Non-linear Ethnic Niches The emerging Western caste system

The groups discussed all come from collectivist, kinship-based cultures. Like Jews, they will thrive in the Western individualist, non-kinship-based environment. The ethnocentrism typical of non-Western cultures is alive and well and continues to pose a great danger to the West.

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Written by Arctotherium in Aporia Magazine.

If you want to join Britain’s thriving cocaine smuggling industry, you have to be Albanian.1

There’s no a priori reason why this should be the case. Albanians do not have a racial, cultural, geographic or political affinity for Colombian narcotics. A reasonable and informed observer in 2000 would not have predicted that they would come to dominate the industry. Yet such an obsever would have predicted that some ethnic minority would because organized crime is almost always organized along ethnic lines. This is true even when the ethnic minority is less criminal on average than society at large, as with the Jewish mafia in early 20th century America.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to criminal enterprises. Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans. I am not the first, the tenth, or even the hundredth person to notice this. From a 1999 New York Times article titled ‘A Patel Motel Cartel?’

America’s motels constitute what could be called a nonlinear ethnic niche: a certain ethnic group becomes entrenched in a clearly identifiable economic sector, working at jobs for which it has no evident cultural, geographical or even racial affinity.

I don’t mean Italians owning pizzerias, or Japanese people running judo schools. I mean, to use an obvious example, the Korean dominance of the deli-and-grocery sector in New York — a city where the Chinese run most laundries and Sri Lankans, in case you didn’t know this, run most porn-video stores. Or the Arabs in greater Detroit, who have a stranglehold on gas stations, or the Vietnamese who monopolize nail salons in Los Angeles. Farther afield, I could mention London’s taxi drivers, sharp-tongued in their big black cars, many of whom are Jews from the city’s East End; or the security guards outside New Delhi’s more affluent residences, virtually all of whom are Nepalese; or the prostitutes in the United Arab Emirates, who are so often women from Russia.

I don’t believe previous writers have really considered the broader implications. The general economic case2 for immigration is that immigration means larger markets and hence more competition, more opportunities for specialization, more economies of scale, and so on. I’ve covered in the past how substantial international trade3 means this doesn’t apply today (small nations benefit from the competition, specialization and scale of the world at large).

The existence of non-linear ethnic niches weakens the economic case for immigration even further. The key point is that immigration fractures national markets. Once a niche is taken over, outsiders can no longer compete in that niche.

There is still competition within ethnic groups inside the niches, but these groups are tiny fractions of the population and often have informal institutions and kinship structures that allow them to act as cartels. In the words of Vishal Shah, a Dunkin’ Donuts store owner in Chicago:

“In Indian culture, if it’s a friend of your father you still call him uncle,” Shah said. “You are family through respect because your parents are friends; everybody’s family.

That makes a big difference on a daily basis in business. “We all help each other,” said Shah, whose family has six stores. “Whenever someone needs something no one ever said I don’t have the time. If your mixer goes down, it’s a matter of a couple of phone calls and you know you’re taken care of.” Likewise, he said, if half his crew gets sick, those same few calls will get him back in business.

What this means is that in vocations taken over by non-linear ethnic niches, modern-day multi-ethnic Chicago has a smaller talent pool to draw from than the smaller but more homogenous4 Chicago of generations past, and the same goes for many American cities.

We can roughly quantify the importance of non-linear ethnic niches by examining levels of co-ethnic hiring in new firms.

But the chart above significantly understates co-ethnic hiring in cases where the sending countries are themselves multi-ethnic. The correct unit of analysis for the motel industry, for example, is not “Indians” but Gujaratis. For Detroit groceries, it’s the minuscule Chaldean minority, not “Iraqis”. And while the chart tells you how dependent a given country’s immigrants are on these niches, it does not tell you how dominant they are inside them, which is the more important number.5

It’s worth looking at some of the more famous non-linear ethnic niches in the US to get an idea of how they operate.

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