Roger Waldinger

Ethnic entrepreneurs : immigrant business in industrial societies

Foreword - John H Stanfield II Preface Opportunities, Group Characteristics, and Outcomes - Roger Waldinger, Howard Aldrich and Robin Ward Trends in Ethnic Business in the United States - Roger Waldinger and Howard Aldrich European Trends in Ethnic Business - Jochen Blaschke et al Spatial Dimensions of Opportunity Structures - Roger Waldinger, David McEvoy and Howard Aldrich Ethnic Entrepreneurs and Ethnic Strategies - Jeremy Boissevain et al Business on the Ragged Edge - Roger Waldinger, Mirjana Morokvasic and Annie Phizacklea Immigrant and Minority Business in the Garment Industries of Paris, London, and New York Conclusions and Policy Implications - Roger Waldinger et al

Second Generation Decline? Children of Immigrants, Past and Present--A Reconsideration.

Is the contemporary second generation on the road to the upward mobility and assimilation that in retrospect characterized the second generation of earlier immigrations? Or are the American economic context and the racial origins of todays immigration likely to result in a much less favorable future for the contemporary second generation? While several recent papers have argued for the latter position, we suspect they are too pessimistic. We briefly review the second generation upward mobility in the past and then turn to the crucial comparisons between past and present.

Primary, Secondary, and Enclave Labor Markets : a Training Systems Approach

While research on ethnic enclaves has shown that workers employed in the enclave appear to enjoy at least some of the advantages associated with the primary sector, this « enclave effect » has not been adequately explained. In contrast to existing explanations that conceptualize the enclave as a special case of the primary sector, we emphasize the distinctive characteristics of ethnic economies, and explain the « enclave effect » using a single, consistent account of recruitment and skill acquisition processes in primary, secondary, and enclave labor markets. Unlike other sectors of the economy, the ethnic enclave is characterized by an external, informal training system that shapes the employment relationship and increases the availability and quality of information for workers and employers. We apply the concept to a case study of the New York garment industry

Through the eye of the needle : immigrants and enterprise in New York's garment trades

To many who hear, the deaf world is as foreign as a country never visited.Deaf World thus concerns itself less with the perspectives of the hearing and more with what Deaf people themselves think and do. Editor Lois Bragg asserts that English is for many signing people a second, infrequently used language and that Deaf culture is the socially transmitted pattern of behavior, values, beliefs, and expression of those who use American Sign Language. She has assembled an astonishing array of historical sources, political writings, and personal memoirs, from classic 19th-century manifestos to contemporary policy papers, on everything from eugenics to speech and lipreading, the right to work and marry, and the never-ending controversy over separation vs. social integration. At the heart of many of the selections lies the belief that Deaf Americans have long constituted an internal colony of sorts in the United States.While not attempting to speak for Deaf people en masse, this ambitious platform anthology places the Deaf on center stage, offering them an opportunity to represent the world--theirs as well as the hearing world--from a Deaf perspective. For Deaf readers, the book will be welcomed as a gift, both a companion to be savored and, as often, an opponent to be engaged and debated. And for the hearing, it serves as an unprecedented guide to a world and a culture so often overlooked.Comprising a judicious mix of published pieces and original essays solicited specifically for this volume, Deaf World marks a major contribution.

The Making of an Immigrant Niche.

Although the dominant paradigm of immigrant employment views immigrants as clustered in a limited number of occupations or industries that comprise a niche, the explanations of how immigrants enter and establish these niches remain incomplete. While most researchers emphasize the importance of social networks, the social network approach begs the issue of how to account for the insertion and consolidation of immigrant networks as opposed to those dominated by incumbent native workers. This article seeks to answer this question through a case study of immigrant professional employees in New York City government. I argue that the growth of this immigrant niche resulted from changes in the relative supply of native workers and in the structure of employment, which opened the bureaucracy to immigrants and reduced native/immigrant competition. These shifts opened hiring portals; given the advantages of network hiring for workers and managers, and an immigrant propensity for government employment, network recruitment led to a rapid buildup in immigrant ranks.

Will the new second generation experience ‘downward assimilation’? Segmented assimilation re-assessed

Research on the “new second generation” in the United States has been deeply influenced by the hypothesis of “segmented assimilation”, which contends that the children of immigrants are at risk of downward mobility into a “new rainbow underclass”. This article seeks to assess that assertion, focusing on the experience of Mexicans, the overwhelmingly largest of today’s second-generation groups, and a population of predominantly working- or lower-class origins. The empirical component of this article rests on analysis of a combined sample of the 1996–2001 Current Population Survey.

The ‘other side’ of embedded ness: A case‐study of the interplay of economy and ethnicity

Abstract As interest in ethnics and their entrepreneurial activities has grown in recent years, sociologists have come to emphasize the importance of ethnic social structures as the source of actions propelling business growth. In a sign of convergence with the ‘new economic sociology’, recent literature suggests that embeddedness in ethnic networks and communities leads to cooperative, if not conformist, behaviour among ethnic economic actors. This article looks at the ‘other side’ of embeddedness, through a case‐study of African‐American, Caribbean, Korean and white construction contractors in New York City. I argue that, in construction, the embeddedness of economic behaviour in ongoing social relations among a myriad of social actors impedes access to outsiders. Embeddedness contributes to the liabilities of newness that all neophytes encounter, breeding a preference for established players with track records. However, the convergence of economic and ethnic ties has a further baneful effect, since out...

Black/Immigrant Competition Re-Assessed: New Evidence from Los Angeles

This paper reports on a survey of employers to assess the impact of immigration and employer practices on black employment chances in Los Angeles. We observe a process of cumulative causation in which a set of mutually reinforcing changes raise barriers to the hiring of blacks. Network hiring seems to have a dual function, bringing immigrant communities into the workplace, while at the same time detaching vacancies from the open market, thus diminishing opportunities for blacks. Employers also perceive immigrants as far more desirable employees than blacks, in part, because they expect that immigrants will be the more productive workers, in part, because they also see immigrants as more tractable labor. Any managerial propensity to favor immigrants is likely to be reinforced by the attitudes of the predominantly Latino workforce, as inserting a black worker in a predominantly Latino crew is not a technique for increasing productivity, given the hostility between the two groups. And African-Americans seem to play their own role in this process, apparently opting out of the low-level labor market in response to rising expectations, on the one hand, and the anticipation of employment difficulties on the other.

Still the Promised City: African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York

Roger Waldinger offers an explanation based on analysis of 1940-1990 census data and interviews with employers, workers, and union officials in several industries. In an argument sustained through nine chapters, he describes how the postwar outflow of whites created large numbers of job openings at all skill levels. Vacancies appeared even in shrinking manufacturing industries as whites left at a faster rate than labor demand declined. Despite often weak English-language and educational skills, foreign-born newcomers have won a disproportionate share of these openings. But they have not done so by directly displacing native blacks out of their jobs. Contrary to the influential skills mismatch hypothesis, Waldinger shows that African-American New Yorkers never had much of a presence in manufacturing and were becoming even more underrepresented in that sector long before immigration accelerated in the 1970s. In fact, the industrial distributions of native blacks and nonwhite immigrants have seldom overlapped. He also finds little evidence to support claims that the availability of immigrant labor has indirectly displaced natives by enabling employers to keep wages and working conditions at unattractive levels. For example, real wages in apparel began their long stagnation in the low-immigration 1950s. Likewise, in hotels the fast job and real wage growth in recent years has not stopped the seepage of native blacks from an industry in which they were overrepresented from the 1940s through the seventies.

Between “Here” and “There”: Immigrant Cross-Border Activities and Loyalties

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the prevalence and determinants of cross-state social exchanges and attachments among Latin American immigrants living in the United States. As we shall show, using data from a recent survey of Latin American migrants living in the United States, migrant cross-state social action comes in a variety of types, with the direction of conditioning factors differing from one type to another. Moreover, social and political incorporation in the United States reduces affective ties and provision of material support, all the while facilitating other forms of cross-state social action. Consequently, while international migrants regularly engage in trans-state social action, the paper shows that neither transnational ism as condition of being, nor transmigrants, as distinctive class of people, is commonly found.