Ethnic Enclaves

Bibliographic Data

ID7079486
AuthorsJan Lin (corresponding author)
Year2007
Publication date2007-02-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeOTHER
VenueThe Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (JOURNAL)
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/9781405165518.wbeose063
OpenAlexW4212951404
ISBN9781405165518
LanguageEN
References cited12

The ethnic enclave is a subeconomy that offers protected access to labor and markets, informal sources of credit, and business information for immigrant businesses and workers. Ethnic enclaves offer entrepreneurial opportunities and earnings for immigrant owners and managers through the exploitation of immigrant labor in poor working conditions. They are phenomena that advance our understanding of the changing experience of immigration and social mobility in America. The enclaves of Asian and Latino immigrants emerging since the 1960s are comparable to the enclaves of Jewish and Italian immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. They present a route for economic and social mobility by promoting positive returns on human capital for immigrants in the labor market. During the decades of immigrant restriction, ethnic enclaves were shunned in the US as economic and spatial barriers to the successful assimilation and upward mobility of immigrants to American life. Since the 1960s, however, ethnic enclaves have been increasingly seen as agents for economic and social mobility. Ethnic enclaves are proliferating in both the cities and suburbs of contemporary immigration gateway cities such as New York, Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles. They constitute and convey the process of globalization as nodes of trade and transaction in flows of ethnic labor, capital, commodities, and cultural products across trading regions. There are costs as well as benefits that come with the insertion of ethnic enclaves into the complex social dynamics of contemporary global cities

Business · Development economics · Earnings · Economic growth · Economics · Ethnic group · Geography · Globalization · Immigration · Miami · Political science · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Finance