In his article “Beyond co-ethnic solidarity: Mexican and Ecuadorean employment in Korean-owned businesses in New York City”, Kim discusses the relationship between immigrant employers and employees. It is interesting that Korean employers of businesses in the city are hiring less Korean employees and actually more Mexicans and Latinos. Kim says the cost of co-ethnic employment has increased, which is often the case of immigrant groups with high self-employment. One of the reasons Koreans have opted to employ Mexican employees instead of people of their own ethnicity is that Korean employees see the job as temporary.

Considering this unique case of Korean employers not hiring co-ethnically, what do you think are its implications into other parts of the Korean community? Will the Korean employers’ decisions to hire outside their ethnicity create tension within the community or will it affect the community dynamic in other ways?

In the reading about Ethnic Enclaves, the author discusses how Korean employers prefer to hire hispanic applicants over black applicants who are equally qualified.  Is this the result of these Korean people internalizing the history of racism in the United States and the consequent fear and distrust of black people that many still have, or did this racism develop independently, perhaps even brought over from Korea?

This reading discusses the relationship between co-ethnic employees and employers.  When these immigrants are brought into the country to work for co-ethnic employers, do they more so benefit from having a support net of people from a similar cultural background who speak their language, or are they hindered in the long run because they are not forced to assimilate to some degree, or interact with people outside of their culture frequently?

Why exactly was New York late in getting Mexican immigrants and moreso successful in gaining Ecuadorian immigrants? How did this ethnic succession affect the overall economy of NYC at the time?

First and foremost, I can’t help but wonder why it is that Koreans are the entrepreneurs in managerial positions hiring Latino immigrants for the low-level jobs and not vice versa. Why aren’t Latinos starting their own businesses? I know that Puerto Ricans used to be the number one owners of grocery stores, or “bodegas”, but that has shifted and I wonder what the cause of that was.

Chapter 3 from One Out of Three discusses the concerns surrounding the effect of immigration on some US-born workers and the article by Dae Young Kim states that “employer discrimination interacts with social networks that are outside of native minorities to reduce their employment opportunities” thus creating competition between native born minorities and immigrants. Is this because immigrants accept lower wages and other bad working conditions that native born minorities may not? How does this specifically impact the community? In what ways can native born minorities work to get the upper hand in a situation like this?

Also, a question about time, is this a phenomenon that is still happening? Has their been another shift in immigrant employment since 1999? I think that would be interesting for us to observe.

We have seen this in earlier readings, how West Indians emphasize on their ethnicity and when they immigrate to U.S, they don’t only have to deal with hardships of being  immigrants, but also they have to face racism from the society for their skin color. I know that you can use data to your advantage but I couldn’t piece together some of it. For instance, the author mentions that Jamaicans believe in strict police actions and even the poor respect law and order, yet despite these beliefs they have a high crime rate. Why is that?

Furthermore the author mentions, how many well educated (college graduate) were able to come to New York because of job opportunities. And at the same time very few people who didn’t have much education were able to come to U.S. Can we call this brain drain? Over a long period of time, this will eventually lead to the decline of the Jamaican nation. What foreign policy should be implemented so as to not adversely affect Jamaica?

I thought it was surprising that, in the article, a focus was on Koreans reserving managerial positions for Koreans only, but were happy to have Hispanics doing lower level work. Generally when one thinks of racism/discrimination, one thinks whites are usually the oppressing side. In this case, we see an immigrant group oppressing another. This kind of makes me think of the cycle of bullying, where people who are bullied can become bullies themselves. Is it possible that the Koreans mentioned in this article behave in such a way because they were discriminated against or used for another immigrant/ethnic group’s interests? If so, what group(s) could that be?

I wonder why the Korean immigrants (really all immigrants that held firm in the co-ethnic tight-nit communities) did not desire bigger and better things? Where was there ambition? The article describes numerous struggles of working in the co-ethnic environment and it seems that such laborers were not extremely  prosperous. By working outside of the co-ethnic community possibilities and opportunities are greatly expanded. So why didn’t ambition take them there?