Immigration and Entrepreneurship

Culture, Capital, and Ethnic Networks

Parminder Bhachu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351513425
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Emigrazione e immigrazione
• Index: Business

Many nations invite foreigners to work within their borders, but few welcome them. Those countries that do receive a torrent of immigrants create pressures that analysts expect to intensify as population growth and social unrest mount in the less developed countries of the world. Immigration and Entrepreneurship, now in paperback, offers a comparative analysis of worldwide immigration issues while focusing more specifically on the emerging influence of entrepreneurship as a potent factor in the economic and social integration of immigrants.In linking the common immigrant and settler experiences with the upsurge in self-employment, the contributors to this volume use California as their base of comparison. The state has both a huge and varied immigrant population and an entrepreneurial economy that has facilitated the formation of immigrant-owned firms. The Los Angeles riots of the nineties indicated the volatility of the mix. Aided by ethnic and familial networks, such firms have served as a route of economic advancement.Immigration and Entrepreneurship offers a comparative perspective unique in the literature of immigration by broaching the topic from both global and local perspectives. Whereas most studies examine the experience of a single group or groups in a particular destination economy, this volume emphasizes variations in the way different nations receive immigrants as causes of differences in immigrant behavior. Among the innovative themes discussed by a range of international scholars are the entrepreneurial efforts and tensions in the garment industry in Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin; Koreans' enterprise and identities in Los Angeles and Japan; and U.S. immigration policies. The result is a genuinely global methodology.

1

Introduction: California Immigrants in World Perspective

Ivan Light and Parminder Bhachu

Many nations invite foreigners to work within their borders, but few welcome them. When nations wish to welcome foreigners, they offer them the same political rights that their own citizens already enjoy. Citizenship is the most basic right (Brubaker, 1989). Of the many nations that accept or tolerate foreigners, only five now encourage foreigners to migrate, to settle permanently, and then to obtain citizenship and naturalization.¹ These are Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and the United States (Salt, 1989: 447-49). Because so few countries welcome foreigners, those that do welcome them receive torrents of immigrants, a pressure that analysts expect to intensify as demographic and social pressures mount in the less developed countries of the world (Montalbano, 1991).

If California were one of the nations that award citizenship to immigrants, it would be the world’s second largest center of immigrant reception, behind only the United States itself. By 1990 California had received more immigrants in the preceding twenty years than did Australia, Canada, Israel, or New Zealand. In 1980, California already had more and a higher proportion of immigrants than any other American state (Rumbaut, 1992: Table 5). In the 1980s, a period of revived immigration in the United States, California also received more immigrants than did any of the other forty-nine American states (Papademetriou et al., 1989: 73; Keane, 1986: 24; Espenshade and Goodis, 1985). By 1990, California had one-quarter of all the foreign born in the United States but only 11 percent of the U.S. population. California’s population was 28.9 million of whom 20.8 percent were foreign-born, a percentage unmatched outside Florida.²

As a world-class immigrant mecca, California’s new stature is novel and unanticipated. When California gained statehood in 1850, California bordered Mexico to the South and faced westward onto the Pacific Ocean just as she does today. However, the number of immigrants who entered from these directions was small. There were several reasons. First, Californians resisted the immigration of Asians, compelling Congress to pass the United States’ first exclusionary legislation in 1882. This anti-Chinese law was continued and expanded thereafter. Finally, in 1924 Congress widened Asian exclusion into a national origins quota system which set each nation’s annual immigration quota proportional to its share of the 1920 U.S. population. This law remained the basic immigration law of the United States until 1965. Second, nineteenth-century Asian migrants included few women or complete families so that natural increase did not contribute to the long-run growth of Asian population. Third, although Mexicans always crossed American borders in search of work, most came as temporary agricultural laborers, and subsequently repatriated (Massey et al., 1987: chaps. 4, 5). Therefore, the net influx of Mexicans was actually modest in the century that followed California’s entry into the United States.³

After 1882, California’s net population increases from immigration reflected the state’s attractiveness to interstate migrants. These migrants were the assimilated children and grandchildren of Europeans whose first settlement areas had been in the Middle West and along the Eastern seaboard (Davis, 1990: 114). This pattern still holds. In 1990, only 36 percent of whites in Southern California had been born in the region. Fifty-one percent were born in the United States outside California, 4 percent in California outside Southern California, and 8 percent abroad. Among Southern California’s blacks, only one-quarter were born in the region. Fully 70 percent of whites were interstate migrants (Quintanilla, 1991). California had no European ethnic enclaves that could match New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago for size or institutional completeness. Nonetheless, the population of California was historically more white than the population of the United States. As late as 1960, the population of the United States was 89.9 percent white. In that year, California’s population was 91.9 percent white.

In the last thirty years, the long preponderance of assimilated whites drew to a close in California. In 1990, California’s population had declined to 60 percent white whereas that of the United States still remained 84 percent white. The discrepancy became a matter of concern for the national press (Henry, 1990).⁴ Now drawing its new population from Asia, Central America, and Mexico, California has introduced new ethnic and racial stocks into its established population. California had in 1990 a higher proportion of Asian and Latino residents than any other state and the second-highest number of blacks and American Indians (Fulwood, 1991). In Southern California, 45 percent of Latinos and 42 percent of Asians were foreign-born in 1991 (Quintanilla, 1991). These Latino and Asian immigrants arrive in California at a moment when the United States, confronting European economic unity, and diminished international economic competitiveness, looks for its economic future to trade with Latin America and Asia more than ever in the past.⁵ According to Mike Davis (1987: 67), and other regional optimists, Los Angeles is becoming the “Pacific’s economic capital.” Naturally, this moment in history provides the United States with new reasons to welcome Latino and Asian immigrants who enable it to communicate better with the societies that sent them. But the burdens of immigrant reception fall heavily upon California, and the Golden State is historically ill-prepared for its new role of entrepot, cultural emporium, and melting pot, however useful that role to the economic future of the United States (Kotkin, 1991).

In general, immigration is most difficult to absorb when immigrants are both numerous and of different ethno-racial stock than the settled population. Both conditions continued to pertain in California, which for this reason, ought to have experienced much immigrant/nonimmigrant conflict in the last two decades. In actuality, however, California has proven surprisingly able to accommodate and integrate the new ethnic stocks into its predominantly white population. Unlike Germany and France, where anti-immigrant riots and political parties have arisen (Tempest, 1991; Miller, 1991; Therborn, 1987), California has seen nothing more organized than ballot efforts to certify English as the state’s official language and boycotts of Korean grocery stores in black communities. In a European review of intergroup relations in California, David Manasian (1990) declared Californians “admirably” tolerant. “Few other societies could have absorbed so many different types of people so rapidly without violent conflict. Instead Californians are proud of their cultural diversity.”(1990: 58) This is a common European view, and, in the light of the Los Angeles riot and arson of 1992, it is easy to ridicule. Moreover, this judgment overlooks the intolerance that has historically attended the meeting of peoples in California. California did not have a tradition of tolerance in 1942 when the Japanese Americans were interned, nor did it have one in 1880 when the state was the seat of anti-Chinese agitation (Chan, 1990: 61-67). Where did this intolerance go?

Until the Los Angeles riot and arson of 1992, immigrant/native relations in California had been largely peaceful and devoid of the frank racism that occurs in Europe. Nonetheless, relations were often troubled and tense. A Field Institute (1982) poll found that 62 percent of Californians believed that the volume of immigration into the U.S. should be decreased.⁶ Sixty-five percent thought illegal immigration a very serious problem, and 77 percent agreed that government should do more to discourage illegal immigration. The intergroup climate is strained. Journalists declare California’s public schools “cauldrons of prejudice” in which racially motivated violence is commonplace, especially between blacks and Hispanics (Woo and Kowsky, 1991). Nationalist blacks boycott the Korean storekeepers who operate in Watts, the black residential capital of Los Angeles. Black/Korean tensions focused around some sensationalized murders. In 1991, the Republican governor blamed undocumented immigrants on welfare for the state’s budgetary shortfall (Starkey, 1992). Even so, frank intergroup conflict has been on a more modest scale in California than one might have anticipated given the volume and heterogeneity of immigration in the 1980s (Fong, 1989; Kimble, 1989; Horton, 1989). The oddest complaint comes from Asian Americans some of whom object to the positive “model minority stereotype” that causes “others to resent them,” and sometimes reduces their ability to obtain financial support from the welfare state (US Civil Rights Commission, 1992).

Emigration of whites offers a possible explanation of California’s surprising absorptive capacity. The Los Angeles metropolitan area had a population of about 8.8 million in 1989, a gain of almost a million persons over 1980. During the 1980s, Los Angeles County added more people than did any other metropolitan area in the United States. Two-thirds of this increase arose from net migration, and one-third from natural increase (Allen, 1990: 2). However, this population growth arose despite a net egress of about 403,000 persons in the period 1985-1990 alone. Of these, three-quarters were non-Latino whites who moved to other California counties and other American states.

In 1990, after two decades of white egress (Light, 1988), the non-Hispanic whites were only 42 percent of Los Angeles’ population. James Allen (1990: 6) estimates that legal immigrants to Los Angeles County amounted to only 310,000 in the period 1985-1990. This legal influx was not enough to compensate the loss of 403,000 established residents. Allen (1990: 6) concludes that Los Angeles County’s net population increase depended upon illegal immigrants. Naturally, the numbers of illegal residents are impossible to establish with precision, but they are certainly numerous. In 1989, Los Angeles County alone accounted for 39 percent of all normalizations of immigrant status made possible under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

In the face of an unprecedented influx of documented and undocumented immigrants, known less correctly as illegal aliens, this decade’s exodus of non-Hispanic whites supported both quality of life and intergroup accommodation. First, by leaving Los Angeles in the 1980s, seven-hundred-thousand non-Hispanic whites vacated residences and jobs, making vacancies at the top that opened opportunities for immigrants at the bottom (Light, 1981: 58). White egress also made extra space available in the schools, hospitals, parks, beaches, and parking lots of the crowded, polluted region. Second, the enhanced availability of these resources reduced the intensity of inter group conflict, thus contributing to the “tolerance” that The Economist identified. However, moving away from an immigrant influx does not represent true tolerance. Since more whites stayed than left, there is this basis for acknowledging the tolerance of the established population, but their tolerance was facilitated by the departure of a significant minority of older homeowners.

Although those who left Los Angeles did not display tolerance toward their immigrant successors, neither did they resist their influx. Unlike Palestinians, Belfast Catholics, Mohawk Indians of Quebec, African Americans of Watts, and others who bear a legacy of hatred toward their dispossessors, Los Angeles’ departing whites left their homes and jobs voluntarily and without rancor or hatred. This self-abnegation owed much to the free market for real estate. Real estate prices in California soared in the 1980s for several reasons, some of them unrelated to immigration. Among these reasons were $40 billion of Japanese and Canadian investment in California real estate, the growth of Pacific Rim trading, and accelerated weapons procurement programs put in motion by the Cold Warriors of the Reagan administration (Frantz, 1988; Davis, 1990: 132, 135-38; Bates, 1992). The additional housing demand of the immigrants only added to the conjunctural explosion of demand for California real estate, but did not basically cause it. Nonetheless, as immigrants arrived, home prices, partially in response to their arrival, soared until August, 1989, when they were more than three times the U.S. national average. Using prevailing yardsticks, only 13 percent of Los Angeles County’s population could then afford to purchase a home at the median price. Since the majority of non-Hispanic whites were homeowners, these vested incumbents could sell their residences for vast profits and then relocate to other parts of California or the United States. Someone who sold a home in Los Angeles could buy a home as good in Portland, and put $140,000 in the bank. In effect, the soaring real estate market paid homeowners to leave Los Angeles, and so many took this golden handshake that housing shortage was significantly reduced among those who stayed.

Naturally, the egress of homeowners did not improve the quality of life. In response to soaring housing prices, residential overcrowding increased (Martinez, 1992). Traffic congestion increased to catastrophic levels, driving business away from downtown to the consternation of central city real estate interests. Air pollution that had declined in the 1970s began to rise again in response to the many additional, often dilapidated cars and trucks that impoverished immigrants pressed into service. Public primary and secondary education was abandoned to immigrants and nonwhite minorities by Republican legislators more sensitive to the needs of tax-resisting suburban voters than to those of immigrant children. Gang violence and drug traffic reached levels much worse than ever observed before. The percentage of Hispanics in poverty increased from 26 percent in 1979 to 45 percent in 1987 (Sabagh, 1992). To make matters worse, the state suffered a severe drought that strained the ability of the Department of Water and Power to supply water. Even the earthquakes of 1988 contributed to the malaise of the state which discovered, after the fact, that highways and public buildings required expensive retrofitting for earthquake safety. Bad as they were, however, the 1980s would have been even worse had it not been for that 10 percent of the white population who voluntarily vacated residences and jobs, thus freeing resources for successors.

Abrupt increase of population threatens the ability of localities to maintain much less to improve their quality of life (Light, 1983: pt. 4). However, effective, proactive government can buffer the impact of immigration on metropolitan regions by shrewd planning and social programs. Unfortunately, several obstacles frustrated the ability of California cities to field proactive, effective, governmental responses to immigration. First, the well-known fragmentation of local government in California deprived localities of an agency uniquely responsible for metropolitan areas or empowered to act on their behalf (Light, 1988: 88-92). Second, California’s minimal government tradition, a legacy of nineteenth-century Liberalism, gave the state’s metropolitan regions no tradition of long-range planning upon which to build. Finally, with the populist tax revolt of 1978 (Proposition 13), public authorities experienced further erosion of their already slender tax revenues, thus impeding their ability to respond proactively to the immigrant influx.⁷

Although immigration reduced their quality of life, it did not reduce earnings or job opportunities for native Californians, except, possibly, native-born Hispanics who sustained the most direct effect of wage competition with the low-wage immigrants (Papademetriou et al., 1989: 74, 78; McCarthy and Valdez, 1986).⁸ First, the state’s defense-based manufacturing sector expanded throughout the 1980s, becoming the state’s first-ranked employer.⁹ Although economic restructuring added new semiskilled and unskilled jobs for immigrants in the garment industry, the high-technology, high-wage sector held up well in the 1980s. Second, California has long benefited from unusually high entrepreneurship. This state’s persistently high entrepreneurship resulted in a flexible and resilient population of small and med...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: California Immigrants in World Perspective
• 2 Migration Networks and Immigrant Entrepreneurship
• 3 Asian and Latino Immigrants in the Los Angeles Garment Industry: An Exploration of the Relationship between Capitalism and Racial Oppression
• 4 Immigrants in Garment Production in Paris and in Berlin
• 5 Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Israel, Canada, and California
• 6 Immigrant Entrepreneurs in France
• 7 Asian Indians in Southern California: Occupations and Ethnicity
• 8 Twice and Direct Migrant Sikhs: Caste, Class, and Identity in Pre- and Post-1984 Britain
• 9 Korean Immigrants in Los Angeles
• 10 Koreans in Japan and the United States: Attitudes toward Achievement and Authority
• 11 Subethnicity: Armenians in Los Angeles
• 12 Armenians in Moscow
• 13 Critical Issues in the U.S. Legal Immigration Reform Debate
• 14 New Zealand’s Immigration Policies and Immigration Act (1987): Comparisons with the United States of America
• 15 Mexican Immigrants in California Today
• Index