Minorities and Immigrants-Struggle in the Job Markets
Waldinger, Roger
The commonly told tale about postindustrial New York is that of two cities, of white elites and minority poor, of advanced services and a crumbling manufacturing base. The conventional...
...Although it's too soon to say what these contrasts fully portend, one thing is sure: the ethnic division of labor is the crucible out of which new—and unpredictable—forms of ethnic identity will emerge...
...and they lack the strong kinship and self-help networks that give immigrants the edge in the small firms and competitive industries that continue to offer low-skilled employment...
...Thus, minorities increased their share of the public-sector jobs when municipal employment was shrinking...
...In contrast to the natives, to whom a garment shop is far worse than an office or hospital job, the immigrants came "hoping to find any job, it didn't matter . . . as long as it was a job...
...and Indians from Gujarat, renowned for their prowess in trading, arrive to extend the family business...
...In the public sector, competition between Puerto Ricans and blacks often breaks out into the open, with Hispanics charging that they have not gained full benefit from the many equalemployment opportunity programs of the past two decades...
...hence there was an infrastructure ready to absorb new cohorts of Latino immigrants, the largest group of whom came from the Dominican Republic...
...they did still better once hiring resumed and city government payrolls began to swell...
...Finally, some arrivals started out by working in a factory owned by a fellow (or sister) immigrant garment capitalist...
...But the crucial factor is that opportunity beckons: there is considerable demand for the particular services that immigrant business owners offer...
...They inherit the low-status, insecure jobs that native New Yorkers are no longer willing to do...
...The turnover of workers—high even in bad times—meant that employers were always looking to add a new hand...
...Informal networks helped newcomers find jobs where other immigrants were already employed: three quarters of a group of Hispanic immigrants I interviewed found their first job through connections with relatives or friends...
...And the growth of black female-headed families provides another negative— the "missing uncle" factor, George Sternlieb calls it—since close relatives are especially important in finding good jobs...
...The portals to the remaining skilled jobs also essentially remain closed: though the number of apprentices in New York's construction trades has doubled since 1980, the proportion of minority apprentices has actually gone down...
...And the explanations for this divergence are not simple at all...
...In a sense, this, too, is a story of ethnic succession...
...Immigrants have settled into small business, especially retailing and manufacturing, while native blacks have lost ground there...
...But for many immigrants, it is neither a love affair with a business nor a preference for being one's own boss that leads them into the petty bourgeoisie, but the quest for profit as a compensation for professional frustration: though highly educated, many immigrants arrive speaking little English and lacking the licenses and certifications needed to enter the fields for which they have trained...
...in 1980, almost 13 percent of foreign-born male adults were working for themselves, and among groups like Koreans, Chinese, Indians, or Greeks the proportion was considerably higher...
...But there is a problem with this story: over a million nonwhite newcomers, often low in skills, rarely speaking English, lacking credentials, are doing reasonably well, particularly in comparison with native blacks and Hispanics...
...And finally, the immigrant boss has good access to cheap, reliable labor in his family and the larger immigrant network: neighbors, acquaintances from back home, "friends of friends...
...In 1985, 42 percent of New York City's employees were nonwhite, as were 52 percent of the workers hired by the city that year...
...Moreover, public-sector positions are also effective vehicles for movement into higher social class...
...working conditions—never good to begin with—got worse...
...Indeed, many of the immigrants seem to move quickly into the middle class, or at least its lower reaches...
...In the small-business field, where the mortality of new firms is appallingly high, the key is the rate at which new businesses start up...
...In the public sector, blacks have found their surest route to stable, well-paying employment as well as their best chances to get ahead...
...Though the fiscal crisis pared down municipal payrolls, jobs were mainly shed through attrition, not layoffs: most of those who retired were civil servants high in seniority—who, as it happened, were mainly white...
...Like many low-wage manufacturing industries, garments suffers the stigma of being an "immigrant trade...
...But the story's complexity shouldn't eclipse its elements of suffering and conflict...
...The conventional explanation for the ills of the minority poor is equally simple: they lack the skills that today's employers want...
...FALL • 1987 • 519 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES But why did immigrants—and not native blacks or Hispanics—take over these entrylevel jobs...
...Fully one third of New York's native blacks employed in 1980 were working in the public sector, according to the census—a considerable net gain in jobs over the figures for 1970, even though the public sector has declined...
...Finally, the importance of the ethnic network as a source of labor gives recruiting a strong exclusionary bias...
...but the latter are gaining in the public sector, which does not loom large in the immigrant employment picture...
...Enterprising Immigrants The passing of an older generation of Jewish, Italian, and Irish entrepreneurs whose own children have no wish to succeed them in small business has left space, even in declining industries like garments, for new immigrant contractors, now mainly Chinese, but also other Asians, Dominicans, and Greeks...
...Israelis are in diamonds, a traditional Jewish business centered in New York, Tel Aviv, and Antwerp...
...Why do the newcomers gravitate toward business...
...The legal immigration system actually reinforces these ties since it rations entries on the basis of family connections to U.S...
...This link between settlers and newcomers never seemed to provide as strong a tie between black southern migrants and northern settlers...
...New York's newcomers are mainly nonwhite...
...The industry had already adapted to Puerto Rican workers with supervisors who were bilingual or could at least mediate between Spanish-speaking workers and nonHispanic employers...
...In similar fashion Koreans took over small retailing from Jewish or Italian owners who were just too old, tired, and scared of crime to keep on minding their stores...
...This kind of hardship is for the first generation only," says a Korean fishstore owner who had been a teacher in Seoul...
...hence job choices widened and most of the alternatives available to moderately skilled native blacks or Hispanics were preferable to working on a punching press or sewing machine...
...Consequently, native workers realized, as one employer put it, that "they can get more doing something else" and they dropped out of the industry's labor supply...
...many shops are filled with workers from the same hometown...
...citizens and residents...
...Working for the State The mythology of ethnic business is that immigrants do well because they have a special knack for turning a dollar...
...Fiscal stringency also led to lower wages and reduced fringes, which in turn lowered the public sector's attractiveness to whites...
...Through the Factory's Revolving Door Though the shift from goods to services in New York has driven the number of easy-entry jobs down, recent immigrants still start where their predecessors began: at the bottom...
...This divvying up of the economic turf has made confrontation among minorities an increasingly important fact of life in New York...
...In the office we get young Hispanics and blacks who are second generation and have never set foot in a factory...
...What we've witnessed is an extended game of ethnic musical chairs, in which positions as well as players have changed, and in which differences among minorities stand out almost as sharply as those between whites and nonwhites...
...In the marketplace, ethnic strife also erupts, as between black neighborhood residents and Korean entrepreneurs who have replaced Jews as the most visible merchants there...
...But even in entry-level employment markets that carry no immigrant stigma, newcomers often have an edge over blacks: the strength of their informal networks...
...Immigrants have their own special consumer tastes, not just the old staples like foodstuffs or newspapers, but also foreignlanguage videos and electrical goods with 520 • DISSENT CONFLICTS AND CONSTITOIOICIES current adapters for use back home...
...but they are living and working under conditions that are different—and often separate—from those that established, minority residents know...
...The business of adaptation itself is also a thriving one: the immigrant travel agent, accountant, lawyer trades on the offer of confidentiality, trust, and a more personal way of doing business...
...Moreover, the extraordinary outflow of whites from New York during the 1970s opened up opportunities in the services and the white-collar sector...
...Studying immigrants and blacks in New York's restaurant industry, Thomas Bailey found that many owners would recruit immigrants but were loath to hire blacks in the "front of the house" where contact with customers is high...
...A recent study of high-level civil servants in one city agency found that blacks in these ranks tended to be of working- or lower-class origins and were far less likely to come from middle-class families than their white counterparts...
...Discrimination also comes into the picture...
...This has been the normal progression: the parents work in the factories, and the kids look for white-collar jobs...
...By contrast, just over 31/2 percent of native black males were self-employed in 1980 and among native Hispanics the selfemployment rate was almost as low...
...Connections" are particularly important for job-finding in small business industries where there are few defined career ladders or bridges from one firm to the next...
...Thus, a common pattern is for new arrivals from the Dominican Republic to seek work in a garment shop owned by a compatriot...
...Moreover, immigrant success has cut into the market for firms where native minorities do find work: New York doesn't have more McDonald's restaurants because its immigrant FALL • 1987 • 521 CONFLICTS AND CONSTITUENCIES restaurants compete on price...
...and seasonality became more pronounced, producing a small weekly paycheck...
...In some cases, they bring traditions of self-employment or skills that give them an edge in some particular business line: Greeks from the province of Kastoria, where a traditional apprenticeship in fur-making is common, have entered the fur trade...
...Several factors seem to be involved...
...Even the immigrant mom-and-pop store has returned to give the supermarkets— employers of minority youth— a run for their money...
...By 1980, just over a third of the industry's production workers were white—a drop of almost fifty percent since 1970—and most of these workers were on the far side of their careers...
...Replacements came from a familiar source: immigration from abroad...
...Not only are New York's native blacks overrepresented in government jobs, but the proportion of government managers who are black is twice as high as in the private sector...
...Dominican garment factory-owners cornplain that "the Chinese are killing business for us," while Colombian storeowners in Queens worry that the explosion of Indian and Korean businesses will push them out of their neighborhoods...
...Ethnic Division of Labor And so, the conventional "tale of two cities" account of New York's postindustrial transition can be misleading...
...Immigrant competition and structural change have hit New York's minority poor like a double whammy: poorer blacks and Hispanics are mismatched for work in the advanced services that increasingly replace goods production...
...0 522 • DISSENT...
...because immigrants going into business often hire their compatriots, native blacks find themselves shut out of many jobs...
...Nowhere is this transition clearer than in the city's quintessential immigrant trade: the garment industry...
...One factory owner told me: I find that whereas there are fewer blacks in the factory, the office staff has become black and Puerto Rican...
...When the bottom fell out of the market for New York's garment industry in the 1970s, hourly earnings dropped relative to those in the rest of the city's already depressed manufacturing sector...
...The consensus among garment employers: "If there were no immigrants, the needle trades would be out of New York...
...And so the economic story of the latest immigrants ends with a surprising twist...
...And the immigrant self-employment rate is high...
...The reality is that immigrants are more willing to take their chances on what are often bad bets...
...Thus, by 1980, newcomers from the Third World made up almost half of New York's needle trades proletariat...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
