Ethnic Enclave, Economic Impact of

What is an Ethnic Enclave?

Scholars have employed a variety of approaches to defining ethnic enclaves. Alejandro Portes and Leif Jensen proposed a definition widely used by other authors, labeling ethnic enclaves as spatially clustered businesses owned and operated by an ethnic minority group. Thus, some have labeled Miami, West Little River, and Hialeah (all located in south Florida) as Cuban ethnic enclaves and San Francisco and New York City as Chinese ethnic enclaves, presumably because of the high concentrations of each ethnic group in those communities. When there is a high concentration of people from an ethnic group living and working in a community, some scholars assume that the firms within that community are benefiting from ethnic solidarity and from vertical integration. Other scholars view this assumption as a major limitation of their approach, arguing that the ethnic concentration of a community is only a rough measure of ethnic solidarity and vertical integration.

Other authors take a different approach by focusing on the ethnicity of a business's owner and supervisor, but such studies do not address the clustering [Page 454]component that the other scholars stress. Such studies fail to distinguish between ethnic businesses per se and ethnic businesses operating within ethnic enclaves. For example, some studies assume that if the owner and the worker share an ethnicity, the firm is an enclave business; sometimes, only the ethnicity of the supervisor of a firm is used to place it in this category. This is problematic because ethnic businesses can operate anywhere. The approach addresses whether the firm is an ethnic firm but not whether an ethnic concentration exists in the area where a firm is located. Given that the ethnic enclave thesis is about the concentration of firms in an area, this concentration must be considered to accurately measure an ethnic enclave.

Festival in Little Italy. Men and boys are shown on a sidewalk outside of store at a festival in Little Italy, New York City (1908). Little Italy is a general name for an ethnic enclave populated (or formerly populated) primarily by Italians or people of Italian ancestry. Ethnic enclaves can be viewed as beneficial by providing employment opportunities for members of the ethnic group, but some argue that wages are kept artificially low in such neighborhoods.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-114764.

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