School Performance of Second Generation Southeast Asian Taiwanese Stigmatized and Undiscovered Potentials in Globalization

Abstract

Why Taiwanese children born from Southeast Asian immigrant mothers had been perceived by the mainstream society as low-quality population with worse school performance? The author adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods to answer this research question. First, the author adopted a dataset from a three-year panel study conducted during 2005-2007 on school performance of elementary school students of both Southeast Asian immigrant non-immigrant Taiwanese families. Setting parental socioeconomic status, cultural and social capital, the author proceeded regression analyses to illustrate that, controlled father's SES and cultural capital, mother's immigrant status had insignificant impact on student's Chinese literature and mathematic performances. In other words, the perceived worse performance of Southeast-Asian Taiwanese students was more resulted from the lower SES and the lack of cultural of their Taiwanese fathers, not Southeast-Asian mothers. Second, the author conducted the follow-up interviews in 2015, when the elementary-school interviewees in the original panel survey had grown up and entered colleges. The author found that most interviewees' mothers, although many with college degrees, were married to Taiwanese men with relative low SES; besides, the biased and discriminative perception from mainstream society also stigmatized second-generation Southeast Asian Taiwanese, making these youngsters neither willing to recognize their maternal cultural tie nor speak mother's first language, thus losing their innate cultural capital and advantageous potential in a highly globalized world. Since father's SES cannot be changed post hoc, the author suggests the policy makers to destigmatize immigrant families in order to regain the advantage in cultural capital that second-generation Southeast Asian Taiwanese deserve to possess.