Immigrant Economy Research Articles

A Study of the Impact of the Immigrant Economy on the Native Country: An Indian Case Study

A Study of the Impact of the Immigrant Economy on the Native Country: An Indian Case Study

Migration and earnings in emigrant and immigrant countries - the case of Europe

Migration flows within Europe intensified after the EU enlargement that enabled easier procedures for finding a job in another country. Among the various effects that migration can have on emigrant and immigrant economies, this paper aims to focus on and quantify the impact of migration flows on income levels in both groups of countries. The research covers the period of 2006-2019 and applies dynamic panel data analysis, the results of which highlight that the number of emigrants has a statistically significant impact on earnings in immigrant countries, while the number of immigrants has no significant effects. On the other hand, migration variables do not indicate a statistically significant impact on the earnings of any household type in the group of emigrant countries, whereas macroeconomic variables have a strong impact.

The moral economy of Asian migrant women in small business in Hong Kong

This article explores how moral norms shape migrant women’s small businesses and examines the implications for immigrant social integration. It draws on qualitative data collected in Hong Kong in the period 2014–2018. Findings from the study suggest that the picture of Asian migrant women in business as either a silent supporter or independent entrepreneur is incomplete. Rather, it is a more complex picture shaped by the intersection of class, gender, ethnicity and religion. Female immigrant entrepreneurship and female empowerment have a complicated relationship, where moral norms both facilitate and constrain women’s business activities. This study contributes to the literature on immigrant economy by suggesting that moral norms should not be overlooked for their implications on the long-term social integration of women immigrants.

“I am not getting your money”: boundary making and identities in immigrant economies in Hong Kong

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how immigrant small business owners construct entrepreneurial identities by deploying strategies of boundary making in Hong Kong.Design/methodology/approachConceptually, it departs from the theoretical discussions of immigrant economy and ethnic boundary making. The analyzes are based on qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation primarily in the South Asian immigrant economies in Hong Kong in the period 2014-2017.FindingsFour strategies of boundary work including blurring boundaries, inversion of boundaries, personal repositioning and reconfirming of boundaries are identified. They bring to light that small immigrant entrepreneurs in Hong Kong still encounter considerable obstacles in the process of social integration. Boundary work serves as strategies to release sentiments that would symbolically bring them closer to the mainstream society. Following the “city as context” framework (Brettell, 1999; Foner, 2007), this paper argues that the various boundary making strategies have been shaped by the legacies of racism, neoliberal governance of integration and urban work ethos highlighting problems and individual responsibilities in Hong Kong.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature of the immigrant economy and social integration. First, it sheds light on the role of symbolic meanings and non-economic gains of immigrant entrepreneurship in social integration. Second, it illuminates our understanding that immigrant economy can provide a channel for advancing and weakening social status, thus reminding us not to assume the path of social integration as a straightforward and positive one.

Diverging Opportunities

AbstractThis paper aims to explore firstly, the distribution of economic opportunities in the Chinese immigrant economy, and, secondly, how opportunities have gradually diverged among Chinese migrants against the backdrop of increased globalization and Chinese transnationalization. Conceptually, it departs from the literature of immigrant economy as well as transnationalism, in particular, Chinese transnationalism. Methodologically, qualitative and inductive methods including in-depth interviews and participant observation are employed. By revealing that some Chinese migrants enjoy economic opportunities induced by transnationalization process while some others are deprived of them, this paper questions the much-celebrated effects of the social mobility of immigrant economy. This paper sheds light on how unequal opportunities can be exported from China channeled by transnationalization, as unequal pathways of Chinese migrants in Vienna, among other cases in Europe, appear to extend the divergent experiences of winners and losers of the late-socialist economic reform in China.

More than just shopping: Ethnic majority consumers and cosmopolitanism in immigrant grocery shops

ABSTRACTThis paper explores ethnic majority consumption practices in immigrant economies. Drawing on recent debates on cosmopolitanism, we focus on the question of how the use of immigrant shops by members of the ethnic majority is intertwined with the erosion and/or the (re)production of symbolic boundaries. We conducted 31 in-depth interviews and 15 go-alongs with consumers in immigrant grocery shops in Vienna. Our findings show how consumption is based upon and shaped by the various ways consumers attribute meaning to the shops, the products on offer as well as their shopping experiences. We identified five different types of consumption: consuming nostalgia, consuming patronage, consuming change, consuming alterity and consuming diversity. However, we only consider the latter two as cosmopolitan consumption in a narrower sense. We show that within these types, the expression of openness towards ‘the other’ constitutes a form of cultural capital displayed by members of the privileged classes. The article argues in favour of a more comprehensive understanding of consumption practices in immigrant economies. This encompasses that not every act of shopping in immigrant businesses is cosmopolitan and that research is called to consider that the various types of consumption effect boundaries along ethnicity and class in manifold ways.

Re-reading remittances through solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in New York City

This paper analyzes how Mexican hometown associations in New York City practice solidarity so that they might best meet the needs of the transnational communities that they serve. Commonly formed by immigrants in the United States, hometown associations are organizations which send money collectively to their home countries, supporting public infrastructure and community projects. Scholars have debated both the merits of remittance programs that channel migrant funds as economic development and the agency of immigrant economies in neoliberal development structures. Through primary data collected from interviews in New York City, I review the frustrations that hometown associations have with one such program: Mexico's programa tres por uno para migrantes. Concurrently, I examine how the same hometown associations engage ethical economic practices of collective remittance sending and community service provision in New York City. Drawing on feminist literature on diverse economies, I argue that the solidarity work of hometown associations disrupts the dominant remittance as development discourse. Migrants are not content to participate in tres por uno and through practicing solidarity they distance themselves from this neoliberal policy.

Measuring the Economic Impact of Tourism in European Emerging Markets

Abstract Statistics shows us with no doubt the importance of tourism industry, even the most immigrant economies can get without this industry shaky. United States economic earnings of tourism industry is about $110 billion annually, and ten times more that in the European Union, even with the financial economic downturn from the last five years, making tourism a key factor solution to cross over the economic crises. In this paper we are discussing the correlation between tourism and creating sustainable development through eliminating business complexities, and ways to measure tourism development. The study takes three emergent markets from the EU and compares them to Romania as a case with its medium of 10 million annual visitors. Results reveal that the majority of developed economies consider tourism a fundamental industry for their economic growth because it depends on other productive sectors making the infrastructure of a zone and cycling its economic wheel. The elimination of business complexity at both macro- and microeconomic level can help developing markets to reach a higher level of efficiency and eventually increase quality.

Commodifying Ethnicity: On Marketing Strategies in Immigrant Cultural Economies in Vienna

This paper examines the role of ethnicity and the formation of various expressions of it in the immigrant cultural economy based on the conceptual frameworks of cultural toolkit and mixed embeddedness. Drawing on empirical data obtained from three immigrant communities in Vienna (Turkish, Chinese and South Asian), this paper proposes a four-field typology, suggesting that multiple meanings related to immigrant integration have been actively invested by social actors to justify their marketing strategies, in the process of which ethnicity is formed and expressed. We therefore argue that ethnicity in the cultural market does not exist as a fixed and independent givenness; its multiple manifestations are rather produced in a process of interplay among collective cultural toolkits, individual resources as well as structural circumstances, in which room for negotiation and adaptation is allowed.

‘What should we do in America?’: Immigrant Economies in Nineteenth-Century American Children's Fiction

This essay examines narratives about immigrants in a sampling of nineteenth-century American children's texts and grows out of my work on reform writing by major women authors. Many of the stories they published in the leading children's periodicals seem to welcome the immigrant contributor to American society even as they defined that immigrant's place in economic/class structures. The goal of this paper is to trace certain strains of the systematic discipline by which American culture tried to manage the immigrant in terms of class. I therefore consider the role of economics in immigrant stories written for children by a number of American women writers, with analyses of the ways in which these stories situate the dependent and independent immigrant in the marketplace.

What is ethnic in an ethnic economy?

This article examines critically the relationship between ethnicity and entrepreneurship in the sociology of immigrant economies. It argues that what is ethnic in an ethnic economy has often been confusingly conceptualised and that several factors now call for re-assessing the ethnic nature of immigrants' business activities. On the basis of a review of recent research, three such factors are outlined: the porosity of ethnic boundaries to cross-group business interactions; the diversity within immigrant economies in terms of status, gender, class and generation; and the political and institutional context in which immigrant economies take place. The conclusion stresses the need for multiple explanations of how and why immigrants become entrepreneurs, which take into account not only the meso-level constituted by ethnicity and social capital, but also micro-individual factors and macro-institutional settings.

Working for the Sabbath: Sabbath in the Jewish Immigrant Neighborhoods of New York

This article analyzes the dilemmas and contradictions surrounding Saturday/Sabbath in New York City's Jewish immigrant neighborhoods at the turn of the twentieth century. How were working-class immigrants supposed to maintain allegiance to the commands and prohibitions of the Sabbath in a new, urban environment that encouraged Saturday labor? Though many immigrants breached Sabbath laws, either by working or by shopping, many also continued to value the traditional Sabbath. They engaged in activities such as Friday night celebrations and Saturday social events with friends and family that ritualized this value and embedded it into the week. This essay introduces the concept of what I call a “family religious economy,” which allows us to examine the strategies immigrants developed to manage the tensions of work and religion. Scholars have shown the absolute importance of the family unit in analyzing the immigrant economy at the turn of the century. This emphasis holds especially true for Jews: more than any other contemporary immigrant group, Jews brought women and children with them and also often relied on the wages of their teenage children. In considering the religious life of Jews, daily, weekly, and annual observances often played out in the familial setting. The family religious economy involved the division of responsibilities of wage earning, household duties, and religious observances within a family and prods us to examine the various strategies families devised to ensure both economic and spiritual survival. By highlighting the religious work of preparing for the Sabbath—whether cooking, cleaning, or simply by earning the wages to finance the cooking and cleaning—this article expands our understanding of the Sabbath in the working-class immigrant neighborhood. It allows us to examine what immigrants did do to honor the Sabbath and how their Sabbaths, though not always observed in a strict halakhic (Jewish legal) fashion, had a profound impact on the rhythm and patterns of the immigrants' week.

Dead men working: time and space in London's (`illegal') migrant economy

This article explores human smuggling's consequences through a study of London's Pakistani immigrant economy, paying particular attention to the labour process and its experiential dimensions.The latter are unpacked in empirical context with due reference to literatures on illegal migration, as well as more recent writings on employment and `precariousness' that seek to make sense of the changing nature of work patterns under post-Fordist `flexible' regimes in the new global economy. All newly migrated (and some British born) Pakistanis working in ethnic economies endure long hours, poor working conditions, low pay and a general context of insecurity that is distinct from the unionized labour process that prevailed under Fordism. Smuggled migrants tend to deal with a specific set of constraints, however, including added material and psychological burdens stemming from the higher cost of migration and an inability to achieve `structural' embeddedness.

History, Sociology and the Political Conflicts of the 1920s in São Paulo, Brazil

In recent years an ‘ethno-economic’ interpretation of politics in the coffee state of São Paulo in the early twentieth century, associated particularly with the work of Mauricio Font, has gained widespread acceptance. Its claim that state politics in the period was increasingly shaped by a cleavage between a declining traditional coffee aristocracy on the one hand, and a rising, mostly immigrant, smallholding and industrial economy on the other, is challenged here. It is argued, in part on the basis of a re-examination of the sources used by Font, that ideological rather than economic concerns motivated the Liga Nacional, while at county level, in Araras and elsewhere, personal and clientelistic motives continued to shape political loyalties. Finally, the argument that the Partido Democrático was driven primarily by ‘Big Coffee’ reaction to the PRP is shown to be unfounded.

Mapping Global Production in New York City's Garment Industry: The Role of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's Immigrant Economy

As a key production site in New York City's garment industry, Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood is increasingly made up of small Asian and Latino immigrant-owned firms. Market conditions created by the globalization of garment production and the continued influx of low-skill immigrants promote a primary competitive advantage embedded in “low-road” strategies evident in the prevalence of sweatshop conditions. Reflecting a “carrot and stick” approach, Sunset Park has been a target for the federal and state departments of labor as well as the site for developing a garment manufacturers' incubator, Brooklyn Mills. This article examines the mismatch of using a conventional economic development strategy to address the conditions of Sunset Park's immigrant economy. Brooklyn Mills illustrates how immigrant firms feel the stick but benefit little in terms of innovative policy intervention, that is, carrots, to stimulate equitable development in a sweatshop economy.

Asian and Latino Immigrants in a Restructuring Economy: The Metamorphosis of Southern California

List of illustrations List of tables Acknowledgments 1. Introduction Marta Lopez-Garza and David R. Diaz Part I. Women in the Global Economy 2. Exploitation and abuse in the garment industry: the case of the Thai slave-labor compound in El Monte Julie A. Su and Chanchanit Martorell 3. Through economic restructuring, recession, and rebound: the continuing importance of Latina immigrant labor in the Los Angeles economy Kristine M. Zentgraf Part II. Macroeconomics: 4. the promises and dilemmas of immigrant ethnic economies Tarry Hum 5. Economics and ethnicity: poverty, race, and immigration in Los Angeles county Manuel Pastor, Jr Part III. The Informal Economy in Southern California: 6. A study of the informal economy and Latina/o immigrants in Greater Los Angeles Marta Lopez-Garza 7. Labor behind the front door: domestic workers in urban and suburban households Grace A. Rosales 8. Doing business: Central American enterprises in Los Angeles Norma Stoltz Chinchilla and Nora Hamilton Part IV. Changing Political and Social Terrain: 9. Latino Street vendors in Los Angeles: heterogeneous alliances, community-based activism, and the state Clair M. Weber 10. The politics of social services for a 'model minority': the union of Pan Asian communities Linda Trinh Vo 11. Community divided: Korean American politics in post-civil unrest Los Angeles Edward J. W. Park 12. Constructing 'Indianness' in Southern California: the role of Hindu and Muslim Indian immigrants Prema Kurien 13. A new and dynamic community: the case of Monterey Park, California Timothy P. Fong 14. The politics of adaptation and the 'good immigrant': Japanese Americans and the new Chinese immigrants Leland T. Saito Part V. Ethnicity, Race, and Racism: 15. Variation in attitudes toward immigrants measured among Latino, African American, Asian, and Euro-American students Grace A. Rosales, Mona Devich Navarro and Desdemona Cardosa 16. Racialized metropolis: theorizing Asian American and Latino identities and ethnicities in Southern California ChorSwang Ngin and Rodolfo D. Torres Part VI. Social Policy: 17. Salvadoran immigrants and refugees: demographic and socioeconomic profiles Claudia Dorrington 18. Environmental logic and minority communities David R. Diaz Appendix Index.

Cosmopolitanism and Business among German‐Turks in Berlin

This paper investigates the cultural dimension of immigrant entrepreneurship in the case of Berlin's Turkish economy. This investigation is needed because cultural explanations of business have been criticised for their deterministic and reified conception of culture. As a result, models explaining immigrant economies are now mostly socioeconomic and ignore culture. After a description of recent changes in German‐Turks entrepreneurial activities and an ethnographic description of two German‐Turkish businesses in Berlin, the paper argues that the implications in terms of culture and identity of self‐employment can be fruitfully analysed with the concepts of hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Finally, a broader perspective is proposed that establishes a link between foreigners, trade and culture in order to enlarge our understanding of cosmopolitanism.

Immigrant Incorporation in the Garment Industry of Los Angeles

Stressing the network's facilitation of immigrants’ searches for jobs and housing, migration network theory has conceptually overlooked the manner in which immigrants’ social networks also expand the supply of jobs and housing in target destinations by means of the ethnic economy. An expanded migration network theory takes into account the ethnic economy's role in creating new resources in the destination economy. However, the power of this objection wanes in the context of working-class immigrations that generate few entrepreneurs. Introduced here, the concept of immigrant economy responds to this contingency. Unlike ethnic economies, in which co-ethnics hire co-ethnics, immigrant economies arise when immigrants hire non-co-ethnic fellow immigrants. This situation usually arises when very entrepreneurial immigrant groups coexist in a labor market with working-class immigrant groups that generate few entrepreneurs of their own. Using evidence from the garment industry of Los Angeles, this paper estimates that only a third of immigrant employees found their jobs in a conventional ethnic economy. Half owed their employment to the immigrant economy in which, for the most part, Asian entrepreneurs employed Latino workers.

Enactment of Mandated Health Insurance in Hawaii

This analysis tells the story of how Hawaii came to have a mandatory employer-provider health insurance law. Based on interviews and review of published materials, the authors conclude that the history of Hawaii's plantation and immigrant economy engendered a culture of very efficient production of health care. This, combined with the progressive political transformation and the economic surge after World War II, brought a wave of broad-minded social legislation, which originated near-universal health insurance coverage and contributed to a higher health status in Hawaii. The investigation is offered to health policy analysts and decision-makers as a learning case study.

Le débat sur l'enclave ethnique : revue critique

The Ethnic Enclave Debate : A Critical Review Roger WALDINGER With the renewal of mass immigration to the United States, large numbers of immigrants have gone into business for themselves. Research on the Cuban immigrant economy of Miami, Florida found that employment in the « ethnic enclave » increases immigrant earnings and improves immigrant's chances of moving into self-employment. This article reviews the American debate that ensued over the « ethnic enclave » and its causes.