Role of immigrants in New York city's labor force in the 1970-80's

ROLE OF IMMIGRANTS IN NEW YORK CITY’S LABOR

FORCE IN THE SECOND HALF IN THE 1970-80' S. 

The latest influx, which started in the 1960's, gained force during New York's economic comeback, providing a fresh source of youthful workers and helping to sustain the boom of the 1980's.
The new immigrants have not had much of an impact on welfare rolls, experts say, and many take jobs as restaurant workers, hotel housekeepers and hospital attendants that are often avoided by native-born residents.
Immigrants have rebuilt whole neighborhoods of the city including the Bronx, Washington Heights in Manhattan and Elmhurst in Queens, some of them home to previous waves of foreign-born settlers.
In the 1970's, as the latest wave of immigration was gathering, New York City suffered a deep and demoralizing decline, as factories fled to the South and middle class residents to the suburbs. The decade that followed brought a sharp turnaround as the city gained jobs and people.
Many economists say the 70's would have been worse and the 80's, though largely driven by a boom on Wall Street, less impressive. From 1980 to 1987, for example, 575,000 immigrants to New York City replaced 375,000 native-born residents, for a net gain of 200,000 people.

The new settlers vary educationally as well as ethnically and have filtered into a wide variety of occupations, from Indian physicians to Filipino nurses to Romanian knitters to Albanian building superintendents to Chinese garment workers to Haitian cabdrivers. But they largely share one demographic characteristic: They are of working age. Some 60 percent are in the prime working years of 25 to 44.
Among non-whites, employment rates also tend to be higher in foreign-born groups than in  native-born groups. For example, 1980 census data indicates that 65 percent of black immigrants over 15 years old were employed, against 53 percent of native-born blacks in the same age group, and that 65 percent of Asian immigrants were employed, but 56 percent of native-born Asians.
And so the city's new immigrants have got  jobs the way immigrants always have - through ethnic networking, in which recent settlers are helped by earlier ones, and ethnic niching, in which various groups stake out particular kinds of employment.
Often the latest immigrants have followed older ethnic groups into specific industries and occupations. Ownership of neighborhood fruit stands has largely passed from Italians and Jews to Koreans, for example, and Chinese restaurants followed Greek coffee shops and are being followed in turn by South American establishments. Taxis once driven by Israelis and Eastern Europeans are now driven by Haitians, Dominicans, Africans and Arabs. Dominicans and Chinese have taken over from Jews and Italians in the city's garment shops. Dominicans are buying bodegas, often from Puerto Ricans.
The new immigrants are willing to work long hours and to take risks, carving out new markets for goods and services, from Mexican flower sellers to Korean manicurists to Senegalese street vendors, who are common throughout midtown, where rough-hewn wooden masks decorated with feathers and beads and solemn bronze busts of African kings look out blankly at pedestrians.
And it is hard to imagine how New York City's hospitals would have continued to function without the influx of immigrant labor. At Mount Sinai Medical Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, many people from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean - especially the Dominican Republic - are housekeepers. There are Jamaicans working in the kitchen and in labs. West Africans, many from Ghana, work in the laundry and wheel patients on gurneys through the corridors. Many nurses are from the Philippines; others are West Indian. There are lab technicians from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Many were physicians in their homelands, but are not accredited here.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2050-411X.2009.tb00415.x