
The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers - throwaway344
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/cooka%C2%80%C2%99s-tale
======
cordovas
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
Strang
"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.

~~~
mikeyouse
> 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.

~~~
calbear81
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.

~~~
mikeyouse
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](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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html?_r=0))

Smarter people than myself have looked at this, here's a good example:
[http://www.itep.org/pdf/undocumentedtaxes.pdf](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.

------
incision
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.

------
marktangotango
>>“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.

------
nlh
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.

~~~
shiftpgdn
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_Americans_in_Houston)

~~~
dozy
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.

~~~
dogecoinbase
Here's the study that's commonly cited in reference to Houston's diversity:
[http://kinder.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/Urban_Research_Center/M...](http://kinder.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/Urban_Research_Center/Media/Houston%20Region%20Grows%20More%20Ethnically%20Diverse%202-13.pdf)

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.

~~~
timdierks
It's the Theil index
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

------
protonfish
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.

------
crazygringo
> _“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.

~~~
dozy
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.

------
throwawayornot
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...](http://americastestkitchen.tumblr.com/post/86246187118/perfect-
grilled-steaks-with-these-3-must-do-tricks)

------
wnissen
Anyone who's interested in a more in-depth look should check out Fortune
Cookie Chronicles.
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446698970](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.

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

------
JoblessWonder
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.

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

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

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

~~~
jkaunisv1
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.

~~~
zorpner
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.

~~~
pessimizer
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.

~~~
zorpner
_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.

