Immigrants Create Jobs

This writer explains how "unskilled" immigrants create jobs and are successful.    - - Donna Poisl

By Matthew Yglesias

I went last night to eat some Chinese food in Cleveland's "Asiantown" neighborhood, an area of mostly unused warehouses that's now occupied by several Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants plus what looked like a couple of Asian grocery stores. I had a meal there that probably exceeds any Chinese cooking you can find in DC proper and would count as quite good even by the standards of the more immigrant-heavy suburbs in Rockville or Northern Virginia.

It was tasty, but also a great example of how even the oft-derided "unskilled" immigrants can be job creators. The key point is that while "can make some cumin lamb or sichuan cold noodles" doesn't necessarily count as the highest-level skill in the world, it's certainly not a skill that's in abundance among the native-born population of Cleveland. To some extent the existence of this kind of restaurant may crowd out dining at other eateries in Cleveland, but mostly it serves to generate a whole new class of products—authentic Chinese cooking—that otherwise wouldn't exist in the area.
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