Early Silicon Valley companies clustered in exclusive suburbs and employed an almost all-White labor force, especially among white-collar engineers and managers.50 The valley was a dream landscape for many early high-tech employees who were enticed not only by its well-paying jobs but also by the promise of orderly and manicured suburban neighborhoods and high-end office parks designed around the same principals.51 In 1970, for instance, the elite suburb of Palo Alto just beyond the Stanford University campus was 93% White. The community also housed the Stanford Research Park, a 700-acre site that was home to many of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies, including Bell Labs, Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and Lockheed.
Silicon Valley’s rise to global prominence also came at a time of massive immigration from many parts of the world, particularly Asia. Immigrants were pushed by ongoing political and social turmoil and harsh economic conditions abroad and were pulled by the valley’s mild climate, extant Asian American populations, and wealth of new job opportunities. Following the passage of the historic 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, émigrés began arriving in record numbers. Commonly known as Hart-Celler, the act opened the floodgates of Asian immigration by lifting restrictive quotas from non-European countries and instituting new policies aimed at family reunification and attracting skilled labor.52 The population of Latino and Asian immigrants in the United States expanded rapidly—far faster, in fact, than Congress had anticipated. “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” Senator Edward Kennedy assured his colleagues. “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”53 Facing pressure from civil rights advocates but expecting little change, Congress passed a bill that has had one of the most significant effects on the numbers and diversity of immigrants ever since.
More educated and skilled than previous generations, post–Hart-Celler immigrants were far more likely to bypass central-city destinations to settle directly into suburbs, such as those in Santa Clara County.54 Between 1970 and 1980 the population of Asian Americans in the county grew threefold, from around 30,000 to more than 100,000, making up just under 8% of the population. In the subsequent decade the population more than doubled to over 260,000, comprising nearly 18% of the county’s population. Fremont saw similarly dramatic trends, with Asian Americans growing from fewer than 2,000 residents in 1970 to more than 33,000 in 1990, comprising about one-fifth of the city’s population. During the same period, the city’s immigrant population went from less than 5% to about 20% of the population (Table 1).
TABLE 1. Over the last half century, Fremont grew from a predominantly White middle-class suburb to a hub for highly educated high-income immigrants from around the world. The table compares Fremont’s racial composition, foreign-born population, and median household income to the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose Metropolitan Statistical Area between 1960 and 2010.
Santa Clara County’s first major wave of Asian immigrants were a diverse lot but highly stratified by occupation, education, and skill level. The valley’s “barbell economy” tended to concentrate jobs at the top and at the bottom—clearly dividing the workforce between manual and mental laborers.55 Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Indians, to a lesser extent, were those most likely to be employed in the higher-end positions, entering into the ranks as scientists and engineers. Many arrived under professional visas known as the third and sixth preference, which prioritized admissions for those with “exceptional abilities” and in occupations with short labor supply in the United States. They came seeking better jobs and educational opportunities than they had in their home countries and oftentimes greater political stability and freedoms. Filipinos fled far more dire circumstances, including the deteriorating economic and political conditions in the Philippines under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965–1986). Still, those who emigrated tended to be among the professional class and entered semiskilled professions that supported the valley’s economy, such as nursing and medical technology.56 They were later joined by a rush of political refugees from Indochina, particularly Vietnam, who arrived in several successive waves after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and throughout the 1990s.57 Often lacking formal education, many Indochinese refugees took jobs in manufacturing or other service-sector occupations such as construction, landscaping, and dishwashing. While plentiful and requiring little English-language skills, these jobs were often temporary, offered few legal protections, and had hazardous working conditions and little opportunity for upward mobility.58
While many recent arrivals initially settled into various communities in and around San Jose, their geographies quickly became as divided as their occupations. Southeast Asian immigrants, including Vietnamese and Filipinos, tended to cluster in “South County,” an area of Santa Clara County that stretched all the way south to Gilroy and whose core was in San Jose. Despite San Jose’s attempt to attract high-tech companies, its inexpensive housing, land, infrastructure, labor, and taxes compared to other Silicon Valley cities was attractive to many computer component manufacturing firms and their blue-collar workers.59 These included not only many Southeast Asian Americans but also Latinos and, to a lesser extent, African Americans.60 By 1990, Vietnamese Americans and Filipino Americans made up nearly half of the 152,000 Asian Americans in the city of San Jose.61
With growing presences in high-tech professions, Chinese and Indian Americans, however, bucked these trends. Instead, their primary geographies tended toward the more exclusive “North County” suburbs. Like Fremont, these communities had built their prestige on restrictive zoning that historically prevented race and class intermixing. By the mid-1970s when Asian immigration had reached new heights, however, many of the North County suburbs closest to Stanford University had already closed their borders to residential growth. By adopting strict no- and slow-growth policies, these close-in communities effectively raised the cost of land and pushed new development farther out. By 1975, 84,000 people commuted daily to the core Silicon Valley suburbs of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Santa Clara.62 While shunning residential expansion and density, many of these same communities welcomed new high-tech firms. Municipal bonds supported infrastructural investments needed for white-collar office parks, while tough environmental regulations ensured that manufacturing firms would not set up shop.63
Fremont was one of the few North County suburbs to welcome new residential development. In fact, the city courted it. Progrowth elected officials wanted Fremont to join the ranks of its prosperous neighbors and encouraged property owners to make residential and industrial land available to help it do so. “The welcome mat is out,” announced Mayor Gus Morrison in 1989. “If someone wants to build a quality project here, I mean a quality project, they’ll never have a reason to be disappointed with Fremont.”64 Stressing the need for “quality” development that matched their middle-class aspirations, the city fast-tracked business permits, rezoned much of its industrial land to industrial research, made significant infrastructure investments, and provided generous tax incentives to high-tech companies.65 In an effort to attract new Silicon Valley wealth, Fremont radically shifted its development policies—going from one of the state’s most highly recognized planned-growth communities to one of its most progrowth communities in only three decades.
The city’s efforts paid off. New Silicon Valley residents and companies saw clear advantages to locating in Fremont. It was strategically located directly across San Francisco Bay from Palo Alto and just north of San Jose. Further, its large quantity of undeveloped land allowed new homes and industrial land to be sold at about half the price as in core Silicon Valley towns.66 High-tech businesses boomed in Fremont from the 1980s to the late 1990s. In the early 1980s the city became home to Apple®, which produced its first Macintosh computer there.67 It also attracted other large high-tech firms such as NEXT and Everex computer manufacturing. By 1989 Fremont was the fastest-growing city in the region for new high-tech firms, with roughly 6,200 acres of its industrial land occupied, primarily by manufacturers
