Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982

Between 1975 and 1982, Korean immigrants entered the entrepreneurial population of Los Angeles in great numbers. They brought new capital and entrepreneurial vigor into the county's economy, and helped to stabilize neighborhoods, improve public education, and counteract street crime. The main concern of this study is explicating the question: why were immigrants in general, and Koreans in particular, more frequently self-employed than native-born Americans during that time period? The Korean influx posed a challenge to the social theory based on the dismissal of small business as an archaic survival. Korean immigrants, underemployed in secondary labor markets, had the money, education, ethnic resources, and motivation to start new small businesses. Korean self-employment in the United States can be seen as an economic consequence of an international economic process started decades earlier when the US started exporting capital, technology, and military power to their peninsula. Examines the international context and the roots of emigration, through examination of the relations between the US and South Korea, in order to explain why hundreds of thousands of Koreans came to the US as immigrants in the late 1960s and 1970s. The analysis offers a hypothetical answer to this question; it draws a connection between this immigrant influx and the simultaneous growth in South Korean integration in the world capitalist economy - the process in which the US was one of the foremost facilitators. The US played a vital role in Korean development and shaping the kind of regime established there through trade, investment, and economic and military aid. The US also helped to keep Korean labor cheap and took advantage of this cheap labor through direct investments, loans, subcontracting, and importing cheap goods. The cheapness of labor in South Korea was also determined by the policies and practices of the Korean government. The economic and political consequences of Korea's role as a producer of cheap manufactured exports led to the dislocation and discontent of certain classes from which most immigrants derived. The present hypothesis places responsibility for the emigration on the US; it suggests that the US often shuts the door to the kinds of immigrants whose immigration the US itself stimulated. The analysis then focuses more specifically on Korean business in Los Angeles, reporting the results of the study of independent and joint effects of ethnic and class resources on entrepreneurship. Ethnic resources are social features of a group which co-ethnic business owners utilize, or from which their business passively benefits. Class resources are twofold: cultural resources of entrepreneurship, like bourgeois values, attitudes, and knowledge; and material resources, like private property and personal wealth. The research herein supports some aspects of class theory which advances an individualistic explanation of overrepresentation in business and industrial clustering. Koreans entered the general business population as resource-endowed individuals, a process independent of ethnicity, and utilized class resources of money and education to effect this entry. The study also offers evidence of ethnic facilitation, which involves the entrepreneurial utilization of collective resources. Hard work and the willingness to take low wages, which reflect a cultural orientation, were also ethnic resources. Korean business was the creation of ethnic bourgeoisie; a creation of both class and ethnic resources on the one hand, Koreans invested and calculated in a typically bourgeois manner; on the other hand, they utilized ethnic resources in order to further their business objectives. Presents research results in the areas of Korean business location, the Korean ownership of liquor licenses in LA, raising capital, the sources of entrepreneurship, as well a