One of the most grueling jobs that immigrants suffered through was the garment shops, which to me sounded slightly nicer than sweat shop. After doing all the readings (which started to blend together after a while in my head so that only the occasion random point like about the Chinese who open up taco stands would “wake” me up) the one common point I could latch on to was trials and suffering that immigrants went through at the mercy of a garment shop. From the Jews in the mid 19th century to the Mexicans and Ecuadorians who flooded the shops most recently, it seems as if immigrants had no choice but to work at the shops (and honestly, some didn’t have a choice).
The manner in which each group relied (or didn’t rely) on coethnic social networks had a real effect on their level of success. Take for example the comparison that Lee makes between the Jews, the Koreans, and the African Americans. Jews were employed at the garment shops early on, but those who wanted self-employment as a means of escaping their current situation went on to open up shops and stores that catered to the needs of other Jews, and the same with the Koreans. Not only did the Jews and Koreans have more access to capital, which made them more economically stable than African Americans, but they also utilized loans from family and participated in rotating credit associations. While naturally, a Korean immigrant might have a hard time getting a loan from a bank due to a lack of English language capabilities or other problems, rotating credit was an easier, albeit riskier option. African Americans on the other hand, went another route for borrowing money since borrowing from kin or friends wasn’t thought to work. I call it trust issues and agree with the African American book-store owner interview when he said “We’ve been poisoned against each other,” and “[they] would rather invest their money outside the community” (Lee 270). Another thing that caught my eye was reading about how to Jews and Koreans saw self employment as merely upward mobility, while African Americans viewed it as achieving the dream. If I owned a successful store I’d be pretty satisfied with myself, owning my own business would be my goal, not a foot hole gained towards my goal.
When reading Margaret M. Chin’s When Coethnic Assets Become Liabilities: Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Chinese Garment Workers in New York City, it struck me just how different the Chinese and the Latinos used coethnic relationships when it came to finding jobs. Chinese immigrants informed family or friends of “open seats” in a shop, which made getting a job easier and smoother than looking in a newspaper. They were brought by family and friends to learn how to sew and work in a shop. This gave the employer an easier time getting new reliable workers since the “elder” or “sponsor” employee trusted the new people. It’s a pity that Latino workers didn’t necessarily follow the example though. One of the interviews with a Mexican woman in her twenties sums up the fear that most Latino’s felt when it came to helping others get a job, “I don’t feel comfortable introducing a worker to the owner. What happens if they get the job, and it doesn’t work out? It would be a bad reflection on me,” (Chin 288). So job insecurity ran high especially since bringing a new worker (who might do the work for less) could get yourself fired if it didn’t work out or if they were hired to replace you.
For Latinos, many suffered a double risk of losing their jobs and on top of that were easily exploited. One risk was that there was always someone new who didn’t know enough about acceptable wages that could be hired to work for much less than the current employee. The second risk came from the fact that if they were undocumented it was so much easier to get fired.
We’d like to think that all an immigrant needed to move up from the bottom rung was “hard work, perseverance, discipline, and thrift,” (Lee 260) but it took more than that for immigrants to even have a shot. For immigrants, getting a job in New York wasn’t about having skills, since even middle and upper class immigrants with education and a career in their country of origin had to downgrade to low paying, labor intense work. Which is why immigrants had to do work they “were good at,” like the unskilled Italian immigrants who came and moved straight into construction, because it had no prerequisites except for a healthy able body. Foner mentioned in the chapter, getting a job required a combination of English language capabilities, coethnic connections and a willingness to work for extremely low wages. Its no wonder that as each flood of new immigrants came, the “old” immigrants moved up and left the undesirable jobs to the newcomers.
