Fremont as “Silicon Valley North”—a moniker that reflected both its changing character and their hopes for the city’s economic future.
Fremont’s residential population was also booming. Between 1970 and 1990 while the populations of many core Silicon Valley communities hardly budged, Fremont’s nearly doubled from just over 100,000 people to nearly 175,000. During one of Santa Clara County’s most significant periods of growth, Fremont outpaced the county’s population growth rate 3.6% to 2.0%. “We’re a sleeping giant,” declared Gus Morrison. “Fremont isn’t that blue-collar town of old. That label just doesn’t fit anymore.”69
With its ample stock of new and affordable homes, good schools, and an increasingly sophisticated array of community and cultural amenities, Fremont was especially popular among newly arrived Asian immigrants. As evidence of the city’s popularity among Indian Americans, Indra Agarwal, an Indian immigrant who moved to Fremont in 1972, recalled becoming the 16th subscriber to India West, an Indo-American newspaper that started in Fremont in the early 1970s and now circulates throughout California. By the 1980s, the city had developed a reputation in many Asian immigrant circles as a good place to live. Like prior generations, these groups arrived by word of mouth to stay with friends, family members, or university classmates from overseas and eventually settled in the city.70
These newcomers started businesses together, networked among each other, moved into common neighborhoods, and began to build their own versions of the American Dream. When I asked Ishan Shah, a second-generation Indian American, why his family had relocated from Chicago to Fremont in the early 1990s, he spoke of both the importance of immigrant networks and what Fremont meant to families such as his. “We had heard that’s where all the immigrants went,” he explained. “It was a community of people driven by the same principles. [My parents] really connected with that. They felt that this was going to be a good place with people like us.” While Ishan’s father was trained as a computer engineer, he moved to Fremont to pursue his lifelong dream of starting his own business. In 2009, Ishan announced his bid for Fremont City Council. At the age of 17, he became the youngest declared candidate to ever run for public office in the United States. According to Ishan, it could only have happened in Fremont. For both he and his father, the city represented a land of opportunity and was key to their American Dream.71
S. Mitra Kalita argues that for many post-1965 Indian immigrants, the American Dream and the suburban dream have been deeply intertwined. “For many, homeownership in a place with a good school district and soccer leagues, strip malls and picket fences, signified the completion of the American Dream,” she wrote.72 According to Kalita, what most post-1965 Indian immigrants wanted from suburbia was similar to that of most other Americans.73 But there were also important differences. The first waves of post-1965 Asian immigrants were looking for suburbs with, as Ishan said, “people like us.” It was a generation who in large part had come to the United States for higher education. They were high-achieving, upwardly mobile, and more culturally “assimilated” than previous generations. They had saved up and sacrificed to purchase new homes in quiet suburban neighborhoods with good schools that were easily accessible to their jobs. But they also sought out places in proximity to their cultural touchstones: Asian grocery stores, restaurants, community institutions, places of worship, and other professional Asian Americans.
These amenities and their shared value among others of similar racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds gave Asian American suburbanites a sense of home, place, and security. These amenities were not just part of Asian American suburbanites’ dreams; they served as critical supports in their pursuit of them. Asian Americans have long used their ethnic communities and resources not just as a refuge but also as a platform for social mobility.74 The community and cultural infrastructure being built in places such as Fremont was, as much as the suburbs themselves, their launching pads.
Taking stock of just how much Fremont changed over two decades of rapid immigration was not so easy for those who lived through it. But for those just coming to the area, the contrast between it and other American suburbs was clear. When Irene Yang arrived in Fremont in the mid-1980s from New Jersey after emigrating from Taiwan, she could not believe what she found:
I almost felt like I’d moved to another country. This [was] not the America that I was used to. When I [went] to the playgrounds, the people [spoke] in their different languages. The Indian moms would be together speaking in Punjabi or whatever, and the Chinese moms—the Taiwanese moms—would be speaking Taiwanese dialect to each other (the ones from back then, very few from mainland China). And then, very few already, very few Caucasian moms.
For many Asian immigrants, even those such as Irene who had lived in the United States for many years, moving to Fremont changed the way they perceived of the suburbs and their relationship to it. Entering a city that was fully entrenched in its transformation from a White working- and middle-class community to a global hub for skilled migrants from all over the world, Irene was faced with a kind of diversity that she had never seen before. Amid such diversity, she saw both new opportunities for connecting with those similar to herself but also new challenges of negotiating the separate spheres that were beginning to take shape among Asian Americans and between Asian Americans and Whites. Such experiences marked the new social realities faced by Asian American suburbanites of this generation as distinct from all those who had come before them.
COSMOPOLITAN SUBURBIA (1990–2010)
By 1990, Silicon Valley was entering its boom years. A decade later the ride was over, and the region was dealing with the aftermath of the dot-com bust and ongoing effects of the Great Recession. But throughout this period of rapid economic expansion and contraction, the region was constantly being reshaped by its role as a popular immigrant gateway, especially for highly educated, geographically mobile immigrants from mainland China and India. Compared to previous generations who often left their homelands behind, these migrants remained closely tied to their friends, families, and even workplaces abroad. In only two decades, they turned many valley suburbs into cosmopolitan places that were more dynamic, globally connected, and ethnically diverse than ever before.
The year 1990 marked a critical turning point in the history of immigration policy for highly skilled immigrants. That year, Congress signed a new immigration and naturalization act focused on attracting skilled laborers. The act tripled annual immigrant quotas for professional employment-based visas from 54,000 to 140,000 and initiated the H-1B, a visa that permitted foreign nationals with “special skills” that were in demand among American companies to work in the United States for six years with the option of pursuing a green card.75 The initial cap on new visas was set at 65,000 but continued to rise throughout the decade, reaching 195,000 by 2001.76 Policy changes coincided with improved foreign relations with both India and China and booming economies in both countries that produced large numbers of highly trained engineers, researchers, and other information technology professionals.
While national and international forces propelled Asian immigration, high-tech companies played a significant role in facilitating their migration to Silicon Valley. During the dot-com boom (1995–2000), over 168,000 new jobs were created in Santa Clara County—more than had been produced in the previous 15 years of a thriving electronics industry.77 Arguing that there were insufficient American-born employees to fill these positions, Silicon Valley companies pressed Congress to raise the cap on H-1B visas and allocate a larger portion of those visas to high-tech employers. Their lobbying efforts proved effective.78 In the first few decades of the program, Silicon Valley companies ranked among the nation’s top employers of visa holders, and computer-related occupations received the bulk of all H-1B visas.79 In 1999, for example, 57% of all H-1B visas went to workers employed in information technology.80
As more visas were granted, Silicon Valley began to use them to aggressively recruit skilled foreign-born workers. Some placed ads in overseas trade journals and newspapers announcing the availability of jobs and employer-sponsored
