For those from Mexico and other Latin American countries, however, the Hart-Celler Act even further restricted avenues of immigration, continuing a pattern that started in with the phasing out of the Mexican Farm Labor Program known as the Bracero Program.
At one point in the midth-century, the program, which granted temporary guestworker visas, allowed for nearly half a million migrants, predominantly from Mexico, to circulate in and out of the United States every year; often, they worked under abusive conditions. Many immigrants would arrive without documentation, making finding employment difficult. And even new immigrants with legal paperwork faced a culture that often would not acknowledge their prior qualifications or work experience.
So, instead of trying to join a workforce that discriminated against them, many immigrants chose instead to start their own business. That question of self-employment is a key one, because it allows them to work without having to deal with the microaggressions that would come along with working for someone else. Many of these newcomers found themselves drawn to businesses like gas stations and convenience stores, which required relatively little start-up capital, and came with an already existing clientele and business model.
He worked as a farmer in Punjab, but like so many others at the time, his family was losing opportunities in India. His father left for New York and started working in the gas station business alongside his uncle in Ten years later, Singh followed, joining the family business in the Bronx. In , Singh bought a truck stop after friends tipped him off to one that was up for auction across the country.
So, along with his wife, his kids, his mother, and his father, Singh found himself leaving New York City for a new life in Burns, Wyoming, population: From the start, he knew he wanted to be serving food at his newly minted Antelope Truck Stop.
He began selling slow-cooked Punjabi foods, like chicken curry, dal makhani, and saag — dishes that can take upward of five hours to prepare — alongside American roadside classics, like scrambled eggs and hamburgers.
In India, dhabas are hour joints, similarly located off of highways, right next to gas stations. They serve the ultimate comfort food — everything creamy, greasy, and covered in ghee.
In the U. The town of Burns boasts a population that is over 99 percent white. Singh and his family may as well be the only Indians in the area; that is to say, Burns is not the most obvious place to start a traditional Punjabi restaurant. And work never stops. Antelope is a true family business — along with his wife, his father, and his mother, Singh cooks all the food, operates the truck stop, and runs the attached convenience and liquor stores.
While I spoke to him over the phone, he kept up the interview while continuing to interface with customers. When they moved to the United States in , the sisters found themselves in Franklin, Tennessee, a town guided by the same God-fearing morality they were raised with back home.
When they first opened, Angelina says they were selling to customers who had never had Mexican food before. But, what they loved is that their customers were more than willing to try.
By sharing her food, Angelina soon found a community in Tennessee that was respectful and accepting, just like the one she grew up with in Mexico. In Michigan, the Gulli family found themselves addressing some of the same issues in the early s when they first started Mr. Kabob, a Middle Eastern restaurant based in their gas station. Worried that new customers would have reservations about eating food from a service station, the family purposely built an open kitchen so that they could show, with full confidence, that their food was fresh and high quality.
Those worries, thankfully, never manifested. It permeates. That entrepreneurial spirit has carried the Gulli family far. So, they found a new home. Even today, Detroit is still home to one of the largest Iraqi American communities in the United States.
The Naseems bought a two-bay car garage in Berkley, Michigan, and started doing full-service auto work. When their sons grew older, Fadia and Walid converted the garage into a gas station, and with the renovation, created a space to start the restaurant they would call Mr. Top left Inside Mr. Kabob; top right A mezze plate, for takeout, at Mr.
Kabob ; bottom Chicken on the grill at Mr. Kabob in Berkeley, Michigan. Eventually, the restaurant became busier than the station, and the family started to consider expansion. Naseem and his two brothers, who were all working other jobs at the time, came back to help the family business grow. That single gas station is now a full restaurant franchise: Today, the Gulli family own and operate four Mr. Common people are used to the idea of ownership. They aspire for it. They work towards it.
Thus, when they get to the United States, they come here with the mindset of ownership. Contrast this with the mood of most Americans. What American parents proudly announce at the dinner party that their son wants to run a motel? What starry-eyed American youth dreams of one day managing a breakfast diner? But why not? If Americans do not tend to aspire to ownership, what do they aspire to? The sad thing is that the capitalist mentality has conditioned Americans to aspire, not to ownership, but to secure positions in middle management—place holders in the bureaucracy.
Success is not bound up with ownership, but with tying oneself to the success of a much bigger entity. The restoration of Property must essentially be the product of a new mood, not a new scheme. It must grow from seed planted in the breast. It is too late to reinfuse it by design, and our efforts must everywhere be particular, local, and, in its origins at least, small. One other point: Notice that in the example of immigrant owned businesses, ownership is vested not in the individual so much as the family.
The Chaldean who owns the party store runs it with his brothers and their children, as does the Albanian who owns the breakfast diner. The Vietnamese woman I mentioned who worked in a clothing shop out of her house did so with her family. Her father, mother, and siblings all worked together in what was essentially an exercise of familial ownership.
Besides being the heart of the Distributist vision—the family as the primary economic unit—familial ownership is the most basic sort of cooperative organization, whereby the resources of individuals are pooled together to bring forth an outcome much greater than what any individual could accomplish alone. This cooperative principle is at the heart of the Distributist ideal.
It constitutes the functional principle of what makes Distributist ventures economically viable. Are non-western economies like those found in Iraq, Cambodia, or Vietnam models of Distributist economies? Certainly not. A proposal to restructure the American economy in the image of that of Albania would rightfully be derided.
These countries all have many serious problems, politically, culturally, and economically. What is praiseworthy is not the material conditions or politics in these other countries, but the ownership mentality that a general distribution of ownership engenders. And this has to do not with the corrupt political systems that usually exist in such places; more often than not, it is due to the hardy remnants of traditional economies that have endured in spite of the destructive, imbecilic administration of tin-pot dictatorships.
Immigrant owned businesses in the United States exemplify what is possible for the common man when the right technological, educational, and financial resources and made available to people with an ownership mentality. Ultimately, for ownership to be more common, our mentality needs to change. We need to break out of the capitalist-induced mental lethargy that has our brightest minds aspiring to nothing more than cozy middle management and recapture an aspiration towards ownership.
He teaches history and economics for Homeschool Connections. His writings have also appeared in such publications as the St. Austin Review and The Distributist Review.
0コメント