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Where does the refugee mentality come from? At least in part from circumstance. The harsh conditions that lead immigrants to America, and the difficult realities they encounter upon their arrival, help account for their drive and determination. Immigrants face an uncertain world, often playing by rules of behavior and organization that are unfamiliar to them.
For many, the best response is to create a controllable "space" within the huge and threatening world, drawing upon family and ethnic culture as resources in the new environment. "As an immigrant, you know you have to work seven times as hard," explains Gupta. "You have to rely on your wife, your family, your friends. It's an enforced advantage, even if it's hard."
Those tendencies showed among the earliest American industrial immigrants. Samuel Slater, for instance, sought business partners only among close kin and trustworthy friends. Like Gupta and many immigrants today, he had an almost visceral dislike for detached investors who controlled industries about which they had only passing knowledge.
Those same attitudes characterize many of the ethnic groups that migrated to North America in this century -- Jews fleeing czarist and Nazi persecution; Vietnamese, Koreans, Cubans, and Chinese escaping communism. Pressed by traditions of poverty and suffering, they developed the refugee mentality. Rather than seek support from the state or from society at large, says Everex's Hui, who first came to the United States in 1967, those with the refugee mentality accept difficulty as a natural part of life to be overcome by themselves and their families.
Hui's company epitomizes more than one aspect of the mentality he describes. The once-high-flying Everex, a personal-computer maker in Fremont, Calif., had grown phenomenally to more than $437 million in annual sales, but suffered a large loss last January. Hui, committed to the long term, is loath to cut back on research-and-development funding. Instead, he has cut his own salary by 50%. President of a company with 1,750 U.S. employees and 2,000 worldwide, he lives up to the ideals of frugality by flying coach, even on long, transpacific hauls.
Hui's principles extend further into companywide operations. In this high-debt era, for instance, Everex has little long-term debt and keeps finished goods, as a percentage of inventory, at around 10%, or less than one-third the average among personal-computer manufacturers. As is common at factories in the Far East, emphasis is placed on streamlining operations to gain maximum use of limited space.
"The way I was brought up, I feel there is opportunity in hard times, that if we can be tougher and more durable, we will come out ahead," explains Hui, 41. "This is how you look at life if you are uprooted. There are no failures in this world, just setbacks."
The setbacks immigrants suffer are often cruelly personal -- which is to say, racist. As recently as 1969, an Ohio State study found that being Jewish, as compared with being a member of any other major religious group, was by far the greatest obstacle to corporate promotion. Indian-born professionals, according to a study by Alka Sabherwal at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, earn considerably less than similarly qualified American-born counterparts. Sometimes those institutionalized biases are suspected but hard to document, such as when Asian engineers speak of the "glass ceiling" that restricts their mobility to strictly technical jobs.
As a result Jews and many Asian immigrants have tended to view self-employment as the most feasible means of support. In many cases, those immigrants have chosen fields in which capital requirements are limited, such as the garment trade. Bernard M. Baruch College professor Abraham Korman notes that the Jewish entrepreneurs, who by the mid-1930s were strong in virtually every aspect of that industry, often collected enough cash to operate by tapping family or factors who would lend money against receivables. Networks of specialized businesses, from sewing contractors to providers of shipping services, helped keep capital requirements to a minimum.
In more recent years other ethnic entrepreneurs have entered the garment business for similar reasons. In New York City about 16,000 people now work in Chinatown's garment factories, and Chinese entrepreneurs, often employing Chinese or Latino workers, play leading roles in other key garment-producing regions as well, notably San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their ascent has been propelled by their traditional attitude toward the importance of savings and investment.
One form of that Chinese thrift can be seen in the development of informal savings clubs based on kinship, friendship, and various forms of patronage. Made up of 20 or fewer members, the groups provide start-up capital to prospective entrepreneurs.
Garment contractor Loy Tam had little more than some family connections when he left the uncertain political climate and hard conditions of Hong Kong for Los Angeles. At first he worked as a waiter while his wife sewed garments at a Chinese-owned factory. In 1978 Tam decided to try the trade himself with $10,000 borrowed from a cousin (who had made some money in real estate with funds saved while working 18-hour days as a waiter and in a supermarket).
Tam bought 10 machines and opened a small shop -- Universal Sewing Contractors. Today he has 60 machines, grosses more than $1 million annually, and employs 40 workers -- about equal numbers of Latinos and Chinese. Like Vinny Gupta, he believes the key to profit is keeping overhead low and staying close to operations; his wife, Po, supervises the day-to-day sewing work.
