Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb

By Noriko Matsumoto

Winner of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Author Award, Scholarly Non-fiction
Winner of the Richard P. McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Historical Association
Honorable Mention, 2019 American Sociological Association Book Award - Asia/Asian American Section

In recent decades, the American suburbs have become an important site for immigrant settlement. Beyond the City and the Bridge presents a case study of Fort Lee, Bergen County, on the west side of the George Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan and New Jersey. Since the 1970s, successive waves of immigrants from East Asia have transformed this formerly white community into one of the most diverse suburbs in the greater New York region. Fort Lee today has one of the largest concentrations of East Asians of any suburb on the East Coast, with Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans forming distinct communities while influencing the structure and everyday life of the borough. Noriko Matsumoto explores the rise of this multiethnic suburb—the complex processes of assimilation and reproduction of ethnicities, the changing social relationships, and the conditions under which such transformations have occurred.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813588841

Book preview

Beyond the City and the Bridge

Beyond the City and the Bridge

East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb

Noriko Matsumoto

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Matsumoto, Noriko, 1968– author.

Title: Beyond the city and the bridge : East Asian immigration in a New Jersey suburb / Noriko Matsumoto.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017056003 | ISBN 9780813588865 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813588889 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813588841 (epub) | ISBN 9780813589046 (web pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Fort Lee (N.J.)—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | East Asians—New Jersey—Fort Lee. | East Asians—Cultural assimilation. | Ethnic attitudes—New Jersey.

Classification: LCC JV7039.F6 M37 2018 | DDC 304.8/74921—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056003

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Noriko Matsumoto

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Contents

Introduction: Globalizing Suburbia

Chapter 1. A Town of Immigrants

Chapter 2. Community and Communities

Chapter 3. Strategies of Assimilation and Distinction

Chapter 4. Accommodating Others

Chapter 5. Remaking Asian Ethnicity in Suburbia

Conclusion: Reconsidering Assimilation and Ethnicity in the American Suburb

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

Globalizing Suburbia

The appearance of Asians within suburban pockets of the greater New York area in the 1970s was a novel phenomenon. In 1972, an article appeared in the New York Times, concerning a Japanese grocery store that had opened in 1969—The Far East (in Fort Lee).¹ It was reported to be the only such store in the New Jersey metropolitan area at the time. During the 1970s and 1980s, the press periodically reported on new communities made up of businessmen from Japan and their families in the suburbs of New York. Their rapid influx into Fort Lee piqued curiosity as the borough became home to the largest Japanese community in the tri-state suburban area. Headlines in the Times conveyed a sense of surprise and interest: Fort Lee: The Suburb of Japan; Why Fort Lee Lures Japanese; In Jersey, Japanese-Style New Year’s.² An established resident in Fort Lee, a white female, recalls the seventies: There used to be a Japanese restaurant on Main Street . . . and [there] was this line of Japanese guys in suits, bowing to a limousine as the limousine pulled away. Besides being the first nonwhite influx in the history of Fort Lee, the newcomers seemed to follow their homeland culture without signs of assimilation.

Some forty years later, the presence of Asians in Fort Lee is ubiquitous and no longer stirs such curiosity. The group that has developed a major ethnic presence, Koreans—and increasingly, the Chinese as well—have replaced the diminishing Japanese. The coresidence of these three groups is visible and audible in the library, church, and school and in the range of languages heard in public spaces. Bulletin boards in local Japanese and Korean supermarkets are covered with flyers in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as English, advertising apartment rentals, music and art classes, English conversation classes, summer camps, garage sales. Ethnic businesses, restaurants, and cafés—mostly Korean, some Chinese and Japanese—line the thoroughfares and shopping malls of Fort Lee. Nowadays it is Asians who increasingly deal with local whites as business owners, store clerks, and health care and other service providers.

Passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (the Hart-Celler Act) in 1965 resulted in a surge of immigration from Asia and Latin America into the United States.³ From 1980 through 2000, the percentage of Asians and Hispanics doubled in the United States. The percentage of foreign-born immigrants and their U.S.-born offspring is currently at its greatest level since the Second World War—25 percent of the U.S. population.⁴ Between 2000 and 2010, the Asian population grew faster than any other racial group in the United States. According to the U.S. census, Asians represented 4.8 percent (14.7 million) of the nation’s population in 2010, and this proportion is expected to double by the year 2050.

In recent decades, the American suburbs have become an important site of immigrant settlement. Beginning in the 1960s, large numbers of Asians and Latinos who had become economically and socially established began to move out of central city areas to settle in outlying suburbs. This development was in part due to the rise of a U.S.-born middle class in both groups, but the driving factor was immigration from Asia and Latin America. By the year 2000, the majority of foreign-born persons in the United States were living in the suburbs.⁵ Today, some suburban neighborhoods—those of metropolitan New York and Los Angeles, for example—have higher concentrations of ethnic group members than city neighborhoods. Asians are the most suburban of all racial minority groups: in 2010, 62 percent of Asians resided in the suburbs of America’s one hundred largest metropolitan areas.⁶ Such patterns challenge two enduring social myths—the notion of the American suburbs as homogeneous havens of the white middle class and of immigrants as predominantly the settlers of urban enclaves. The increasing move of immigrants to new destinations and new gateway suburbs, areas that had previously experienced little migrant flow, has drawn increased scholarly attention to these locations.⁷ Unprecedented ethnoracial diversity is now rapidly reconfiguring suburban life and landscapes and is raising questions regarding immigrant incorporation.⁸ Although research on immigrant communities has traditionally centered on cities, today the suburbs present a critical locus for the study of immigration.

This book concerns the immigrant communities of a metropolitan suburb of New York and the social transformations that have accompanied the dramatic demographic shifts at this location from the 1970s to the present. The site is Fort Lee, a borough of Bergen County in northern New Jersey. Ten miles from midtown Manhattan, Fort Lee is situated on the waterfront area recently dubbed the New Jersey Gold Coast. It lies along the Hudson River, stretching between Bergen and Hudson counties. The area has witnessed a real estate boom since the 1980s.⁹ Urban economic restructuring and resultant suburban development since 1970 have transformed the borough into a highly urbanized middle-class suburb with modern office buildings in the downtown and high-rise luxury apartments along the Palisades overlooking the Hudson. Despite its suburban location, Fort Lee’s proximity to New York City offers a sense, for residents, of being an extension or a borough of New York.

Fort Lee is a familiar name to New Yorkers: as the first town across the Hudson from Manhattan, many recall having passed through the borough en route to elsewhere. Less known is the fact that Fort Lee has now one of the largest concentrations of East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) of any suburb on the East Coast. Successive waves of East Asian immigrants have transformed this suburban space through expanding entrepreneurship, the educational system, and political and civic participation. This study aims to shed light on the rise of this contemporary multiethnic suburb, the changing system of social relationships within it, and the conditions under which such transformations have occurred.

Asian Immigration in Fort Lee and Bergen County

New Jersey is one of the five, major immigrant-receiving states in the United States—after California, New York, Florida, and Texas. The state has been an important destination for Asian immigrant groups and now has the fourth largest Asian population after California, New York, and Texas. The largest group is Asian Indian, followed by Chinese, Filipino, and Korean, all of which have been on the increase to date.¹⁰ East and South Asians were the fastest-growing immigrant groups in New Jersey in the 1990s. During this decade, New Jersey’s Asian populations grew by 61 percent—a rate higher than the national growth rate of 40 percent. The number was even higher in Bergen County, at 64 percent.¹¹

Bergen is the most populous county in the state of New Jersey (905,116 inhabitants as of 2010). Along with the steady influx of Hispanic immigrants, the county began to attract East Asian immigrants in the 1970s. According to the census of 1970, Bergen already had the largest number of Japanese (1,177) and the second largest number of Chinese (1,372) among the twenty-one counties of New Jersey.¹² During the 1990s and 2000s, Bergen County became the largest and fastest-growing suburban settlement of Korean immigrants in the New York metropolitan area.¹³ By contrast, the formerly predominant white population of Bergen County has markedly declined. Today, Asians make up almost half the population of some towns in Bergen County and have a presence in almost every municipality.¹⁴ Thriving immigrant businesses have breathed life into ailing downtowns. Bergen County’s low crime rate, its cleanliness, its parks and open areas, the ease of access to the mountains and to recreational areas to the north, and its numerous institutions and establishments serving the general public have all been sources of attraction for newcomers searching for a desirable place of residence.

Fort Lee was largely composed of German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish populations in the postwar period. The census registered 97 percent of the population as white in 1970; Italians constituted the majority of the white population in the same year—27.6 percent of the borough’s population.¹⁵ Between 1970 and 2010, the percentage of whites dropped, from 97 to 46.7 percent. Within four decades, the three Asian groups—Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans—have come to constitute 34.7 percent of the borough’s population, an increase from 1.7 percent in 1970 (table 1). Hispanics represented 11 percent in 2010. The number of Filipinos and Asian Indians has also increased while the number of blacks has shown a slight increase. As table 2 shows, the decline of white inhabitants has been offset mainly by the increase of Asians but also, more recently, by Hispanics.

The concentration of East Asians in Fort Lee is one of the highest in New Jersey. Over the last forty years, the composition of the East Asian population has, however, shifted (table 3). Japanese were the majority Asian group during the 1970s through the 1980s. Their numbers have rapidly decreased since the 1990s, yet Fort Lee still remains home to the largest number of Japanese in New Jersey. A Korean influx followed the declining number of Japanese around 1990, doubling in size between 1990 and 2000. Currently, Koreans form the largest minority group in the borough and represent the second largest Korean population in New Jersey after the neighboring borough of Palisades Park. While there has been a small proportion of longtime Chinese residents since the 1970s, the significant Chinese influx began in more recent years.¹⁶ Fort Lee now has the largest number of Chinese residents in Bergen County, a population that has grown rapidly since the 1990s. By 2010, the number of Chinese had surpassed that of Japanese. Fort Lee’s ethnoracial mix—rather than the predominance of one ethnic group—has produced a uniquely pluralistic, multiethnic suburban community.

The rapid influx of Asian immigrants into Fort Lee further reflects a new facet of the post-1965 immigrant wave—an increased proportion of well-educated, middle-class professionals. In 2015, Asians had the highest annual median household income ($76,679) of all racial groups—including non-Hispanic whites ($67,114)—and had incomes higher than those of the median household for the borough ($70,415).¹⁷ Asians also had the greatest level of education for all racial groups in the borough in 2015: 65.7 percent had gained a bachelor’s degree or higher, by comparison with 54.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites.¹⁸

The proportion of foreign-born residents has increased over the years in Fort Lee. According to the census of 1970, 19 percent of the Fort Lee population was registered as foreign-born. This figure increased every decade, and by 2000, nearly 45 percent of the borough’s population was foreign-born.¹⁹ In 2015, 53 percent of the borough residents were foreign-born; 64 percent of these were from Asia. Among the foreign-born, 60.9 percent were naturalized citizens.²⁰ Regardless of place of birth, Fort Lee’s population in general has been transient and has included a large portion of new arrivals with short tenures of residency.

Theorizing Immigrant Suburbanization in the United States

Suburbanization as a Sign of Assimilation

Traditionally, immigrants have settled in ethnic enclaves, defined by national origin, in central cities of the United States. Later immigrants, with limited resources, were drawn to the same communities, as havens of assistance with housing, jobs, and cultural familiarity. An enclave can be defined as a spatially concentrated area in which members of a particular population group, self-defined by ethnicity or religion or otherwise congregate as a means of enhancing their economic, social, political, and/or cultural development.²¹ Such enclaves occupy a transitional phase in the incorporation of new groups into society, providing mutual support, orientation to the new land, and a channel for integration. Immigrant enclaves have been viewed as a stepping stone toward integration and upward mobility in the mainstream; eventual departure from the enclave has been regarded as a sign of social success.²² Those who become economically secure leave the enclave and frequently convert their occupational mobility and economic assimilation into residential gain—in places with greater advantages and amenities, frequently in suburbia.²³

The spatial assimilation model proposed by Douglas Massey—an influential theoretical framework for immigrant suburbanization—holds that the move into white, middle-class suburbs is associated with immigrant acculturation and rising socioeconomic status, indicative of integration into mainstream society.²⁴ The process of moving out of the urban ethnic enclave entails the geographic dispersion of minority group members, opening the way for increased contact with members of the white majority and thus desegregation and greater assimilation. According to this model, the suburbs promote increased association with members of the majority group, eventually leading to the disappearance of ethnic distinctiveness. Spatial assimilation, closely connected with the idea of residential integration, may be viewed as a form of status attainment through relocation to the suburb.²⁵

Spatial assimilation has been used widely to assess the degree of residential segregation of various ethnoracial groups, the significance of suburbanization with regard to the assimilation of immigrants, and patterns of immigrants’ residential distribution in the United States and beyond (e.g., in Canada).²⁶ It has been found that English proficiency (a measure of acculturation) and high socioeconomic status are strongly correlated with the suburbanization of ethnic minority groups. Minority suburbanization can also be viewed as a process driven primarily by the motivation for status attainment rather than ethnic preference.²⁷ Asian representation in those suburbs with large white populations has increased more than that of African Americans and Hispanics. This has been interpreted by some as indicative of the declining significance of race for Asians.²⁸ That suburbs with large Asian populations tend to be wealthier and more self-sufficient may seem to support the spatial assimilation model. Asians’ lesser degree of residential segregation from whites, compared with that of blacks or Hispanics, does not, however, automatically imply greater contact with whites. In fact, scholarship has indicated that depending on the region, an increase in Asian immigration has also led to an increase of Asian–white segregation.²⁹

Maintaining Ethnicity in Suburbia

Contrary to previous assumptions of a reduction in the probability of ethnic aggregation, it was found that by 1990, most groups had established ethnic communities in suburbia. Ethnic concentration has not disappeared in the suburban setting. For some groups, the suburban enclave provides an alternative to assimilation—it is an ethnic community in a relatively high-status setting.³⁰

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, Asian ethnic communities began to develop in metropolitan suburban areas to accommodate affluent U.S.- and foreign-born Asians. Many new immigrants from Asia now settle directly into middle-class suburbs, bypassing the urban ethnic enclaves; they position themselves within the middle or upper-middle strata on arrival in the United States. Recent immigrants often arrive with considerable amounts of financial capital, high levels of education, desirable occupational skills, and the social capital necessary for settlement in desirable locations, even while lacking signs of acculturation such as English proficiency. Scholars interpret this recent pattern among Asians as the reflection of greater resources, volitional selection, and a preference for coethnic residency, rather than social constraints such as discrimination in housing.³¹ In light of this new trend, the proposed correlation between level of assimilation and residential mobility in the spatial assimilation model appears less tenable. The question arises whether the suburbanization of nonwhites today has the same impact on them that it had on earlier European immigrants.

Recent conceptualizations of emerging suburban ethnic communities have drawn upon the case of Chinese immigration in the Los Angeles suburbs. These ethnoburbs are defined by urban geographer Wei Li as suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large American metropolitan areas, where one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but may not necessarily be a majority.³² The ethnoburb is a product of a multitude of factors including economic globalization, geopolitical shifts, and changes in immigration policy. The ethnoburb differs from urban enclaves and, it is argued, is not a suburban Chinatown.³³ As an expression of the international expansion of fiscal and economic structures, high-waged, highly skilled professionals involved in international trade tend to live in the ethnoburb, with an overrepresentation of those in the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector. Yet in Li’s example from the environs of Los Angeles, the ethnoburb retains some features of an ethnic enclave economy, since working-class Chinese follow the professional classes to provide ethnic services and businesses.³⁴ Ethnoburb residents are thus of diverse socioeconomic status, producing a new class stratification within the ethnic suburb.³⁵ This combination of global ties and local service jobs gives the ethnoburb the feeling of a global outpost with a distinctive ethnic character.

The ethnoburb model describes a framework of resistance to complete assimilation and a propensity for the maintenance of immigrant cultural heritage. The ethnoburb is a voluntary concentration of the ethnic group, created and maintained through deliberate effort, and is self-contained as a place of residence and work. As a result of such sociospatial arrangements, the assimilation process slows down and takes different forms. Despite the ethnic concentration, ethnoburb residents have greater interaction with the host compared to those in urban enclaves and can integrate into mainstream society through economic activities, political involvement, and community life.³⁶

Another contemporary form of suburban ethnic community is that of relatively privileged Chinese immigrants residing without propinquity. In this case, ethnic linkages are retained without clustering in a physically defined community. According to such heterolocalism, recent immigrants with resources adopt a dispersed pattern of residential location while maintaining strong social cohesion.³⁷ Ethnic organizations such as language schools, churches, community organizations, and cultural and political agencies provide for the maintenance of community. The spatial dispersal of ethnic services and institutions allows for such residential patterns while the high socioeconomic status of immigrants obviates the necessity of clustering together for ethnic support.³⁸ Affluent immigrants may choose to live in dispersed areas solely for practical reasons (e.g., the education of children) without necessarily being assimilated.

Immigrant professionals and upwardly mobile, U.S.-born Chinese Americans who settle in affluent suburbs among diverse ethnic groups tend to blend in with the local scene and are viewed as generally assimilated by some scholars.³⁹ Such Yacht Chinese are not perceived as a threat to Caucasian majorities in life or work, as opposed to the ‘boat’ people of various backgrounds.⁴⁰ It does not seem that these highly educated, affluent Chinese immigrants drawn to the suburbs are concerned with favorably impressing their white neighbors, however. This tendency may instead be ascribed to social origin: coming from developed countries with high standards of living, such immigrants are confident of their own values when encountering the outside world.⁴¹ Whether dispersed or clustered, Wei Li considers contemporary Chinese communities as a new ethno-spectrum of multiclustered settlement patterns and multifaceted community forms.⁴²

Everyday Life in the Growing Multiethnic Suburb

Metropolitan suburban communities in the United States have evolved into global neighborhoods in which native-born groups live side by side with immigrants of different national origins. Emergent multiethnic suburbs have been documented in several ethnographic studies, whose findings underscore the increasing significance of immigration and ethnic relations for suburbia. The majority of studies have focused on the Los Angeles area, including Monterey Park and the San Gabriel Valley.⁴³ The primary issues considered include intraethnic