Ethnic Enclave Sociology

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An ethnic enclave is a distinctive geographical area highly concentrated with ethnic immigrant groups that organize several businesses to serve and employ co-ethnic workers. According to Alejandro Portes, immigrant enclave economies are seen as a way for minorities to avoid the harsh costs they often face in assimilating into the secondary labor market and provide ethnic networks to facilitate the integration process newcomers often face. Portes’ enclave economy hypothesis, postulates that enclave minorities obtain proportionate earning-returns to human capital to immigrants in the primary labor market. Within these enclaves, immigrants are offered social and economic capital through mutual support, access to labor and market, sources of capital, …show more content…

This is demonstrated by the view that they each take on ethnic solidarity. Portes believes that in exchange for oppressive and exploitative work arrangements, immigrants will receive in return reserved supervisory positions in the immigrant firms that can eventually result in self-employment. Sanders and Nee disagree and argue that this is not the case. Ethnic solidarity in fact results in employers finding a way through this established trust to retain a low-wage workforce of immigrant workers and not provide them a means to self-employment in return. Sanders and Nee argue that ethnic enclaves do not actually produce comparable earnings as workers in the primary labor force. They found that immigrant workers living inside ethnic enclaves produced comparatively lower earning-returns to human capital than those in the open labor market. The only difference was in regards to self-employed immigrants in that those who were self employed within the ethnic enclave produced similar earnings as entrepreneurs in the open labor market. Therefore emphasizing that workers working for immigrant employers do not eventually become self-employed as a result of this class tension. Portes responded to this by stressing that ethnic enclaves did not equate ethnic residential areas rather they are concentrations …show more content…

Despite the fact that immigrant workers in Silicon Valley are highly educated, the majority of them are concentrated in professional and technical occupations and a smaller portion become or obtain managerial positions. This is evidence that highly skilled immigrants still bump into the “glass ceiling” through these race-based institutional barriers to mobility into the managerial elite. She demonstrates that skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants too create ethnic networks that facilitate and support the process of becoming self-employed through technology businesses. These networks like those in traditional enclaves facilitate the job finding process, exchange useful information, resources and access to capital, managerial expertise, as well as creating collective ethnic identities. One example of such networking would be associations such as CIE, which provides alumni relations, solidarity, managerial training, and assistance in assimilation while still promoting collaboration between their counterparts in Asia. Much like traditional enclaves, immigrant workers in Silicon Valley also possess ethnic and cultural knowledge that are marketable in terms of the global economy and connections with their place of

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