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How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#231

Post by vram22 »

iguy wrote: post #74
vram22 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of common knowledge in India that Gujaratis, Sindhis, Punjabis and Malayalis (Keralites) are generally pretty enterprising and are often businessmen, both within India and abroad. There can be other such Indian communities too, of course. These are just the ones I have heard of (from childhood) as tending to be more so. For example, the Patels in the US are the topic of this thread; then there are lots of P…

Yes indeed, they specialise within India too. And surely some of the same network benefits may apply there too. Surely Parsi entrepreneurs (a century ago) got better loans... backed in part by the fear of angering a close community? It's also my hazy impression that the plantation-labor Indian groups haven't done nearly as well on the whole. Another example is the surprisingly high proportion of overseas Chinese who…

>Surely Parsi entrepreneurs (a century ago) got better loans... backed in part by the fear of angering a close community?

Could be. I do know that Parsis are said to take care of the elderly and poor of their community. They have retirement homes and do charity for them, etc. They are generally philantropic too, like some others. Good of them.

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#233

Post by danans »

st26 wrote: post #228
danans wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian food is labor intensive and uses expensive ingredients Labor intensive yes, but expensive ingredients? Maybe saffron, but it's used very sparingly in only a few dishes, and a little goes a long way.

Generally, vegetables are more expensive than grains and more perishable.

By mass, Indian food is mostly grains and pulses (Rice, wheat, and split peas).

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#234

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bena wrote: post #65
rohan404 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make the argument that startup founders who aren't taking a salary from their early stage startup are also performing "free, illegally so" labor.

I think in that case, you can't work for yourself illegally.

If the startup is incorporated, then you're working for the corporation, not for "yourself."

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#235

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

vram22 wrote: post #81
fermienrico wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad's friend is an Indian farmer in Valdosta, GA. He has 10k acres of land, has his own private plane and flies Indian groceries to Houston once a week. He immigrated to the US back in the 60's. I had a chance to meet him and he had an extraordinary character. He had no formalities and greeted us at his farm house without a shirt on. He was old but fit and you can tell what he has gone through in his life to make…

Wow, cool story. I wonder under what visa or work permit scheme he went there. I had two uncles and an aunt who went to the US and stayed there, but they all went via the traditional grad student then H1-B then green card then citizen route, and were all white collar workers (an engineer turned entrepreneur and two academics), not farmers. Didn't know there were schemes for farmers and such, then or now, for the US,…

At least in the late 70's - early 80's, if you could find an employer to "sponsor" you (basically agree to give you a job for a certain amount of time), then you could immigrate with a green card immediately. There was no specific "scheme" for particular occupations: many of the people who did this were low-wage workers doing housekeeping, janitorial work, construction, etc.

I'd assume something similar was already in place during the 60's.

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#236

Post by iguy »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #197
iguy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's much deeper than "individualist streak in American culture". Western Europe in the last 1000 years or so has been a very unusual place... one aspect of which is having nuclear families not extended ones. Because (crudely speaking) the catholic church wished to diminish alternative power structures, such as clans. This led to an unusually open society, which had many benefits... with generally higher leve…

I think of the nuclear family more as an invention of 20th century ad campaigns. It’s a lot harder to sell mom cooking and cleaning products when she has help from an extended family.

Many people thought this, e.g. it was assumed in Victorian England that the past looked a lot like the present of less-developed countries, like Russia.

But it's not true, we have data. The quite readable book on this is Laslett, "The World We Have Lost". https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La...

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#238

Post by tathougies »

ams6110 wrote: post #180
tathougies wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious if this is common in the US in other immigrant communities. Yes absolutely. As an Indian American, I'm familiar with the Indian grocery store model. However, I grew up in a majority vietnamese area of Southern California, and most of my friends growing up were vietnamese. They had a few interesting hustles going on: 1. A few families were involved in growing produce in their backyards, and grocery store…

Assuming these fruits were not native to SoCal, how did they get the plants/seedlings there? Under the table? I think it would be very difficult to bring Vietnamese flora into the USA through legitimate channels.

The fruit I was talking about is dragon fruit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitaya

Which, while popular and does incredibly well in Asia, is also apparently native to the Americas up to Mexico, so it wouldn't be a far leap to grow it in SoCal

But I mean, as someone whose family is from Asia, it is not particularly difficult to sneak things in to the United States.

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#239

Post by barry-cotter »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #206
barry-cotter wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extended family may be a thing in Western Europe and derived cultural areas but clans are not. Descent based political groupings are for backwoods peasants at best, not the commanding heights of the polity, unlike every other meta cultural grouping. The recipe for setting and enforcing a policy over vast areas of time and space is incentive compatibility. It is always in the interest of one powerful political group t…

He would have tipped his hand as a purveyor of speculative, just-so, white-supremacist garbage, if he'd cited her. Also, there is nothing in that paper to support your claim about the policies of the Catholic Church.

If you’re the Alex who writes Yorkshire Ranter congratulations on an excellent and long maintained blog.

If you want to know more about the policies of the Catholic Church on marriage of relatives the Wikipedia article on cousin marriage is quite good and well referenced if you want to go from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

On the Church banning marrying relatives

> First and second cousin marriages were then banned at the Council of Agde in AD 506, though dispensations sometimes continued to be granted. By the 11th century, with the adoption of the so-called canon-law method of computing consanguinity, these proscriptions had been extended even to sixth cousins, including by marriage. But due to the many resulting difficulties in reckoning who was related to whom, they were relaxed back to third cousins at the Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215. Pope Benedict XV reduced this to second cousins in 1917,[22] and finally, the current law was enacted in 1983.

The Church’s justification for banning cousin marriage has no scriptural basis. If St. Augustine's justification for banning relatives from marrying isn’t evidence in favour of what I wrote I don’t know what is.

> Whatever the reasons, written justifications for such bans had been advanced by St. Augustine by the fifth century. "It is very reasonable and just", he wrote, "that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that various relationships should be distributed among several, and thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests".

As to “speculative, just so, white-supremacist” Science is generally built on a base of speculation, which researchers then attempt to disprove. Hypothesis falsification and all that. Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified. Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

Re: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

#240

Post by skookumchuck »

st26 wrote: post #225
skookumchuck wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I.e. the price of a modest new car. Hardly "immense".

My parents bought a car for me to drive back when I was a teen. It cost $900, not $25,000.

The average price of a new car in 1975 was $4,960.

http://www.autonews.com/article/19960626/ANA/606260830/1975-...

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