In her article, “Moving On”, Professor Chin talks about the effects that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center had on the garment industry and more specifically, the garment workers. I did not find it surprising that the garment industry had already been in steady decline prior to the incident. With a technology-obsessed society such as ours, I was not taken aback by the information that dot-com industries were uprooting the establishments of the garment industry for a long time coming. Even so, the sharp decline that came with 9/11 did come to me as a surprise. As the media has unremittingly portrayed the incident and its effects mostly in accordance to politics and religion, it did not even occur to me to think of specific effects that the event could have had on any one industry, let alone the garment industry in Chinatown.

Reading about these effects came to me as very eye opening. I thought the two views about the workers’ knowledge of English and its respective cause and effects was interesting to read about. The traditional ethnic enclave model claims that the Chinese did not need to learn English because they had settled at a job, at which “they can achieve mobility” without knowing the language. Opposed to this was the Kwong’s model, which claims that the workers are actually trapped in low-paying jobs without opportunities to learn English (Chin 191). Kwong felt that the traditional enclave model undermined the immigrants’ ability to learn English, which is an important asset in finding jobs outside of their comfort zone (191). I personally think that one model is not innately superior to the other in any way and that both are pragmatic reasons that can even go hand in hand with each other. Kwong’s model makes it seem as though it were not the immigrants’ choice to stay in the enclave without learning English but I’m sure that there were many immigrants who chose to stay in the enclave for those specific advantages, such as not having to learn English. As mentioned in the article, this then proved to be one of the bigger hurdles after 9/11, as it hindered the workers’ progress in finding new jobs elsewhere. Kwong’s model, however, is just as viable, as low-paying jobs do limit workers’ opportunities in many ways, and not being able to afford learning a second language is one of them.

Taking into consideration that both these models are equally adequate explanations for the circumstances that ensued, as well as Victor Nee and Jimy Sanders’ views on the mobility trap having favored entrepreneurs over the workers, I’ve come to the following conclusion. The garment industry engulfed its workers into a systematic cycle, from which it became difficult to escape. The workers chose to stay in the industry out of comfort and ease, but soon became limited in their opportunities to escape due to the low wage; nonetheless, because of the comfort and ease, they did not think it was a necessary or grave concern to do so. Consequently, the use of the term ‘mobility trap’ gets a whole new layer of meaning. This interpretation offers another layer of reasoning as to why it was so hard for the workers to find jobs out of the industry they’d always known. The difficulties resulted not only because the workers had grown so accustomed to the industry, but also because the industry had consumed them into its seemingly inescapable hold; once the workers were forced out of it, this loss of momentum, for lack of a better phrase, caused unforeseen predicaments.

– Nadera Rahman