The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers | Hacker News Reader

The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers

newyorker.com

115 pointsthrowaway34439 comments

It's almost cathartic to hear the struggle of immigrants coming to the US for better opportunities transcends ethnic and racial backgrounds. We've heard this story differently before about Latino immigrants coming to the US and taking tough jobs in the kitchen to provide for a better life for their family. Anthony Bourdain even chronicles it in his book, Kitchen Confidential.

Of course this narrative of a hard working immigrant coming to this country to work goes squarely against what we hear from critics saying immigrants only come here to freeload. If anything, this article just shows how lazy Americans can be, when Americans can't be bothered to eat meat or fish with bones, but of course that's just an anecdote.

How do you create opportunities for immigrants and people in general? How do you empower people to leverage their own skills and monetize them, without others looking to exploit them.

Great article.

The whole 'immigrants coming here to freeload' thing is a ruse capitalizing on fear of the other in order to gain political power. If the immigrants would stop their work collectively and move back to their countries of origin the bottom would drop out of the economy within 90 days.

"Immigrants coming here to freeload" and "immigrants coming to work industriously" are not mutually exclusive. The general concern is that immigrants work largely under the table. They therefore benefit from the welfare state without contributing taxes. In that sense they are "freeloading".

In other words, they contribute labor to the economy, but largely freeload when it comes to any government-provided benefits.

It's usually not the immigrants not paying taxes, it is their employers not paying taxes.

Under the table work is not because they don't want to pay taxes, they'd be happy to. It is because they get paid by employers that prefer to hire cheap immigrants rather than to pay wage taxes and other withholdings.

One mans freeloading is anothers profiteering.

They are also quite limited in what government provided benefits they can partake in. Mostly the stuff that is already there for everybody else (infrastructure) as soon as they need more than that they are usually discovered and deported. Cheap labour is only good as long as it is cheap.

> In other words, they contribute labor to the economy, but largely freeload when it comes to any government-provided benefits.

What government-provided benefits? Surely our largest two entitlements are social security and medicare, right? Illegal immigrants don't qualify for either of those. Importantly, many businesses use fake SSN's when hiring illegals, so often times they actually are paying FICA taxes -- with 0 hope to collect.

Public schools? Schools are largely funded via property taxes and sales taxes, both of which illegal immigrants pay at rates probably greater than the average American pays.

Income tax? They are some of the lowest paid people in the country, if they were suddenly legal, they'd likely be owed income taxes via the EITC or other mechanisms.

Emergency Care? Indigent care is expensive, but some state-level medicare programs are allowing illegal immigrants to actually pay for their care.

The entire 'freeload' argument is easily dismantled if you consider the actual facts for more than a few seconds.

I generally agree that the visible benefits are not available to undocumented immigrants but you're forgetting about the unseen things that taxes support. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr once remarked "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society..".

Taxes pay for civil infrastructure, a somewhat-functioning democratic government, our National Parks, and of course our armed forces. We don't often think about these things since they're not as visible but our ability to sit here in the relative safety of our homes/workplaces exercising our 1st Amendment rights is in a large part supported by the taxes we pay.

Say you're an illegal immigrant working for a factory in Texas. Here's a list of your state tax burden:

http://www.itepnet.org/wp2009/tx_whopays_factsheet.pdf

Illegal immigrants are surely in the lowest 20% bucket. What taxes don't they pay? They rent homes, so they pay property taxes. Their money is spent on clothes and food, so they pay sales taxes. The income taxes that they might not pay are an absolutely minuscule portion of their burden -- literally $11/year on average.

Ever since the I-9's existence, most employers use fake social security numbers for their illegal immigrants. So FICA taxes are removed from their paychecks -- and they'll never get them back in the form of Medicare or Social Security. (Don't take my word for it, here's NYT reporting on SSA's "Earnings Suspense File": http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.htm...)

Smarter people than myself have looked at this, here's a good example: http://www.itep.org/pdf/undocumentedtaxes.pdf -- Tl;Dr: Illegal immigrants pay a lot of taxes, probably pretty close to the amount they would pay if they were legalized. However, they get far less benefit from their taxes since they don't qualify for most programs.

First, illegal immigrants (which is who we seem to be talking about here) don't have permission to work, which is why they work under the table. Under the 1994 IIRIRA law, it's virtually impossible to get a work permit if you don't have one when you arrive.

Second, they are not eligible for benefits, of any kind. Children who are born here to immigrants are eligible for benefits, because the children are American citizens, and also children who are brought into the country as children are allowed to attend school etc., because being children they were below the age of legal responsibility at time of entry.

Third, a lot of immigrants do pay taxes. Some use someone else's social security #, in which taxes are withheld but don't benefit them, some people work with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, which is like an SSN but not the same and which the IRS gives to people who are liable for US taxes but not eligible for an SSN. The usual way people file with an ITIn is as self-=employed, in which case they pay both the employer and employee portion of payroll taxes (which normally go into social security) but accrue no benefits for doing so.

Some people get tax benefits through the Earned Income Tax Credit which is a payment to people who work but have a low income, I think this amounts to something like $4 billion a year, against about $10bn paid in. It may be they're eligible for the EITC because a tax credit is not considered a benefit for legal purposes but I've never looked into that so I might be wrong.

>Second, they are not eligible for benefits, of any kind.

That's not true at all. When California tried to cut off state benefits for illegals a federal judge force the state to reinstate them. Illegals send their (illegal) kids to school, even college, at taxpayer expense. They take advantage of community medical services, live in subsidized housing, and get assigned public defenders. That's just what they're entitled to under the law.

But if they have enough forged documentation to get a job they have enough to get food stamps and WIC too. Some of them do, though for political reasons the government isn't trying to figure out how many or how they could be stopped.

The things you mention do not count as benefits. I already addressed the education issues above. Things like public defenders are not restricted to the citizenry, a tourist who is arrested is entitled to a public defender same as anyone else.For clarity by 'benefit' I am talking specifically about transfer payments, I'm sorry for not making that clearer.

I think the vast majority of immigrants come here to work hard and make a better life for themselves and their families. They also end up making life better for a lot of other people around them. One example is that a lot of illegal immigrants pay taxes through a fake Social Security Number, and they pay into the system for years. However, they very often don't get the benefits because they'd get caught using the number (e.g the number was for some 80-year old white lady), or go they back to their country.

However, it's still important to acknowledge the fact that a small number of immigrants get sick, or descend into alcoholism, or get hurt badly enough that they can't really work. It's just the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.

I've grow up around a lot of immigrants, illegal and legal, and they have pretty much all been decent, hard-working people, and they have the same kinds of financial/family/emotional problems that everyone else has.

>'If anything, this article just shows how lazy Americans can be, when Americans can't be bothered to eat meat or fish with bones, but of course that's just an anecdote.'

Labeling Americans as a group and particularly certain subsets within as lazy is just as credible and, I'd wager, often done for many of the same reasons as labeling immigrants freeloaders.

Plus Americans love chicken wings.

We (and most every other country) demonize immigrants as a matter of course on usually fallacious ethnic, religious and economic grounds. See how the Irish were portrayed[1] when waves of them were showing up in America in the early 19th century. The rhetoric and stereotypes have been reused in each successive wave, for the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Latin Americans, etc.

[1] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/10/06/negative-ste...

I was actually surprised that the workers in question are themselves Chinese. In and around DC (Indian Head extends perhaps 15 miles out) restaurants that 10 or 15 years ago would have been staffed entirely by Asians are overwhelmingly staffed by Hispanics under Asian management.

I often wonder what sort of path the people who used to work those jobs have taken since.

>>“Everything we do, we do for the next generation,” he said, and added, “No matter what, it beats sitting around in the village.”

Being from a small town in an impoverished area of the US, I can somewhat relate to that sentiment. Very interesting story. The author paints a very stark picture about restaurant workers from China. The subject of the story, who spoke the quote above, makes more than I would have supposed.

Fascinating article. One part in particular answered a question I've had about Houston for ages:

I visited Houston with a friend about a decade ago and we were both puzzled about the Chinatown area of the city. Why, we asked, would a city smack in the middle of the country have such a large Chinese population? NYC & California made sense, but Texas?

And as it turns out:

"Rain and his companions walked for a full day and most of the night, until, before dawn, they came to a road, where an associate of the smugglers picked them up. They went to Houston first, and from there a van took them straight to New York."

Waystation city on the international Chinese immigrants smuggling route for folks who just crossed the Mexican border. Fascinating.

EDIT: Aaaaaaand I'm wrong. Thank you shiftpgdn for the Wikipedia link and background.

That's not the real reason at all. First Houston is major port city, the fourth largest city in the country, the most diverse in the country and it's certainly not "smack in the middle of the country." Houston has two China towns. The east downtown China Town area was established in the 50s-70s but later abandoned due to white(yellow?) flight as the new Chinatown area expanded in the west of the city in the 1980s. This was also fed by Vietnamese "boat-people" who were typically of Chinese descent.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_American...

Even more fascinating. Thanks for the correction and link.

I'm curious as to your source or why you say, in no uncertain terms, that Houston is "the most diverse in the country". If such a thing could be accurately quantified, I would bet my life savings on NYC.

Here's the study that's commonly cited in reference to Houston's diversity: http://kinder.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/Urban_Research_Center/M...

And the relevant paragraph regarding NYC: The standardized Entropy Index measures how close a total population is to sharing balanced percentages across its racial/ethnic groups. If one subgroup is 100 percent of the population, then the standardized index score will be 0. If the four racial/ethnic groups are each 25 percent of the population the score would be one. Houston has the highest entropy score of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, 0.874. New York is a close second with a score of 0.872. All but two of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, Boston and Philadelphia, have a higher entropy score than the national average of 0.709, meaning that in general the large metropolitan areas are more diverse than the nation as a whole.

EDIT: I'm not going to argue the pros or cons of the methodology because I'm not familiar with the field of study.

Ah, interesting way to qualitatively determine diversity. Taking the quoted example, from my perspective a city with 100 ethnic groups, each with 1%, is much more diverse than the example with 4, each with 25% - but they share the same entropy index of 1. Do I have that right?

It's the Theil index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theil_index

I am not an expert in its use, but IMHO, it's BS because it's dependent on the idea that you have maximum diversity if various subgroups are all the same size, but it's very dependent on the definition of subgroups. For example, in the case of ethnic diversity, the measure will vary significantly depending on whether you group people from Southeast Asia and people from the Indian subcontinent together as "Asian" or not, or any other subjective subdivision.

It might have use as a comparative measure with a predetermined set of classification groups, but you can definitely manipulate your conditions to construct different outcomes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Houston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

I would go with NYC also, but its not too far off.

That's not necessarily the reason for Houston having such a large Chinese community. The majority of Chinese in Houston are legal and often more educated immigrants that would not have gone through Mexico.

The people profiled in the article were from specific poor areas in China (eg Fujian) that could be considered the Chinese equivalent of Appalachia.

This is the kind of article that I want to read in a newspaper. It's a story about real people in my own area - not some scary, exotic, far-off place. Politics should not the only source of news.

> “There are only three jobs a Chinese immigrant can get without papers,” a woman from Beijing told me. “You can work at a massage parlor, you can work doing nails, or you can work in a restaurant.”

Curiously, Chinese laundries are not mentioned, and are ubiquitous here in NYC. I wonder it the omission is a mistake, or if there's some reason laundries don't fit in this list.

The quote is from the perspective of 'a woman from Beijing', it's not meant to be an exhaustive list, just as this article is not meant to be a research study - it's a perspective piece. Interestingly enough, it implies that women from Beijing (or at the very least this one) are under the impression that those are the only three jobs available to Chinese immigrants. Of course there are more possible jobs available, but I find the anecdotal perspective more valuable in this journalistic context.

Great article! Being the fat guy I am, I had to google "salt and cornstarch on meat" and I'm glad I did! "As odd as it sounds, don’t skip the cornstarch. The cornstarch absorbs additional moisture from the surface of the steaks. Drier exteriors mean even darker, more intense browning, which translates to bigger, more complex flavor."[1]

[1] http://americastestkitchen.tumblr.com/post/86246187118/perfe...

Anyone who's interested in a more in-depth look should check out Fortune Cookie Chronicles. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446698970 It really explains why the food at 99.9% of the "Szchewan" and "Peking" etc. places all tastes the same.

A heartwarming story of conspiracy to violate immigration laws, the tax code, and employment discrimination law.

I remember going to Chinatown in San Francisco when I started college and seeing the job postings posted in a window for Chinese restaurants throughout the country. It blew my mind but also made so much sense.

If this story were about prostitutes, it would be read differently.

>If this story were about something else, it would be about something else.

Wow. Can't say that I thought of that.

Actually pessimizer is drawing a parallel between the two situations. Both involve going into fairly substantial debt to get from China to the US under the promise of more money than could be made at home. Both involve years of difficult labor and living conditions. Both have limited options for leaving the lifestyle once committed. Yet the article about kitchen workers reads more like a hard path to the American dream, while the (hypothetical) one about sex workers reads more like a terrible, inhumane path to sexual slavery.

I think it's a noteworthy comparison and not a non-sequitur/trueism. Can't say I've seen much evidence of thought yet.

While not impossible, it's less common for someone (who is nearly always female) to be abducted as a child, forcibly addicted to heroin, then sold into kitchen labor.

Yes, if this article were rewritten word-for-word to reference prostitution it would be a fictional story which could be compared to the existing article. However, it would badly misrepresent the state of global sex trafficking and the victimhood of people affected by it.

I think that your fantasy version of sex trafficking is common, but is certainly not representative. Many (most?) women are trafficked in exactly this way, knowing generally what they will be employed to do, just not knowing how terrible the conditions and pay are, and that they will never be able to pay off their 'debt' to the traffickers.

The vast majority of human trafficking is to provide house servants and manufacturing workers, but we don't care because sex. Judging by this thread, stories of human trafficking that don't involve sex are heartwarming and inspirational.

not knowing how terrible the conditions and pay are, and that they will never be able to pay off their 'debt' to the traffickers

The fact that this is clearly not true in this article may be another way in which it's heartwarming and inspirational, and not comparable to even the whitewashed version of human trafficking you're proposing.

Didn't realize that this would be confusing to people. This is a story of human trafficking.

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