The author takes an interesting idea and makes sweeping conclusions which are not at all supported by the evidence. I'll list some of the problems.
The idea of "dominating" a niche is used inconsistently throughout the article. Sometimes it means 40%, sometimes it means 80%, sometimes it means nothing in particular. For example, there's no evidence given that "virtual all niches" in India are dominated by a particular caste. Also, if only 40% of a niche is occupied by an ethnic group, clearly, it's not impossible for outsiders to compete.
There's also no quantification of how important these "niches" are in a broader economy. Author asserts that these industries were important mobility vehicle. Possibly. But they're still a very small part of the economy. And the economy is an ever-changing beast. Aren't there other avenues now, which weren't open decades ago?
In the particular case of India, the author keeps trying to fit every wrong thing in India into his theory. He tries to argue that the labour shortages and very small size of firms in India are due to these ethnic niches.
India has a hundred different problems. It has a horrible schooling system which is directly responsible for a lot of the "skill shortage". And it has massive corruption, abysmal labor laws and inadequate credit systems which inhibit the growth of firms.
How does the author know that the "real" problem is ethnic niches and not these direct problems which have been pointed out for decades?
To decide between different explanations, author has to quantify the effect of the various factors, and he doesn't even try.
Frankly, the behavior he describes is ultimately self-marginalizing on the part of the ethnics. This is why they end up in low-margin low-status businesses.
Yes. The success of US-born Asians is obvious to anyone who attended an elite university or worked in a highly remunerative field. Attracting the best and the brightest is one of our greatest strengths. We can keep the refugees out, but we want the strivers. They make us better, stronger.
“Dominating” where you are a significant plurality of a regional industry is a fairly accurate description. While 40% being run by a specific small ethnic group who makes up a fraction of a percent of the population is massive. Starbucks has roughly 15% of all US coffee shops and most would see them as the dominant force in the industry.
Additionally, the brand of stores being run here are specifically the low-budget low-prestige stores. Meaning the niche these groups are filling are not competing with similar stores targeting affluent areas. So while maybe people are buying and running businesses on the bougie side of town outside of the niche, if you are operating on the rough side of town it is almost entirely run by them. This can be both seen and felt by anyone that comes from those places where all of the businesses they frequent are run by specific ethnic niches.
I’ll also say the author cites a lot. Check out some of the other literature on it since you seem to have so many questions.
He also misses the reality that such ethnic conclaves prevent innovation, they will eventually be out competed. Granted, there is only so much you innovate at a donut shop, but that doesn’t hold for the economy writ large
There is clearly no economic knowledge here. It is painfully obvious. My guess is that the author has a graduate degree in government or the humanities. It reads like women's studies essays. It has that kind of logic.
He seems to explicitly tackle the fact that it prevents innovation.
But it is tough to outcompete an industry that gets away with cheap labor and credit. Even without innovation at the donut shop, having $10,000/mo less in overhead means you got quite the edge. While someone being innovative would have to work that much harder and be that much more innovative to only edge out ahead for a low prestige industry like a donut shop or budget hotel. People with that energy and creativity are better served just going to college and working in better industries, which apparently is what they have been doing for decades.
Actually, that kind of innovation happens all the time. What often kills it are government policies. Steel is a broken market because of subsidies. Once someone can automate the manufacture of donuts, those shops are toast.
Did you forget to realize that this is the result of government policies?
Abusing immigration and finance laws by having black market workarounds means people that do this manage to make businesses work while anyone else that wants to get into the business means they can't make it work because they follow the government laws. The competition requires to be *that* much more innovative to even bother. Where once again, if you had that kind of innovation of production, service, or business administration, why would you be selling donuts and why not put it in a more lucrative and prestigious industry?
These niche ethnic industries aren't capturing major products like steel or microchip manufacturing that are both insanely lucrative, prestigious, and institutionally captured by politics. They are capturing and cornering marginal markets that interact with a niche audience of the poor and marginalized; budget motels, gas stations, nail salons, liquor stores, and donut shops. You can get away with abusing immigration and finance laws while heavily favoring your own ethnic niche in the process.
While just saying that "one day someone will figure out how to solve this" sounds like the normal libertarian cope of holding no opinion/accountability for a problem. I can't wait for us to find a way to make motels so efficient that the racial caste of people owning them can't compete with illegal practices.
First of all, steel is not prestigious. I agree that many jobs that were mentioned are so low-status and low-value-added that no ambitious person would bother with them, but if someone thought they could make a killing at it, they would.
Liquor stores is an interesting example. Where I live, the nice liquor stores are large, beautiful places operated professionally. The ghetto liquor stores are run by immigrants. No one wants to run a cash-only liquor store in a violent neighborhood. If they did not offer that service, the people would go to the grocery store or liquor store in better neighborhoods far away. In the normal neighborhoods, more professional operations dominate, selling cheese and high-end salted meats along with regular liquor, wine, and a large amount of cool liquor (Rye, bourbon, Irish whisky, Japanese whiskey,...). Near my home there is an upscale cognac and whisky place that intentionally avoids selling anything not expensive to keep the rif-raf out. It is three blocks from public housing, but they sell $1500 bottles of cognac.
These people are creating businesses that would never exist in their absence. We know this because we have many urban communities that every business avoided after the riots. The people who live in those neighborhoods could easily save up, then gamble everything on a small business, but they do not. Instead they work mostly in the public sector in safe, secure jobs that pay a middle class income. I live on the edge of such a community and it is strange to see the dynamic work out, but it does.
This system is identical to Jews running similar shops 100 years ago. In many communities the Arabs running the shop will tell you that they bought it from a Jewish operator forty years before. I used to work at a mattress manufacturer. I have spoken to many Patel motels and Chaldean/Assyrian urban stores in Michigan. Fun fact--Assyrian and Hebrew are in the same language family. They were the original people before the Arabs and Turks invaded and ethnically cleansed the region.
There is room in an economy for all kinds of work. That is the beauty of free markets. We can have Jagdish Patel run his motel while his son Alkesh works in mergers and acquisitions at Lazard. Once any business is no longer adding value, they cease operations. T
If you are worried about productivity, focus on the non-profit sector. That is a cesspool of evil. I will take 1,000 tiny cheap-labor-based businesses over some slick Washington, DC NGO that is funded by corporate sleaze and employs the wives of the donor corporation executives. They have misleading names like "Save the Children" and exist primarily to signal status to rich women. Both parties partake in this evil so there is no pressure to end it. That is far more problematic than some hard-working immigrant running a dry cleaners, and at least the dry cleaners offer me the opportunity to speak Korean.
I think the author believes "massive corruption, abysmal labor laws and inadequate credit systems" are the result of the caste system structure. Obviously these problems exist outside of India, but the caste system is an extreme example of social division for countries that matter in the global perspective. The large genetic gaps between Indian castes vs the smaller differences of commoners vs nobility/upper class in Western European nations like Britain or Germany supports this.
It is much too simplistic to say that these problems are "the result of caste system". Of course, caste contributes to corruption, but corruption has a dozen different causes. Nobody serious claims that all corruption in India, or even most of it, is due to the caste system.
Same goes for all the other problems. For instance, many of the bad labor laws are due to India's long legacy of socialist thinking. That particular problem has little to do with caste.
Author just wants to fit everything into his theory as the dominant explanation. There's no pretense of quantification or doing a comparative analysis between factors or even between countries which may share some of these factors.
Whatever aspects of the article could've been improved by the author, I think it was well-written and thought-provoking. It's seemed to me for the past years that the average Chinese person is more capable than the average Indian person, at least in part because of China's greater social and ethnic cohesion. China also fits the structure the author talks about of a market dominant majority.
Yeah, all you have to do is Believe In IQ, and the just-so story writes itself.
Academic skills are real. Pro-social values are real. Social capital is real.
Intelligence is a potential, and an elusive one. And it amazes me how many people don't realize this, and prefer to make sweeping judgements about mass populations from IQ Tests...how many formal IQ exams are there. I only know of two. And someone gets a score on this test, and in pop-sci public conversations on Substack it's treated as more trustworthy, more probative, more definitively precise, and more important than practically any other grade they ever get. On the basis of one 40-minute session with Raven's Progressive Matrices, or the WISC. The fate of nations is held to depend on these assessments. IQ, the very Icon of the God of Speaman's "g", General Intelligence. Like hell.
You mean "higher in China", right? Of course you can look this up, but thinking about how this came about, considering India and its diaspora has very high achievers, is a worthwhile topic. India is a good example to think about the problem, but other countries show the issues caused by very unequal social systems, like Latin America and the Middle East.
Sorry for typo. I did mean "higher in China". I fixed the typo.
Looking at disaspora is not a good method to look at average IQs. Selection bias. Most of the Indian diaspora in the US is upper-caste (or at least not the lowest caste).
One common route of advancement for African Americans was the black hair care field. (E.g., Madame C J Walker made a million dollars around the beginning of the 20th Century by inventing a hair straightener). Retailing specialized hair care products to other blacks was a typical step up the ladder for enterprising blacks. But in the later 20th Century in many cities, African Americans got pushed out of selling black hair care products by straight-haired Korean immigrants.
Now it is all Indian hair from India. Korean wig manufacturers went to China in the 1980's as Korean women became too rich to want to sell their hair. Then the Chinese got too rich.
In india, the women give their hair to temples, and they sell it to make wigs. I partied with Korean wig industry guys in China and Vietnam in the 1990's. Never, ever try to keep up with Koreans drinking. It is not worth it.
One question is whether there are non-linear ethnic niches dominated disproportionately by regular Americans. For example, in Los Angeles, Japanese seemed to take over gardening by the mid-20th Century (there's a reference to the well-known proclivities of Japanese gardeners in a Philip Marlow detective story from the 1940s), followed by Mexicans in the later 20th Century.
On the other hand, I think the fairly similar job of Pool Guy was quite white in L.A. for a couple of more generations.
The article quotes the example of London Hackney carriage drivers, but these are overwhelmingly White British, which in the UK context is a clear counterexample: they have the Knowledge exam which acts as a barrier to entry from non-natives. Given their procedures predate the invention of the car, they are not known for their innovation either.
Ethnic niches are very common in the professional world too. Our local hospital system essentially got taken over by Indians.
One of the real negatives about NOVA is that these sorts of ethnic cartels are very common, which is easy to do in the government contractor space. This is something you will miss if you just look at a places median household income or whatever.
Can you get a job if your the wrong ethnicity?
What are the differences between how native and foreign doctors will treat you as a patient?
Indian-Americans and other Asian Americans are over-represented in medicine, but Indian immigrants tend to only be in hard-to-staff systems (rural areas, dangerous urban areas,...).
Interesting, above all for the part concerning India. I would not lose sleep over the foregone ‘innovation gains’ in donut shops and motels in ‘flyover America’, however. It may be that the cost advantages of non-linear ethnic niches are what allows these places to have donut shops and motels in the first place.
I should have expressed myself better. I meant that operations such as donut shops or motels have a inherently limited potential for productivity gains. I further advanced the hypothesis that local markets in ‘flyover America’ may lack the minimum size to attract mote efficient operations, such as those of motel chains. Therefore, the alternative to small-scale ethnic businesses would likely be no business at all.
I would want to see the numbers in that assumption. A few percent improvement in capital situation will still allow the incoming group to more easily purchase existing properties as they become available, and over time ownership will shift en masse, without there being a question of the business not having been available to purchase in the first place: it was.
I am in Illinois, and we like the hard-working immigrants and their brilliant children. Go to a trading desk at any investment bank or the engineering floor at any tech firm and count the Asians. These people are good for America.
I live near Chinatown in Chicago, and I am a public school kid who studied with Asian kids, then attended Cornell University where I was again surrounded by Asian students. I would omit illegal migrants and the misguided refugee programs. Those are bad for everyone, but the US could easily have a open employment system with South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan without few down sides. Our biggest problem is that we are not allocating spots to the best candidates.
We could learn a lot from Australia. They do immigration so much better than us.
Yeah because people in that part of the country have been sitting around with their thumbs up their asses for the past 200 years. 🙄
The Central & Mountain time zones were full of donut shops and motels before the immigrants showed up and thwarted normal economic workings to their own benefit. That is the entire point of the article. Immigration is fracturing the national economy. The family business used to be a key pillar of the American economy, even in "flyover" states, and now immigration is destroying that path to self-sufficiency.
"The family business used to be a key pillar of the American economy, even in "flyover" states, and now immigration is destroying that path to self-sufficiency."
Really? How can that be? According to this article, only Indians (and other non-white ethnicities) build up businesses using family ties. Americans would never do that!
I really like the article. It certainly highlights a cost to immigration that is rarely identified. Two comments though. (1) I guess the article identifies a cost of unskilled migration. The arguments don't really seem apply to highly skilled migrants because they typically won't enter the type of economic sector the article focusses on. (2) In order to strengthen the case against unskilled migration it would be useful to argue (and provide evidence) that whatever costs the non-linear niches create aren't outweighed by the benefits of migration (e.g. I assume many would argue that Americans are not particularly interested in the menial jobs some of these niches offer).
I really can’t stand the “Americans don’t want to work these jobs” bit. They don’t want to be paid and treated like dog shit for the jobs. Which is why people just import migrants and skirt labor laws.
Plenty of Americans work dirty and tough jobs. They just get paid for them and not treated like farm animals.
"the smaller but more homogeneous Chicago of generations past"
I lived in Chicago in the 1960s and I still go there frequently because my children live there. It was much more balkanized back then than it is now. Further it was bigger then than it is now. In 1960 the census population was 3,550,404. By 2020 it had dropped to 2,746,388. That is a decline of 23%. Population growth has gone to the burbs which are much more culturally homogeneous than the city ever was.
Such a great essay. Explains exactly what is going on in Canada right now, gaining pace at a rapid rate in accordance with 10 years of reckless Liberal immigration policy. It's a disaster.
This has always been the case in America? How were the Irish and Italian immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century any different? They initially worked in unskilled fields as well, which they dominated a lot of the time. It seems like you only take issue when the ethnic minority in question is nonwhite. As these new groups assimilate over the course of a few generations they will begin to enter a wider range of industries. This country is built on immigrants, and it is not suddenly a problem when the immigrants change color.
Do you have some interesting information to provide about ethnic industries that the Irish and Italians dominated when they showed up? They certainly did bring a lot of organized crime with them and ethnically replaced the Americans of New England and the Mid Atlantic.
Early 20th century America also had very little labor and banking hurdles for normal businesses. Most of what the average American dealt with was similar to what Irish and Italians had to deal with.
The benefits of these modern ethnic business niches is that they can skirt business loans and labor protections of the late 20th century by borrowing from basically racist informal credit unions with near zero interest and abuse work visas to hire extended family members to pay them pennies and threaten to deport them if they act up. These groups have also been operation in America for generations; he cites originators for some of these going back to the 40s. How many more decades of not assimilating will it take for you to conclude that you can’t just say that early 20th century American Italians and Irish aren’t interchangeable with early 21st century Indians or Sikhs?
Powerful article. Well researched 🧲📚💯
The author takes an interesting idea and makes sweeping conclusions which are not at all supported by the evidence. I'll list some of the problems.
The idea of "dominating" a niche is used inconsistently throughout the article. Sometimes it means 40%, sometimes it means 80%, sometimes it means nothing in particular. For example, there's no evidence given that "virtual all niches" in India are dominated by a particular caste. Also, if only 40% of a niche is occupied by an ethnic group, clearly, it's not impossible for outsiders to compete.
There's also no quantification of how important these "niches" are in a broader economy. Author asserts that these industries were important mobility vehicle. Possibly. But they're still a very small part of the economy. And the economy is an ever-changing beast. Aren't there other avenues now, which weren't open decades ago?
In the particular case of India, the author keeps trying to fit every wrong thing in India into his theory. He tries to argue that the labour shortages and very small size of firms in India are due to these ethnic niches.
India has a hundred different problems. It has a horrible schooling system which is directly responsible for a lot of the "skill shortage". And it has massive corruption, abysmal labor laws and inadequate credit systems which inhibit the growth of firms.
How does the author know that the "real" problem is ethnic niches and not these direct problems which have been pointed out for decades?
To decide between different explanations, author has to quantify the effect of the various factors, and he doesn't even try.
Frankly, the behavior he describes is ultimately self-marginalizing on the part of the ethnics. This is why they end up in low-margin low-status businesses.
And send their kids to medical school. This article is missing a kit
Yes. The success of US-born Asians is obvious to anyone who attended an elite university or worked in a highly remunerative field. Attracting the best and the brightest is one of our greatest strengths. We can keep the refugees out, but we want the strivers. They make us better, stronger.
“Dominating” where you are a significant plurality of a regional industry is a fairly accurate description. While 40% being run by a specific small ethnic group who makes up a fraction of a percent of the population is massive. Starbucks has roughly 15% of all US coffee shops and most would see them as the dominant force in the industry.
Additionally, the brand of stores being run here are specifically the low-budget low-prestige stores. Meaning the niche these groups are filling are not competing with similar stores targeting affluent areas. So while maybe people are buying and running businesses on the bougie side of town outside of the niche, if you are operating on the rough side of town it is almost entirely run by them. This can be both seen and felt by anyone that comes from those places where all of the businesses they frequent are run by specific ethnic niches.
I’ll also say the author cites a lot. Check out some of the other literature on it since you seem to have so many questions.
He also misses the reality that such ethnic conclaves prevent innovation, they will eventually be out competed. Granted, there is only so much you innovate at a donut shop, but that doesn’t hold for the economy writ large
There is clearly no economic knowledge here. It is painfully obvious. My guess is that the author has a graduate degree in government or the humanities. It reads like women's studies essays. It has that kind of logic.
He seems to explicitly tackle the fact that it prevents innovation.
But it is tough to outcompete an industry that gets away with cheap labor and credit. Even without innovation at the donut shop, having $10,000/mo less in overhead means you got quite the edge. While someone being innovative would have to work that much harder and be that much more innovative to only edge out ahead for a low prestige industry like a donut shop or budget hotel. People with that energy and creativity are better served just going to college and working in better industries, which apparently is what they have been doing for decades.
Actually, that kind of innovation happens all the time. What often kills it are government policies. Steel is a broken market because of subsidies. Once someone can automate the manufacture of donuts, those shops are toast.
Did you forget to realize that this is the result of government policies?
Abusing immigration and finance laws by having black market workarounds means people that do this manage to make businesses work while anyone else that wants to get into the business means they can't make it work because they follow the government laws. The competition requires to be *that* much more innovative to even bother. Where once again, if you had that kind of innovation of production, service, or business administration, why would you be selling donuts and why not put it in a more lucrative and prestigious industry?
These niche ethnic industries aren't capturing major products like steel or microchip manufacturing that are both insanely lucrative, prestigious, and institutionally captured by politics. They are capturing and cornering marginal markets that interact with a niche audience of the poor and marginalized; budget motels, gas stations, nail salons, liquor stores, and donut shops. You can get away with abusing immigration and finance laws while heavily favoring your own ethnic niche in the process.
While just saying that "one day someone will figure out how to solve this" sounds like the normal libertarian cope of holding no opinion/accountability for a problem. I can't wait for us to find a way to make motels so efficient that the racial caste of people owning them can't compete with illegal practices.
First of all, steel is not prestigious. I agree that many jobs that were mentioned are so low-status and low-value-added that no ambitious person would bother with them, but if someone thought they could make a killing at it, they would.
Liquor stores is an interesting example. Where I live, the nice liquor stores are large, beautiful places operated professionally. The ghetto liquor stores are run by immigrants. No one wants to run a cash-only liquor store in a violent neighborhood. If they did not offer that service, the people would go to the grocery store or liquor store in better neighborhoods far away. In the normal neighborhoods, more professional operations dominate, selling cheese and high-end salted meats along with regular liquor, wine, and a large amount of cool liquor (Rye, bourbon, Irish whisky, Japanese whiskey,...). Near my home there is an upscale cognac and whisky place that intentionally avoids selling anything not expensive to keep the rif-raf out. It is three blocks from public housing, but they sell $1500 bottles of cognac.
These people are creating businesses that would never exist in their absence. We know this because we have many urban communities that every business avoided after the riots. The people who live in those neighborhoods could easily save up, then gamble everything on a small business, but they do not. Instead they work mostly in the public sector in safe, secure jobs that pay a middle class income. I live on the edge of such a community and it is strange to see the dynamic work out, but it does.
This system is identical to Jews running similar shops 100 years ago. In many communities the Arabs running the shop will tell you that they bought it from a Jewish operator forty years before. I used to work at a mattress manufacturer. I have spoken to many Patel motels and Chaldean/Assyrian urban stores in Michigan. Fun fact--Assyrian and Hebrew are in the same language family. They were the original people before the Arabs and Turks invaded and ethnically cleansed the region.
There is room in an economy for all kinds of work. That is the beauty of free markets. We can have Jagdish Patel run his motel while his son Alkesh works in mergers and acquisitions at Lazard. Once any business is no longer adding value, they cease operations. T
If you are worried about productivity, focus on the non-profit sector. That is a cesspool of evil. I will take 1,000 tiny cheap-labor-based businesses over some slick Washington, DC NGO that is funded by corporate sleaze and employs the wives of the donor corporation executives. They have misleading names like "Save the Children" and exist primarily to signal status to rich women. Both parties partake in this evil so there is no pressure to end it. That is far more problematic than some hard-working immigrant running a dry cleaners, and at least the dry cleaners offer me the opportunity to speak Korean.
I think the author believes "massive corruption, abysmal labor laws and inadequate credit systems" are the result of the caste system structure. Obviously these problems exist outside of India, but the caste system is an extreme example of social division for countries that matter in the global perspective. The large genetic gaps between Indian castes vs the smaller differences of commoners vs nobility/upper class in Western European nations like Britain or Germany supports this.
It is much too simplistic to say that these problems are "the result of caste system". Of course, caste contributes to corruption, but corruption has a dozen different causes. Nobody serious claims that all corruption in India, or even most of it, is due to the caste system.
Same goes for all the other problems. For instance, many of the bad labor laws are due to India's long legacy of socialist thinking. That particular problem has little to do with caste.
Author just wants to fit everything into his theory as the dominant explanation. There's no pretense of quantification or doing a comparative analysis between factors or even between countries which may share some of these factors.
Whatever aspects of the article could've been improved by the author, I think it was well-written and thought-provoking. It's seemed to me for the past years that the average Chinese person is more capable than the average Indian person, at least in part because of China's greater social and ethnic cohesion. China also fits the structure the author talks about of a market dominant majority.
I already said the idea is interesting, but the author is draws unsupported conclusions from little or no evidence.
If you think "the average Chinese person is more capable than the average Indian person", one can just look at average IQs, which are higher in China.
One doesn't need any big theories about dominant niches and caste system to reach this conclusion.
Yeah, all you have to do is Believe In IQ, and the just-so story writes itself.
Academic skills are real. Pro-social values are real. Social capital is real.
Intelligence is a potential, and an elusive one. And it amazes me how many people don't realize this, and prefer to make sweeping judgements about mass populations from IQ Tests...how many formal IQ exams are there. I only know of two. And someone gets a score on this test, and in pop-sci public conversations on Substack it's treated as more trustworthy, more probative, more definitively precise, and more important than practically any other grade they ever get. On the basis of one 40-minute session with Raven's Progressive Matrices, or the WISC. The fate of nations is held to depend on these assessments. IQ, the very Icon of the God of Speaman's "g", General Intelligence. Like hell.
I know something that the IQ fetishists don't know https://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-of-nations?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
https://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/more-thoughts-on-iqhttps://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/more-thoughts-on-iq
https://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/on-chris-langan-at-al-and-iq?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
You mean "higher in China", right? Of course you can look this up, but thinking about how this came about, considering India and its diaspora has very high achievers, is a worthwhile topic. India is a good example to think about the problem, but other countries show the issues caused by very unequal social systems, like Latin America and the Middle East.
Sorry for typo. I did mean "higher in China". I fixed the typo.
Looking at disaspora is not a good method to look at average IQs. Selection bias. Most of the Indian diaspora in the US is upper-caste (or at least not the lowest caste).
Thanks for a fascinating look at immigration. You can be sure most have not looked at it from this angle.
One common route of advancement for African Americans was the black hair care field. (E.g., Madame C J Walker made a million dollars around the beginning of the 20th Century by inventing a hair straightener). Retailing specialized hair care products to other blacks was a typical step up the ladder for enterprising blacks. But in the later 20th Century in many cities, African Americans got pushed out of selling black hair care products by straight-haired Korean immigrants.
Now it is all Indian hair from India. Korean wig manufacturers went to China in the 1980's as Korean women became too rich to want to sell their hair. Then the Chinese got too rich.
In india, the women give their hair to temples, and they sell it to make wigs. I partied with Korean wig industry guys in China and Vietnam in the 1990's. Never, ever try to keep up with Koreans drinking. It is not worth it.
One question is whether there are non-linear ethnic niches dominated disproportionately by regular Americans. For example, in Los Angeles, Japanese seemed to take over gardening by the mid-20th Century (there's a reference to the well-known proclivities of Japanese gardeners in a Philip Marlow detective story from the 1940s), followed by Mexicans in the later 20th Century.
On the other hand, I think the fairly similar job of Pool Guy was quite white in L.A. for a couple of more generations.
The article quotes the example of London Hackney carriage drivers, but these are overwhelmingly White British, which in the UK context is a clear counterexample: they have the Knowledge exam which acts as a barrier to entry from non-natives. Given their procedures predate the invention of the car, they are not known for their innovation either.
Ethnic niches are very common in the professional world too. Our local hospital system essentially got taken over by Indians.
One of the real negatives about NOVA is that these sorts of ethnic cartels are very common, which is easy to do in the government contractor space. This is something you will miss if you just look at a places median household income or whatever.
Can you get a job if your the wrong ethnicity?
What are the differences between how native and foreign doctors will treat you as a patient?
Indian-Americans and other Asian Americans are over-represented in medicine, but Indian immigrants tend to only be in hard-to-staff systems (rural areas, dangerous urban areas,...).
Interesting, above all for the part concerning India. I would not lose sleep over the foregone ‘innovation gains’ in donut shops and motels in ‘flyover America’, however. It may be that the cost advantages of non-linear ethnic niches are what allows these places to have donut shops and motels in the first place.
"I would not lose sleep over the foregone ‘innovation gains’ in donut shops and motels in ‘flyover America’, however."
That is, unless you happen to live in 'fly over America'.
I should have expressed myself better. I meant that operations such as donut shops or motels have a inherently limited potential for productivity gains. I further advanced the hypothesis that local markets in ‘flyover America’ may lack the minimum size to attract mote efficient operations, such as those of motel chains. Therefore, the alternative to small-scale ethnic businesses would likely be no business at all.
I would want to see the numbers in that assumption. A few percent improvement in capital situation will still allow the incoming group to more easily purchase existing properties as they become available, and over time ownership will shift en masse, without there being a question of the business not having been available to purchase in the first place: it was.
I am in Illinois, and we like the hard-working immigrants and their brilliant children. Go to a trading desk at any investment bank or the engineering floor at any tech firm and count the Asians. These people are good for America.
"I am in Illinois, and we like the hard-working immigrants and their brilliant children."
Your first sentence is broad in its implications, and your second sentence is reduced to Asians.
I also live in Illinois, and most of the immigrants and their children do not qualify as brilliant.
I live near Chinatown in Chicago, and I am a public school kid who studied with Asian kids, then attended Cornell University where I was again surrounded by Asian students. I would omit illegal migrants and the misguided refugee programs. Those are bad for everyone, but the US could easily have a open employment system with South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan without few down sides. Our biggest problem is that we are not allocating spots to the best candidates.
We could learn a lot from Australia. They do immigration so much better than us.
Yeah because people in that part of the country have been sitting around with their thumbs up their asses for the past 200 years. 🙄
The Central & Mountain time zones were full of donut shops and motels before the immigrants showed up and thwarted normal economic workings to their own benefit. That is the entire point of the article. Immigration is fracturing the national economy. The family business used to be a key pillar of the American economy, even in "flyover" states, and now immigration is destroying that path to self-sufficiency.
"The family business used to be a key pillar of the American economy, even in "flyover" states, and now immigration is destroying that path to self-sufficiency."
Really? How can that be? According to this article, only Indians (and other non-white ethnicities) build up businesses using family ties. Americans would never do that!
That would make sense if they had not in fact already had them in the first place.
I really like the article. It certainly highlights a cost to immigration that is rarely identified. Two comments though. (1) I guess the article identifies a cost of unskilled migration. The arguments don't really seem apply to highly skilled migrants because they typically won't enter the type of economic sector the article focusses on. (2) In order to strengthen the case against unskilled migration it would be useful to argue (and provide evidence) that whatever costs the non-linear niches create aren't outweighed by the benefits of migration (e.g. I assume many would argue that Americans are not particularly interested in the menial jobs some of these niches offer).
I really can’t stand the “Americans don’t want to work these jobs” bit. They don’t want to be paid and treated like dog shit for the jobs. Which is why people just import migrants and skirt labor laws.
Plenty of Americans work dirty and tough jobs. They just get paid for them and not treated like farm animals.
Great article!
What an article!
"the smaller but more homogeneous Chicago of generations past"
I lived in Chicago in the 1960s and I still go there frequently because my children live there. It was much more balkanized back then than it is now. Further it was bigger then than it is now. In 1960 the census population was 3,550,404. By 2020 it had dropped to 2,746,388. That is a decline of 23%. Population growth has gone to the burbs which are much more culturally homogeneous than the city ever was.
Such a great essay. Explains exactly what is going on in Canada right now, gaining pace at a rapid rate in accordance with 10 years of reckless Liberal immigration policy. It's a disaster.
That opening line is a belter lol
A large proportion of cab drivers in Boston in the 1990s were Haitian. Never understood why.
Bad job. Ethnics come in and find staff among their own. It has been this way for at least 200 years.
Did Boston in the 90s see a mass reduction in its number of cats and dogs, perchance?
This is Substack, not Twitter
This has always been the case in America? How were the Irish and Italian immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century any different? They initially worked in unskilled fields as well, which they dominated a lot of the time. It seems like you only take issue when the ethnic minority in question is nonwhite. As these new groups assimilate over the course of a few generations they will begin to enter a wider range of industries. This country is built on immigrants, and it is not suddenly a problem when the immigrants change color.
Do you have some interesting information to provide about ethnic industries that the Irish and Italians dominated when they showed up? They certainly did bring a lot of organized crime with them and ethnically replaced the Americans of New England and the Mid Atlantic.
Early 20th century America also had very little labor and banking hurdles for normal businesses. Most of what the average American dealt with was similar to what Irish and Italians had to deal with.
The benefits of these modern ethnic business niches is that they can skirt business loans and labor protections of the late 20th century by borrowing from basically racist informal credit unions with near zero interest and abuse work visas to hire extended family members to pay them pennies and threaten to deport them if they act up. These groups have also been operation in America for generations; he cites originators for some of these going back to the 40s. How many more decades of not assimilating will it take for you to conclude that you can’t just say that early 20th century American Italians and Irish aren’t interchangeable with early 21st century Indians or Sikhs?
Great writing.
Global India is a horrific prospect.
Well observed on the aversion towards innovation and improvement among non linear ethnic cartels.
This plays a large part in the 'enshittification' so widely decried in the Anglosphere.