Marital boundaries and highly achieving immigrants: How upward assimilation can lead to intermarriage resistance

According to the ‘Asian American marriage paradox’, Asian-origin groups generally achieve upward assimilation, but experience different paths to marital assimilation, including marriage to white natives. The author uses the perceptions of a sample of successful Taiwanese immigrant parents regarding marriageable partners for their children to examine how integration can result in resistance to intermarriage with whites. An analytical framework called marital boundaries is proposed to show how differences between ‘marriageable us’ and ‘undesirable them’ are perceived by individuals who occupy different family positions. Data from 37 interviews with highly achieving Taiwan-origin immigrants residing in San Diego reveal a long-term effect of homeland politics on their Asian-centered hierarchies for preferred marriage partners for their children. Impacted by a growing sense of Taiwanese nationalism starting in the 1970s, many interviewees described a moral line between different Asian groups that helped them define their marital boundaries. The data provide evidence of a tendency among Asian immigrants to follow segmented assimilation paths based in part on transnational influences. The findings challenge assumptions found in the immigration literature that define intermarriage with whites as a form of social mobility, as well as descriptions of Asians as a single homogeneous category.