Immigrant Case Study: Chen

Unlike many immigrants who already had existing connections in America, be it the Huiguans and family groups that assisted with adjustment before 1965 or the immediate family connections after 1965, Chen and his wife were the first of their network to immigrate and thus had no connections in America. Without family and connections in their area of settlement, there was no one to vouch for Chen and to assist him in finding employment. Chen states he “started looking for a job on [his] third day in the new city and sent resumes to more than 100 different companies in different industries, with no reply.” Chen attributes his difficulty in finding a job to his “closed horizons” – he did not want to find a job that was too far from his previous experience. This sentiment is echoed by other post-1965 immigrants who resented finding jobs in America that were beneath their status and value in their home country.

In the end, Chen still used his primordial ties to find a job, as immigrants did previous to the 1965 Immigration Act. After half a year of searching, a colleague of Chen who worked with him in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in China was sent to work in the Chinese Embassy. This colleague took Chen to visit some companies who were interested in

expanding their operations to China and operated in Chen’s industry – packaging. She helped to arrange meetings between Chen and the CEOs of many companies, and Chen eventually found a company where his skills perfectly fit the requirements of the CEO.
Nonetheless, like many skilled immigrants after 1965, Chen still downgraded in his professional life despite the waiting and searching.

Previous to immigration, Chen was the CEO of an international packaging company with 15 subsidiaries, had multiple secretaries, a fleet of cars with drivers, seaside properties, maids, butlers and daily social events with the company. After immigration Chen said he had to work very hard and was “the first person at the office every day and the last person to leave. [He] also cleaned the office every morning and made coffee and tea for the rest of the staff.” From this description, it seems that although Chen’s position was to coordinate imports to Canada, he also took on a janitorial

role.
However, even though there was a significant downgrading in Chen’s position and treatment, he did not feel discriminated against nor felt that there was a limit to how high he can climb in the company or in society at large. While he knows anti-Asian discrimination and racism was a difficult issue for Chinese immigrants in the past, often resulting in violent clashes and discriminatory laws, he thinks that the environment has changed a lot, citing the welfare he received from the government upon his arrival and the equal treatment from his non-Asian colleagues at work.
In 2012, Chen departed from the company he had been working in since his arrival and started his own trading company to profit from the cheap cost of production in China. While this is not the same as past ethnic niche market creation stemming from discriminatory actions and laws, Chen’s entrepreneurism runs along the same vein. Chen’s start-up acted as a middleman between the producers of packaging goods in China and its importers in North America. Thus, while Chen did not act as a middleman domestically in the black and Latino neighbourhoods post-1965 or between landed immigrants and the white majority in the 20th century, he did act as a middleman internationally. In this regard, Chen’s entrepreneurship fitted in with the typical Asian American post-1965 immigration experience.