Economic Inequality and the Choice of Self-Employment among Americans of Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian Ethnic Descent

Abstract

Self-employment dependency varies drastically between national origin groups living in the United States. Prejudicial feelings against some nations of origin make it more difficult for some immigrants or ethnics to bypass employment hierarchies that force them out of the traditional occupational structure; religion can also form strong barriers to employment. The result is that groups who face high levels of discrimination choose to form their own businesses at inordinately high rates. It is also true that within ethnic economic enclaves socially unpopular subgroups are placed at an economic disadvantage. This situation makes the rate of self-employment a key indi­ cator of ethnic economic discrimination. This article investigates the role of social distance in promoting self-employment among Americans with Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian ethnicity or national backgrounds. Borjas and others argued that immigration is a self-selecting process wherein motivated people relocate and excel via self-employment in the host country [1]. This cycle makes "the context of the migration decision itself is important for understanding labor-market outcomes for immigrants, [. . . including] edu­ cation, . . . national origin, . . . time of migration [2, p. 987] and indicates that *This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered to the Mellon Foundation post-graduate seminar on racial and ethnic economic inequality at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author would like to thank William J. Darity, and Dr. Gary S. Becker for his notes on this research.