The emerging Western caste system - Non-linear Ethnic Niches
If you want to join Britain’s thriving cocaine smuggling industry, you have to be Albanian...
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...
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...
The general economic case for immigration is that immigration means larger markets and hence more competition, more opportunities for specialization, more economies of scale, and so on...
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...
... The common features in all of them are as follows.
They are founded and sustained by first-generation immigrants. This allows niche owners to exploit labor arbitrage through their ethnic and kinship networks in their home countries, and also creates a language barrier...
They are in low-prestige, low-margin sectors...
They establish dominance through a combination of below-market-rate extended family loans...
The third advantage non-linear ethnic niches have is the various racial privileges that non-whites enjoy in the US...
The big losers are Americans at large. Not only do ethnic niches facilitate mass immigration, with all the problems that causes, but small business ownership (especially franchises) was one of the classic paths of upwards mobility for Americans. As ethnic networks take over more and more sectors, this gets closed off...
By breaking up kin-based structures into nuclear families, the Western European Marriage Pattern facilitated impersonal cooperation, which both enabled cooperation at much larger scales and greatly improved the efficiency of learning...
Once an ethnic group takes over an economic niche, these benefits are lost...
Immigration is the most reactionary force in Western societies today... immigration supporters are turning back the clock 700 years. Non-linear ethnic niches portend the reversal of centuries of social progress towards impersonal cooperation and economic progress toward larger, better integrated markets. Economists who support immigration on the grounds that it increases market size are simply wrong...
Low fertility means it only takes a few defections for the ethnic network to unravel.
The bad news is that this breakdown only happens if immigration is stopped.