly cater to the demands of rich Asian new arrivals have become a massive obstacle for new immigrants to become more integrated with non-Asians, and indeed, to learn anything about non-Asian cultures in America.  And as new Asian immigrants remain more tied to a increasingly prosperous Asia, and less so with the rest of America, it is not inconceivable than future generations of Asian-Americans will remain much more socially apart from non-Asians in America.

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