Transclave Economy: Immigrant Business Survival in An Era of Pandemic

Abstract

The ethnic enclave economy – the spatial clustering of immigrant enterprises where immigrant owners employ workers of their own ethnic or migration background – has been portrayed as a protected labor market where immigrant business owners and workers build beneficial or exploitative relationships. Scholars’ characterizations of the ethnic enclave economy have been dichotomized. Optimists argue that it allows immigrants to avert labor market discrimination and racism in a host society. Specifically, immigrant workers can find entry-level jobs with ethnic enterprises despite their limited socioeconomic capital, while employers take advantage of easy access to cheap, loyal workforces. Pessimists, in contrast, claim that this enclave effect is insignificant. They point out that workers are underpaid and that the heavy reliance on ethnic ties hampers employers from innovation and expansion. Over the last several decades, the persistent debate over the positive functions of the enclave economy, which is called the enclave effect, has expanded our knowledge of the social mobility of immigrants in a receiving society.

Despite its significant contribution, a limitation of this debate is that scholars assume this economic ecosystem is static rather than fluid. The majority of enclave economy articles capture the earlier stage of the developmental trajectory of the immigrant economy, which is dominated by a single-ethnicity group and small mom-and-pop businesses. Under this premise, they examine the economic performance of the immigrants in that exceptional temporal context. Consequently, they pay little attention to the constantly changing nature of the enclave economy and interpret the ethnic enclave as an equilibrium place where socioeconomic conditions (e.g., ethnic diversity, immigration law, economic vibrancy) are stable. However, in highly globalized urban settings, the enclave economy undergoes consistent ethnic diversification, stratification, and spatial reconfiguration as a result of the socioeconomic changes in a host society and the inflow of people from different countries, who maintain continuing connection to their home societies.

By utilizing mixed methodology, including geostatistical analysis, interviews, surveys, and longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork from 2020 to 2021, this dissertation reveals how the enclave economy has developed into a multiethnic contested place where immigrants from different backgrounds cooperate and compete. To highlight the variable nature of the enclave economy, I incorporate the transnationalism framework and propose the term transclave economy. I argue the transclave economy is developed by the transnational inflows of labor, capital, and heterogeneous culture into an immigrant economy. In this variable system, the enclave effect should be understood as a fluid capability whose function is contingent to the time and context that each enclave economy participant is situated in. The framework will be applied to the case of nail salons in New York City, where the largest cosmetology service cluster is located and the majority of workers and owners are immigrant women. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes to highlighting the enclave economy as a system of becoming, rather than a system of being, which is an increasingly important perspective in understanding multicultural city environments.