This is the same dilemma that 1st generation Indian immigrants also struggle with.
Sir V.S. Naipaul compares it to being 'Shipwrecked'. You've arrived at a new land where you don't know anyone and build your life from scratch. You spend enough time here, but still don't "fit in" to the culture because you did not grow up here. Festivals are alien (ex: Halloween), holidays are alien (ex: Thanksgiving Day). You hit ceilings at work because the promotions in corporate america are mostly reserved for white men in their 40s. Your kids grow up here, and experience High School, Prom, College, Internship and such, and they have no idea what you are talking about when you say you miss the homeland.
You can't leave either, because you've put down roots, probably had some kids, and back home, things have changed dramatically, and even if you go back for good, you don't "fit in" there either, because you are always treated as the "NRI" - Non Resident Indian.
So after a decade or two,you are neither here nor there, essentially "shipwrecked" in America.
I don't know about the glass ceiling. Our CEO is from India (bet you can guess the company), many of our SVPs are Chinese. As a white male approaching his 40s, I'm not quite sure how promotion will work for me when all of our managers in my local site are ethnic Chinese (granted, I work in China and there aren't many foreigner datapoints).
In high school, I had a lot of ABCD classmates, and there parents were incredibly successful in the Seattle area, especially at Boeing. They had no problem going into management.
Cheer up, man. Who wants to fit in anyways? Kind of a platitude but it's true. The homogenization of culture (or asking immigrants to totally fit in to their new surroundings) are negative things for humanity.
Very true. I think it is precisely the not-fitting in which makes cultural mixture very very productive. Or in other words, cultural homogeneity is stagnation and unproductive.
Besides, did anybody realize how much chinese are contributing to high tech, battery tech from a chinese guy at stanford. Math from many chinese.
That said, of course the chinese government will want to take advantage of this like the russians will with their emmigres. The scale though may be frightening.
Hint, nobody really "fits in" in America. Even white natural born Americans are hardly the dominant group as they have many divisions within themselves.
Reading Naipaul was the very therapeutic for my first generation angst. On some level I now accept that I will now never feel at home - either in my country of origin or in the country that I have immigrated to.
Welcome to the human condition. It applies not just to first generation immigrants, but also multi-generation minority communities (try being black in America, pre-Obama) and lifestyle choices at the periphery of society (e.g. being openly gay).
So after a decade or two,you are neither here nor there, essentially "shipwrecked" in America.