Immigrants for a long time have come to America with the dream of becoming successful; working their way up from the bottom and eventually securing a comfortable position within American’s society for the future of their family. Doing so seems straightforward enough, but in reality, it’s not so simple. Regarding this American dream we examine both the lives of legal and illegal immigrants as well as lower class native American inhabitants (most likely 2nd generation and above immigrants) and their role in America’s growing economy.
Kwong brings up the involvement of illegal Chinese immigrants in the American economy. Several of these illegal immigrants are being smuggled by boat from cities in China like Fuzhou city. Upon arrival, each immigrant owes their smuggler around $30,000 dollars. This, surprisingly enough, occurs quite frequently today as human trafficking and illegal immigration grows. These immigrants would take up below minimum-wage jobs with factories in order to pay their debts; however, not all of the immigrants achieved success. Several Chinese immigrants actually stayed within range of their job, working day by day to get by and pay off their debt. As a result, Chinese enclaves formed around wherever there were extremely low wage jobs. These enclaves differ from other enclaves in that there was barely any interaction with the outside society. The inhabitants of such an enclave already had work set for them, and they barely had the necessity to learn and speak English since their society was heavily Chinese. For them, success could only be visioned in the distant future as they were strictly confined to their enclave.
Most legal Chinese immigrants differed from their undocumented counterparts purely by their interaction with the society outside of their enclave. They may have also worked low wage jobs, but their interactions, social and economical, occurred at times outside of their enclave. In this group, assimilation and outward interaction culminate into an opportunity at upward mobility not easily present within the tight-knit enclaves of the undocumented immigrants. However, such an outcome between immigrants and America’s economy wasn’t necessarily specific to the Asian Americans. In fact, such results were true for immigrants of any race, illegal or legal. In Malkin’s article, he mentions how these immigrants (1st, 2nd, and future generations) played their part in America’s business sectors, specifically within New York City. He first goes through this by discussing the diversity of the employees present within the retail sector. The vast majority of these employees are young adults and most likely 2nd generation immigrants or further. They are most likely assimilated and used to the diverse society in which they live in. As a result, companies are able to hire workers of different backgrounds without any racial or ethnic conflict. Such an economy rarely existed in the early 1900s where racial segregation occurred on multiple levels, especially within the workplace. Just as society became more diverse and accepting of different cultures and races, so did business. Today, companies even seek to diversify their workforce hiring qualified people of different problems.
There still however remains one problem regarding immigrants and their involvement with the economy. This problem is the conflict between native American minorities and the illegal immigrants who come into this country taking extremely low wage jobs. A large number of New Yorkers are unemployed, and a large number of them belong to groups of minorities living in poor neighborhoods, or “ghetto’s” as Marcuse would say. These same people compete with illegal immigrants for low wage jobs. The problem arises due to the increase of illegal immigrants streaming into the city. Kwong and Malkin easily explain this by discussing the kinship of immigrants and their familial ties. As one group of immigrants stabilizes themselves, they work to bring over the rest of their kin. This causes an increasing wave of immigrants. Ultimately this causes a problem for minority native Americans stuck in “ghettos” which has a solution yet to be seen.
