In “Beyond Co-ethnic Solidarity: Mexican and Ecuadorean Employment in Korean-owned businesses in New York City”, the author, Dae Young Kim, examines the changing dynamics in the co-ethnic nature of Korean owned businesses and applies these findings to critique the traditional scholarly approach to immigrant entrepreneurship
In the past, scholars have put forward the Ethnic Enclave Thesis, asserting that in ethnic enclaves co-ethnic employees and employers form a mutually beneficial relationship. In other words, both sides benefit from an economic relationship. Employees provide employers with a large and cost-efficient labor force while employers provide training and the chance for promotion or independent entrepreneurship.
How did this co-ethnic economic model come to be? With the drastic increase in the reate of immigration in the nineteen sixties came rising discrimination. Immigrants succeeded in overcoming this discrimination and building new economies and communities for themselves by collaborating and cooperating with their co-ethnic community to help build businesses and become economically self sufficient.
In the past, scholarly literature has almost exclusively painted a positive picture of co-ethnic economic partnership and as a result has failed to properly note the internal conflicts and views within ethnic communities. These conflicts, perceptions, and the resulting economic shift have contradicted the fully positive model of co-ethnic entrepreneurship and economic solidarity. To address these issues, Kim uses the events behind the changing dynamics within Korean-owned business to illustrate the costs and following downfall of co-ethnic economic solidarity.
In short, what happened in the Korean immigrant economic community was as follows: In the beginning, Korean businesses followed the Ethnic Enclave Thesis perfectly. They hired many of their co-ethnics who provided them with abundant, cheap, and reliable labor. In return they provided job training and also provided an established business infrastructure and community from which new immigrant could eventually mold their own businesses. And in this lies the problem. Eventually, the population that would have been employed cheaply by business owners became business owners themselves or advanced themselves economically using other paths. As Korean business owners saw their own labor pool dry up they were forced to turn to other more reliable and cost-efficient sources, namely, recent Latino immigrants.
