Ethnicity and Networks

Immigration and Labor Issues

Choices about immigration are often shaped by networks. Immigrants use their networks as sources of information to discover where, when, and how to relocate and how to find housing and employment and negotiate governmental policies upon arrival. While migration is often set off by specific push and pull factors in the countries of origin and destination, the existence of dense ethnic networks can mean that immigration outlives the initial push and pull factors; the networks themselves becomes pull factors. Networks are a key ingredient in chain migration, a situation where networks connect destination and origin, and workers travel back and forth between the two locations, depending on what opportunities exist at either end at any given moment. Immigrants may send money back to family members who remained behind or return to their country of origin for holidays and better job offers. Chain migration can lead to dominance of certain labor niches by particular ethnic groups in one location.

An old view of immigration, popularized by the Chicago school studies led by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, argued that immigrant groups who resisted assimilating into the broader society were at a disadvantage. Assimilation was seen as the natural and desirable aim of immigration; once absorbed into the melting pot, people of all ethnicities were certain to eventually succeed economically in the United States. While the [Page 273]original theory of assimilation has been criticized for its ethnocentrism and uncritical acceptance of the ideology of progress, the benefits of assimilation have been touted in contemporary times by networks theorists who argue that without links into the social networks of broader society, immigrant groups are limited by group resources and class position and are therefore less likely to experience social mobility. For example, immigrants' lack of connections to mainstream social networks would translate into a lack of job opportunities.

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