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Via Tyler Cowen comes this explanation of why so many Chinese immigrants started Chinese restaurants. Hint: It's not cause they were delicious.
Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.In other words, it was a reaction to nativism. Few think a Chinese immigrant working in a Chinese restaurant has stolen a job from a native worker. That's, like, a whole new job! So there's no reason to get angry about it. A Chinese immigrant who gets a job in the building trades, conversely, can be seen as grabbing a job a white man might have wanted, and there are -- and in particular, there were -- various social consequences that could result from that feeling. On a slightly related note (which is to say, odd effects of immigration patterns), I was reading an interesting essay on drug policy from the blogosphere's own Mark Kleiman in which he makes the point that America has a particularly acute cocaine problem because "illegal drugs have to be moved covertly and sold to trusted confederates, and common ethnicity is a key source of trust. The United States, particularly Florida and New York, had large, established communities of Colombian immigrants, and there was substantial legal trade in which cocaine shipments could be hidden." In other words, our cocaine problem is in part the result of preexisting social networks that happened to connect the leading cocaine producing nation with trusted importers in a massive new market. I thought that was interesting.
