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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
Edits needed: “Yet such an obsever would have been predicted that of some ethnic minority because organized crime is almost always organized along ethnic lines.”
It’s an easy answer to claim everything wrong with India all boils down to the caste system. Indian leftists, have been doing this for a hundred + years, no doubt its origin was from the British view of India, but it’s developed its own life in Indian Politics. Caste Hysteria in Indian politics plays the same role as Race Hysteria in America (our affirmative action is more extreme though more formal). If you suspect all the research studies that claim America is extremely racist and that is holding America back, you should suspect all the studies that claim India is extremely casteist and that everything wrong with India is due to the caste system. These are even written by the same broad coalition of people, (Indian leftists educated in American Colleges aka globalists). That said let me try to give you a more realistic view of the caste system in India, based on living my life in India.
If there is one place where caste is prevalent in every Indians life, it’s in marriage. Most, even educated Indians marry within their caste, the reason being most Indian marriages are arranged marriages because there are no institutions to help men meet women organically outside of school and maybe work. (The gender imbalance at school and work also tends to be 10:1 male to female, because most women are housewives, and feminism hasn’t taken a strong hold in India yet). Beyond marriage, among the educated section of Indian society, no one uses caste for anything. I was never asked or never ask caste in job applications, my father who’s worked for 40 years now in 8 different companies, never had anything to do with caste. The fact that the organized sector of Indian economy, uses caste in any way in hiring is both a myth and extremely illegal and would be met with the sort of public hysteria, that the American public would feel if they heard of a firm hiring only white people. There is no political party that represents caste based interests, just like there’s no white identitarian party in US. There is no college, school, formal government institution that considers caste except in cases of affirmative action.
That said, what about the un-organized sector, India is after all still a mostly unorganized and rural economy if raw numbers of people are considered. In my lived experience caste exists in villages, probably exists in most villages but the prevalence is decreasing. I am a Brahmin, though my grandfather left to the organized sector, I have familial connections still living the traditional Indian Brahmin life of praying and maintaining a temple in a village. In my grandfathers generation, he did not encourage lower castes to get into the temple (but he never banned them in fear of government repression), in my fathers generation “Hindutva” (the ruling party’s ideology) took over which is basically Hinduism without any caste, (and an antagonism towards Islam), which led to lower castes being taught the sacred texts (a big no no to traditional Hindu teachings), and being allowed into the temple etc. In my generation, if they are religious, they believe caste was never meant to be hereditary, just an estimation of character, caste was invented by British to divide India etc etc.
I sympathize with the issues this article highlights. To some extent we see this in India, Gujurati’s (Patels) are pretty successful businessmen in India too, we have another even more insular and successful group called Marwaris, but the overall issue is not that bad/ pronounced in India. I doubt 40% of motels in India are owned by any 1 group or same for shops, car washes etc. I think that is because in India, they dissolve, there are millions of Patels in India, maybe some of them own motels in India, but a lot of them also do regular jobs and so you don’t notice them particularly. But in US Patels will stick out, they won’t dissolve into the majority, their skin color is different, their religion is different, their culture is different. Maybe this is how the first Irish and Italian immigrants were to the US, but eventually they dissolved into the mainstream. It’s not obvious to me Indians will ever dissolve into the mainstream like other Europeans, and for that reason alone Indian immigration should be curtailed. It is probably good for India, if US immigration did not exist. Apart from the top 1% who are being held back in Indian society and do extremely well in US society (the tech CEO types), for the rest of India, US immigration creates an extremely distorting effect to the local economy. The dollar is worth far more than the rupee, courtesy of being the world’s reserve currency. A 100k in US dollars, is a fortune in Indian Rupees, and when you have millions of people with 100k US dollars buying properties in India, the property prices get driven sky high, and the local Indian population gets displaced creating more desperation to immigrate to a foreign land that isn’t very welcoming. The number 1 reason to immigrate is to save enough money to buy a house, without which as a guy you cannot get married, (this is similar to the motivations of most Chinese immigrants coming to the US right now too), and this cycle continues. It should be put to an end.
Excellent writing. That comparison between Iceland and India is eerie and drives your point home. The whole piece made me think of Claude Levi-Strauss's description of how masses of people in India approached him when he visited, looking to get him to pay for literally any service they could think of. His view of the day-to-day experience of India's social structure ( while respecting its higher accomplishments) lines up with yours.
Powerful article. Well researched 🧲📚💯
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.
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.
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).
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?
Great article!
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.
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.
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).
What an article!
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.
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 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.
That would make sense if they had not in fact already had them in the first place.
That opening line is a belter lol
A large proportion of cab drivers in Boston in the 1990s were Haitian. Never understood why.
Did Boston in the 90s see a mass reduction in its number of cats and dogs, perchance?
This is Substack, not Twitter
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.
Edits needed: “Yet such an obsever would have been predicted that of some ethnic minority because organized crime is almost always organized along ethnic lines.”
Fixed
—NC
While you’re at it, “upwards mobility” sounds off to American ears; perhaps it may be the English locution.
It’s an easy answer to claim everything wrong with India all boils down to the caste system. Indian leftists, have been doing this for a hundred + years, no doubt its origin was from the British view of India, but it’s developed its own life in Indian Politics. Caste Hysteria in Indian politics plays the same role as Race Hysteria in America (our affirmative action is more extreme though more formal). If you suspect all the research studies that claim America is extremely racist and that is holding America back, you should suspect all the studies that claim India is extremely casteist and that everything wrong with India is due to the caste system. These are even written by the same broad coalition of people, (Indian leftists educated in American Colleges aka globalists). That said let me try to give you a more realistic view of the caste system in India, based on living my life in India.
If there is one place where caste is prevalent in every Indians life, it’s in marriage. Most, even educated Indians marry within their caste, the reason being most Indian marriages are arranged marriages because there are no institutions to help men meet women organically outside of school and maybe work. (The gender imbalance at school and work also tends to be 10:1 male to female, because most women are housewives, and feminism hasn’t taken a strong hold in India yet). Beyond marriage, among the educated section of Indian society, no one uses caste for anything. I was never asked or never ask caste in job applications, my father who’s worked for 40 years now in 8 different companies, never had anything to do with caste. The fact that the organized sector of Indian economy, uses caste in any way in hiring is both a myth and extremely illegal and would be met with the sort of public hysteria, that the American public would feel if they heard of a firm hiring only white people. There is no political party that represents caste based interests, just like there’s no white identitarian party in US. There is no college, school, formal government institution that considers caste except in cases of affirmative action.
That said, what about the un-organized sector, India is after all still a mostly unorganized and rural economy if raw numbers of people are considered. In my lived experience caste exists in villages, probably exists in most villages but the prevalence is decreasing. I am a Brahmin, though my grandfather left to the organized sector, I have familial connections still living the traditional Indian Brahmin life of praying and maintaining a temple in a village. In my grandfathers generation, he did not encourage lower castes to get into the temple (but he never banned them in fear of government repression), in my fathers generation “Hindutva” (the ruling party’s ideology) took over which is basically Hinduism without any caste, (and an antagonism towards Islam), which led to lower castes being taught the sacred texts (a big no no to traditional Hindu teachings), and being allowed into the temple etc. In my generation, if they are religious, they believe caste was never meant to be hereditary, just an estimation of character, caste was invented by British to divide India etc etc.
I sympathize with the issues this article highlights. To some extent we see this in India, Gujurati’s (Patels) are pretty successful businessmen in India too, we have another even more insular and successful group called Marwaris, but the overall issue is not that bad/ pronounced in India. I doubt 40% of motels in India are owned by any 1 group or same for shops, car washes etc. I think that is because in India, they dissolve, there are millions of Patels in India, maybe some of them own motels in India, but a lot of them also do regular jobs and so you don’t notice them particularly. But in US Patels will stick out, they won’t dissolve into the majority, their skin color is different, their religion is different, their culture is different. Maybe this is how the first Irish and Italian immigrants were to the US, but eventually they dissolved into the mainstream. It’s not obvious to me Indians will ever dissolve into the mainstream like other Europeans, and for that reason alone Indian immigration should be curtailed. It is probably good for India, if US immigration did not exist. Apart from the top 1% who are being held back in Indian society and do extremely well in US society (the tech CEO types), for the rest of India, US immigration creates an extremely distorting effect to the local economy. The dollar is worth far more than the rupee, courtesy of being the world’s reserve currency. A 100k in US dollars, is a fortune in Indian Rupees, and when you have millions of people with 100k US dollars buying properties in India, the property prices get driven sky high, and the local Indian population gets displaced creating more desperation to immigrate to a foreign land that isn’t very welcoming. The number 1 reason to immigrate is to save enough money to buy a house, without which as a guy you cannot get married, (this is similar to the motivations of most Chinese immigrants coming to the US right now too), and this cycle continues. It should be put to an end.
Excellent writing. That comparison between Iceland and India is eerie and drives your point home. The whole piece made me think of Claude Levi-Strauss's description of how masses of people in India approached him when he visited, looking to get him to pay for literally any service they could think of. His view of the day-to-day experience of India's social structure ( while respecting its higher accomplishments) lines up with yours.