Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and Change in MacArthur Park
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Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and ...

Chapter 2:  Looking Beyond the Blighted Surface
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businesses and also working as wage laborers as a way to gain entry into the new society's economy (Waldinger 1986). Ward (1971) described various employment strategies for gaining capital adopted by some immigrants at the turn of the century as follows:

Irish immigrants found employment in warehouses and terminal facilities, German immigrants worked in the sewing machine and consumer supply trades…new arrivals from Italy in part replaced the Irish as general laborers and were attracted to redistributing fresh food from the central wholesale markets. Jewish immigrants, equipped with long experience in the handicraft industries and the local commercial life of Eastern Europe, quickly developed many branches of merchandising at a time when the retail and wholesale segments of marketing were firmly established as distinct and specialized areas in the central business district.

Other immigrant groups used different strategies depending on when they immigrated to the United States. Today, Korean immigrants to the U.S. use a strategy tailored to and influenced by the restructuring of the global economy (Ong, Bonacich, and Chang 1994; Smith 1996; Lin 2000). Korean immigrants migrate to areas experiencing economic disinvestment and use their cultural and economic capital to revitalize those spaces and establish their ethnic community. Examples of this type of adaptation strategy can be seen in the creation of Koreatown in Los Angeles (Smith 2001). These employment strategies are used by various immigrant groups to gain social and financial capital, which helps them establish their immigrant neighborhood and adapt to their host society.

These immigrant businesses are often the core of an ethnic enclave that serves to support both the economic and cultural capital of immigrants. Alejandro Portes described an ethnic enclave as consisting of

important groups which concentrate in a distinct spatial location and organize a variety of enterprises serving their own ethnic market and/or the general population. Their basic characteristic is that a significant proportion of the immigrant work force works in enterprises owned by other immigrants. (Sanders and Nee 1987)