In 1990 the USA enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act which almost tripled the number of visas granted on the basis of occupational skills from 54,000 to 140,000 annually.

The population of Chinese workers in the high-tech industry kept swelling in the 1990s. At the same time the population of Chinese students in California universities was swelling even faster. In 1990, 23% of the Chinese employed in Silicon Valley were college graduates with a master or PhD, compared with only 11% for the white population (only the Indians boasted a higher percentage of graduates).

Feifei Li represents the Deng-era wave of immigration. Her parents moved to the USA in the late 1980s and she grew up in suburban New Jersey before moving to California for university. At Caltech she created ImageNet (2006), an important step in the development of Artificial Intelligence, so much so that in 2013 she became the director of Stanford's AI Lab.

The 1990s witnessed the Internet revolution, which started in 1991 with the inauguration of the World-wide Web and the first "browsers" and "search engines". The first wave of Chinese founders in Silicon Valley was almost entirely of Taiwanese-born founders, like Jen-hsun Huang of Nvidia (1993), Jerry Yang of Yahoo (1994) and Steve Chen of YouTube (2005). Many of the Chinese executives in major Silicon Valley companies were also from Taiwan, like Kai-fu Lee, an executive first of Apple and then of Google. Finally a founder of a major company who was born and raised in mainland China appeared: Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom in 2011.

In the 1990s the motivation for the Taiwanese to emigrate was greatly reduced: Taiwan was moving towards a democratic government (the first direct presidential election took place in 1996), Taiwan had become a high-tech country (TSMC had been founded in 1987 and in 1990 the Industrial Technology Research Institute launched a five-year program to develop submicron fabrication technology), the economy was growing rapidly (12.8% in 1987), and Taiwan's per-capita income was growing rapidly ($8,000 in 1990, double the 1986 level, compared with $24,000 in the USA but with a much lower cost of living). The number of Taiwanese students on US campuses peaked in 1993/94 at more than 37,000 and then it started declining. Last but not least, Taiwan's educational system had been reformed (in 1990 junior colleges were converted into four-year institutes of science and technology, and the threshold on the college entrance exam was lowered to expand the college population) and its National Taiwan Institute of Technology (instituted in 1974) had become world-class.

In 1997 Hong Kong returned to be part of mainland China, a fact that induced many Hong Kongers to move to California, but for the most part Chinese immigration was now mainly from mainland China, and soon Mandarin-speaking mainlanders greatly outnumbered the Taiwanese and the Cantonese.

In 1997 Michael Chang, who had immigrated from Hong Kong as a student, was elected mayor of Cupertino, the first Chinese American to become mayor in the Bay Area. There wasn't a San Francisco mayor of Chinese descent until 2011, when Ed Lee got elected. In the same year, Jean Quan was elected mayor of Oakland.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Asian Americans became the fastest-growing ethnic group of the USA, thanks mainly to Indians and Chinese, which replaced the Japanese as the leading Asian-American groups. The new crop of Chinese American immigrants were either students or engineers. About 15% of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans are employed or do research in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math), and about 4% of STEM graduates from US universities are ethnic Chinese. Immigrants constitute 69% of the high-tech workforce of Silicon Valley, with Chinese immigrants being approximately 14%. Asians are the richest group in the USa. Chinese neighborhoods have the reputation of having the lowest crime rate, no drugs, no prostitution. Chinese children have the reputation of studying and winning prizes, not joining gangs. What a change from the days when Chinatown was considered a concentrate of opium dens, brothels and tongs.

But habits are apparently difficult to break. When in 2020 the covid pandemic spread from China into the USA, president Donald Trump called it "the China virus" and the Chinese were again targeted by white suprematists. Just like back then, hostility towards the hard-working Chinese and negative portrayals of Chinese communities spread on the media that had taken the place of the newspapers: social media.