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In sociology, an ethnic enclave is a geographic area with high ethnic concentration, characteristic cultural identity, and economic activity.Abrahamson, Mark . "Urban Enclaves: Identity and Place in America." Review by: David M. Hummon. Contemporary Sociology. American Sociological Association. Vol. 25 No. 6 (Nov. 1996): pp. 781-782. The term is usually used to refer to either a residential area or a workspace with a high concentration of ethnic firms.Portes, Alejandro, and Leif Jensen. "Disproving the Enclave Hypothesis: Reply." American Sociological Review. Vol. 57. no. 3 (1992): 418-420. Their success and growth depends on self-sufficiency, and is coupled with economic prosperity.
Douglas Massey describes how migrant networks provide new immigrants with social capital that can be transferred to other tangible forms.
pp. 60. As immigrants tend to cluster in close geographic spaces, they develop migrant networks—systems of interpersonal relations through which participants can exchange valuable resources and knowledge. Immigrants can capitalize on social interactions by transforming information into tangible resources, and thereby lower costs of migration. Information exchanged may include knowledge of employment opportunities, affordable housing, government assistance programs and helpful .Massey, Douglas S. "Why Does Immigration Occur? A Theoretical Synthesis." The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, editors. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999. By stimulating social connections, enclaves can generate intangible resources that help to promote the social and economic development of its members.
By providing a space for people who share the same ethnic identity to create potentially beneficial relations, ethnic enclaves can assist members in achieving economic mobility. By reducing their exposure to language and cultural barriers, enclave economies can improve co-ethnics' incorporation into the economy. Enclaves can help to explain the success of some immigrant groups. Additionally, while the ethnic enclave theory was developed to explain immigrant incorporation into the receiving society, it has also been linked to migration processes at large as successful incorporation of immigrants has the potential to lower migration costs for future immigrants, an example of chain migration.
Despite their immediate benefits, the long-term implications of participation in an ethnic enclave are a topic of debate. Enclave economies have been linked to a glass ceiling limiting immigrant growth and upward mobility. While participation in the enclave economy may assist in achieving upward mobility through increased availability of employment opportunities in the enclave labor market, it may also impede acquisition of host country skills that benefit the immigrant over the long-run.Edin, Per-Anders, Peter Fredriksson, and Olof Aslund. "ETHNIC ENCLAVES AND THE ECONOMIC SUCCESS OF IMMIGRANTS—EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT." The Quarterly Journal of Economics. no. 1 (2003): 329-357. Such delays constrain immigrants to activity within the enclave and secludes them from the larger economy. Opportunities available to mainstream society can thus be out of reach for immigrants who haven't learned about them. Thus, the accelerated path toward economic mobility that lures new immigrants into enclave economies may impede success. One 2024 study, for example, found that relocation from an ethnic enclave led to greater economic outcomes for those who were relocated. Integration into an ethnic enclave may delay and even halt cultural assimilation, preventing the immigrants from benefiting from mainstream institutions.Sanders, Jimy M. and Nee, Victor. "Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Enclave Economy." American Sociological Review. 52. no. 6 (1987): 745-773.
Historically, the formation of ethnic enclaves has been the result of a variety of socioeconomic factors that draw immigrants to similar spaces in the receiving city, state, or country. Cultural diversity brings together people who don't understand each other's language but a group can communicate more easily with neighbors in an enclave. In some cases, enclaves have been enforced by law, as in a ghetto. Roman colonies were established to control newly conquered provinces, and grew to absorb the surrounding territory. Some enclaves were established when a governing authority permitted a group to establish their own new town, as in the English town of Gravesend, Brooklyn in 1645.
The lack of access to economic capital and of knowledge regarding residential neighborhoods can constrain newly arrived immigrants to regions of affordable housing. Social dynamics such as prejudice and racism may concentrate co-ethnics into regions displaying ethnic similarity. Housing discrimination may also prevent ethnic minorities from settling into a particular residential area outside the enclave. When discussing the ethnic enclave as defined by a spatial cluster of businesses, economic success, and growth can be largely predicted by three factors. These factors include 1) the size and population of the enclave, 2) the level of entrepreneurial skills of those in the enclave, and 3) the availability of investment resources to the enclave. Successful enclaves can reach a point where they become self-sufficient, or "institutionally complete" through the supply of new immigrants and demand of goods offered in the market. They only reach this point after first supplying for the needs of co-ethnics and then expanding to meet needs of those in the larger market of the host society.
The term "ethnic enclave" arose in response to a publication by Alejandro Portes and Kenneth Wilson in 1980.Waldinger, Roger. "The Ethnic Enclave Debate Revisited."International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 17. no. 3 (1993): 428-436. Portes and Wilson identified a third labor market in which Cuban immigrants in Miami took part. Instead of entering the secondary labor market of the host society, Portes and Wilson discovered that new immigrants tended to become employed by co-ethnics running immigrant-owned firms. The collection of small immigrant enterprises providing employment to new immigrants was defined as the enclave economy.Portes, Alejandro, and Kenneth Wilson. "Immigrant Enclaves: An Analysis of the Labor Market Experiences of Cubans in Miami." American Journal of Sociology. 86. no. 2 (1980): 295-319.
One influential factor in an immigrant's journey is the presence of relatives or friends in the receiving country. Friends and family, making up a kinship network, who are willing to help the newcomers can be classified as a type of capital commonly referred to as social capital. Upon arrival, many immigrants have limited or no access to human capital and thus rely heavily on any available source of social capital. The cost to immigration is large, however this burden can be shared and thus eased through an immigrant's access to social capital in the receiving country. Kinship networks in the receiving country can provide aid not only for the physical and economic needs of immigrants, but also for their emotional and socio-psychological needs.Menjívar, Cecilia. "Immigrant Kinship Networks and the Impact of the Receiving Context: Salvadorans in San Francisco in the Early 1990s." Social Problems. 44. no. 1 (1997): 104-123.
Ethnic enclave economies also provide a method for immigrants who enter at lower wage jobs to rise to the status community entrepreneurs own firms within the community. While benefiting from the higher wages that owning a business provides them, these established immigrants continue the cycle of providing attractive (albeit lower income) labor to newcomers within the framework of the ethnic enclave. The ethnic enclave economy allows for a measure of independence for immigrants by creating a path for them to own businesses. Ethnic enclave economies also have the effect of raising the hourly wages of workers within the enclave.
An individual's entrance into the enclave economy is dependent upon the conditions of incorporation they experience. Unfavorable modes of incorporation into the host society provide incentives for immigrants to enter the informal economy. Discrimination, hostility, and a lack of resources may encourage immigrants to enter into informal employment. Ethnic enclaves are rich in informal activities, as the entrepreneurial services making the core of the enclave's founding were historically informal ventures. Informality proves favorable for many immigrant entrepreneurs by bypass regulatory expenses. Additionally, the scope of employment for immigrants is greatly widened by the availability of informal jobs in the enclave economic sector. The informality of the enclave economy simultaneously induces risk and fraud. Informal activities are constantly under risk of detection by the formal sector, which has a negative effect on job security. Furthermore, due to the absence of legal framework, immigrant laborers often remain silent about various forms of exploitation. The most common form of labor exploitation in immigrant economies is unpaid labor. Undocumented immigrants are especially afraid to report violations of labor laws and exploitation.Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. "Blowups and Other Unhappy Endings" in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy by Barbara Enrehnreich and Arlie Hochschild. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002.
The granting of different statuses and visas (i.e. refugee, temporary visas for students and workers) to immigrant groups affects the type of reception immigrants will receive. Aside from immigration control policies, some governments also impose measures to accelerate social and political incorporation of new immigrants, and to stimulate economic mobility.
Wayne Cornelius studies two central theses regarding institutional response to increased movement of people across transnational borders. The first of these is the gap hypothesis which describes the dissonance between official immigration policies and real policy outcomes. Policy gaps are the result of unintended consequences and inadequate enforcement by the receiving society. Many reasons can explain unintended consequences of immigration policy. Governments with undefined or ambiguous stances toward immigration may propagate unintended consequences, and the reliance on flawed policies can further reduce the efficacy of institutional measures. Furthermore, political incoherency policy poses a greater challenge for the incorporation and enforcement of effective measures.
A negative public opinion toward immigrants is a good measure of significant policy gaps in the receiving government; however, special interest groups may also constrain political responses to immigration. This is especially true in liberal democracies, where "lobbying by powerful employer groups, religious groups, ethnic and immigrant advocacy groups, and even labor unions leads governments to adopt more expansionary immigration policies, even when the economy goes bad and general public opinion turns hostile to immigrants."Cornelius, p.11-12. Furthermore, governments and special groups in the immigrant-sending country may align themselves with pro-immigration lobbyists in the receiving country. Thus, the policymaking process is complicated by involvement of multiple factions.
The second thesis studied by Wayne Cornelius is the convergence hypothesis, which describes the growing similarity of political responses to immigration among immigrant-receiving countries. These similarities fall into: "(1) the policies that their governments have adopted to control immigration; (2) policies designed to integrate immigrants into host societies by providing them with social services as well as political, economic, and social rights; and (3) attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy preferences among general publics."Cornelius, p.4.
Ethnic groups receive various levels of reception by the host society for various reasons. In general, European immigrants tend to encounter little resistance by host countries, while tenets of racism are evinced by widespread resistance to immigrants of color.
Political incorporation into the host country is coupled with adoption of citizenship of the host country. By studying the diverging trajectories of immigrant citizenship in Canada and the U.S., Irene Bloemraad explains that current models of citizenship acquisition fail to recognize the social nature of political incorporation. Bloemraad describes political incorporation as a "social process of mobilization by friends, family, community organizations and local leaders that is embedded in an institutional context shaped by government policies of diversity and newcomer settlement."Bloemraad, Irene. "Social Forces." Social Forces. Vol. 85. No. 2 (Dec. 2006): pp. 667-695. Print. This alternative model emphasizes the role of migrant networks in critically shaping how immigrants consider citizenship. Bloemraad shows that friends, family, co-ethnic organizations and local community affect political incorporation by providing a structured mobilization framework. This social structure is most essential for immigrants who face language barriers and may lack familiarity with host institutions.
The extent to which migrant networks promote citizenship depends on the efficacy of government policies on immigrant integration. Governments adopting policies that facilitate the emergence, integration and growth of ethnic economies are presumed to gain support by co-ethnics. Thus, the movement toward political incorporation and citizenship is nested in a larger institutional structure involving economic and social integration policy as these relate to immigrants. Ethnic enclaves have the ability to simultaneously assist in political and civic incorporation of immigrants. By providing a space that facilitates upward mobility and economic integration into the receiving society, enclaves and their members fundamentally influence the perceptions of receiving institutions by co-ethnics. Finally, enclaves may gauge community interest in naturalization and direct immigrants through the process to gaining citizenship
The immediate economic and social advantages associated with membership in an ethnic enclave are undisputed by scholars, however the long-term consequences remain an area of uncertainty. The role these networks play remains uncertain due to the fact that ethnic enclaves allow immigrants to function successfully within the host society without a significant amount of adjustment either culturally or linguistically. As such, they can either help or hinder naturalization within the host country. The relatively low levels of skill required allow immigrants to achieve financial stability which can in turn encourage eventual naturalization and assimilation. Adversely, this same factor can afford enclave members the opportunity to remain considerably segregated and secluded from the host society. As such, members may circumvent the need to acquire skills necessary for life in the larger host society such as knowledge of cultural norms and language.Duncan, Natasha T. and Waldorf, Brigitte S." Becoming a U.S. Citizen: The Role of Immigrant Enclaves" Cityscape. 11. No. 3 (2009): 5-28.
The debate regarding the economic viability of ethnic enclaves revolves around the enclave-economy hypothesis. The hypothesis as written by Wilson and Portes formulates the idea that "immigrant workers are not restricted to the secondary labor market." They instead argue that "those inserted into an immigrant enclave can be empirically distinguished from workers in both the primary and secondary labor markets. Enclave workers will share with those in the primary sector a significant economic return past human capital investments" something those who enter the secondary labor market are not able to enjoy.Sanders and Nee, pp. 746. Thus, they assert the enclave economy is not a mobility trap as some would term it, but an alternate mode of incorporation.
In their argument formulated to disprove the enclave economy hypothesis, Sanders and Nee state the need for a distinction between "immigrant-bosses" and "immigrant-workers" as the economic benefits differ along this distinction.Sanders and Nee, pp. 745. They also call for the investigation of economic opportunities available to those in the enclave, believing them to be lesser in quality and supply. Sanders and Nee also assert the idea that segregation and forced entrance of immigrant-workers into low paying jobs is actually aggravated by the existence of ethnic enclaves. Due to these objections, they call for the revision of Portes and Wilson's hypothesis to include an acknowledgement and outline of the entrepreneur/worker economic benefit distinction.
In reaction to Sanders and Nee, Portes and Jensen make the clarification that those in ethnic enclaves need not be wealthier than those who left the enclave for the hypothesis to be supported. They instead assert that this will usually not be the case as the constant entrance of new immigrants into the enclave will actually be somewhat burdensome on the economy; a factor which does not actually represent disadvantage when compared with the other advantages provided. Additionally, Portes and Jensen outline three different conditions to be fulfilled in order to disprove their hypothesis. The first of these conditions requires the demonstration that ethnic entrepreneurship is a mobility trap leading to lower earnings than the immigrant's worth in human capital. The second condition requires data proving the work within the enclave to be exploitative, and the third condition requires data showing employment within the enclave leads to a 'dead end' and offers no chance of upward mobility. They acknowledge that the fulfillment of these three requirements is difficult as there is little data available to accurately test them.
Jennifer Lee adds to the discussion noting the particular niches and types of business immigrant groups enter. She notes that it is most common for immigrants to participate in long hours of physically demanding work in the retail industry. The retail market is a viable option due to the relatively low startup costs and knowledge of the host country's language required. Different niches have different levels of communication, for example the retail and self-service niche, (fruit and vegetable markets, take out restaurants) typically require the lowest level of customer interaction and communication. Lee notes the embeddedness of ethnic enclaves and brings the thought that such practices are good for those within the enclave but harmful to certain groups outside them.Lee, Jennifer. Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2002. She also notes the adverse effects patterns of ethnic embeddedness can have on surrounding ethnic groups by noting the difficulty other groups face in joining the network. She argues that this type of retail niche domination can have positive consequences for co-ethnics, as Portes and Wilson believe, however can also have negative effects on surrounding ethnic groups who face exclusion due solely to their ethnic dissimilarity from the network.
In 1998, nearly three quarters of all immigrants in the United States lived in California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey or Illinois.Borjas, George J. Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. p.8-11. Housing discrimination remains a factor in the persistence of racial enclaves in American cities. The Racial Structuring of the Housing Market and Segregation in Suburban Areas Linda Brewster Stearns, John R. Logan Social Forces, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Sep., 1986), pp. 28–42Stephen R Holloway (1998) Exploring the Neighborhood Contingency of Race Discrimination in Mortgage Lending in Columbus, Ohio Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (2), 252–276. However, more recent patterns of migration, such as chain migration, challenge traditional methods of enclaves establishment.
A 2023 study found that 43% of the foreign-born population in the United States lived in ethnic neighborhoods in 1970. By 2010, this had risen to 67%. Ethnic neighborhoods tend to have lower average incomes and housing values, as well as more rental housing and more inhabitants that commute without a car.
Most ethnic neighborhoods in the United States disappear within a decade or two, as immigrants gain language abilities, cultural skills, and resources and subsequently move elsewhere.
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