Acculturation Strategies among Chinese Immigrants in the American Labor Market — A Survey on Immigrants from Guantou Town, Fujian Province

Abstract

The current exploratory study takes the Guantou town immigrants as its target group to explore how they acculturate in the American labor market. The immigrants’ major acculturation strategies have been identified based on Berry’s bidimensional model of acculturation. Results reveal that integration and separation are the immigrants’ major preference of acculturation strategies. How the variables within each one of the two sets (demographic and intercultural contact) affect immigrants’ preference for different strategies has been tested. Descriptive analysis and correlation analysis show that some general relationships could be predicted in terms of immigrants’ demographic features and the intercultural contact factors. The authors have interviewed 18 participants through online QQ chatting system about their conceptions of the American Dream. Interview results indicate immigrants’ acculturation difficulties, which reflect their acculturation patterns or acculturation dilemma where psychologically the general Guantou town immigrants have unconscious tendency to the integration strategy, while in practice they choose to separate for being conditioned by those acculturation difficulties.