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A World of Opportunity: Understanding & Tapping the Economic Potential of Immigrant Entrepreneurs,
This new report by the Center documents that immigrant entrepreneurs have emerged as a key engine of economic growth for cities from New York to Los Angeles--and, with the right support, could provide an even bigger boost to these cities in the years ahead
Immigrant Entrepreneurs Shape a New Economy
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Manuel A. Miranda was 8 when his family immigrated to New York from Bogotá. His parents, who had been
lawyers, turned to selling home-cooked food from the trunk of their car. Manuel pitched in after school, grinding
corn by hand for traditional Colombian flatbreads called arepas.
Today Mr. Miranda, 32, runs a family business with 16 employees, producing 10 million arepas a year in the
Maspeth section of Queens. But the burst of Colombian immigration to the city has slowed; arepas customers are
spreading through the suburbs, and competition for them is fierce. Now, he says, his eye is on a vast, untapped
market: the rest of the country.
In the long run, like bagels, "you're going to have arepas in every store," predicted Mr. Miranda, whose
innovations include a "toaster-friendly" version (square instead of round), and an experimental Web site that
offers online sales nationwide. "But I don't have the connections. I don't know the people who can advise how to
take us to the next level."
Curb Job
By PETE HAMILL
Taxi drivers are the most enduring oppressed minority in New York City history. Race, ethnicity and religion are not sources of the oppression. It lies entirely in the nature of the work. Trapped for about 12 hours each day in the worst traffic in the United States, taxi drivers must suffer the savage frustrations of jammed streets, double-parked cars, immense trucks, drivers from New Jersey - and they can't succumb to the explosive therapy of road rage. Their living depends on self-control.
At the same time, they face many other hazards: drunks behind them in the cab, fare beaters, stickup men, Knicks fans filled with biblical despair, out-of-town conventioneers who think the drivers are mobile pimps. Some seal themselves off from the back seat with the radio, an iPod or a cellphone. All pray that the next passenger doesn't want to go from Midtown to the far reaches of Brooklyn or Queens. They hope for a decent tip. They hope to stay alive until the next fare waves from under a midnight streetlamp.
In this informative, solid history, Graham Russell Gao Hodges traces the story of the cabdrivers from 1907, when the first metered taxis appeared on New York streets, to the present. He writes with obvious sympathy, having driven a hack himself before moving on to academic labors as a historian at Peking University and Colgate. Loneliness is a running theme in "Taxi!": if the title were not already taken, Hodges could have called his compact history "One Hundred Years of Solitude.