If you’re fretting about immigrants stealing American jobs, I recommend going to Traci Harris for a manicure, complete with the soothing aromatic compresses. Her business is a case study of what happens to native workers when immigrants arrive.
In theory, hordes of immigrants are a problem because they can take lots of jobs and drive down wages, especially for the less-educated natives in direct competition with them.
In practice, though, that’s not what economists find when they look at wages and unemployment rates in cities that attract large numbers of immigrants. Less-educated American workers in places like Los Angeles, Miami and New York don’t seem to be substantially worse off than they are in cities with few immigrants.
Why not? One of the cleverest answers comes from an analysis of the nail-salon business in California. It makes an especially tidy case study because the state keeps track of all licensed manicurists, enabling economists to see what happened to American workers like Harris when tens of thousands of Vietnamese entered the business during the past two decades.
Harris owns the Salon Legohn in Leimert Park, a working-class, predominantly black neighborhood in Los Angeles. As Vietnamese salons proliferated nearby, she couldn’t compete with their low prices. But she has kept her salon in business — and kept hiring Americans — by concentrating on hairstyling.
“Women want a hairdresser who speaks English,” Harris says. “You don’t face the same kind of competition from the Vietnamese.”
Harris herself remained a manicurist, but not at her own salon. She has found more lucrative full-time jobs at beachfront hotel spas and as a freelancer on movie sets and at magazine photo shoots. Instead of competing with the Vietnamese in the neighborhood, she visits clients in Beverly Hills who pay $150 for a house call.
“If you can speak English, it’s easy to find a job at an elite shop,” she says. “American manicurists are a hot commodity. My clients want to have a conversation.”
Harris’s experience doesn’t surprise Kathy Krynski of Kenyon College, one of the economists who analyzed the California manicure business. She, Maya Federman and David Harrington found that the surge in Vietnamese manicurists didn’t suddenly put Americans out of work.
Some Americans gave up their licenses, but the turnover wasn’t much higher than it had been before the Vietnamese arrived. The chief effect of the competition was to discourage young Americans from entering the business, so over time the number of American manicurists dwindled.
“The Vietnamese didn’t so much displace Americans as gradually replace them,” Krynski says. “Some Americans stayed in the business in upscale salons, and others probably went into other occupations offering higher wages, like being a hairdresser.”
Some young Americans did lose the chance to become manicurists, but it’s not as if every immigrant took an American’s job. The study found that for every two fewer Americans in the business, there were five new Vietnamese manicurists.
Like other immigrants, Vietnamese nail-salon owners didn’t simply fill existing jobs. They created more jobs that benefited American consumers. These entrepreneurs transformed the business not only with their workers but also with time-saving innovations like electric tools for shaping nails.
As a result, shop clerks in Harris’s neighborhood who used to go a couple of months between manicures can now afford weekly visits to Van’s Salon. I got a manicure there from Nancy Nguyen for $8, a quarter of what I paid for the cheapest manicure available from Harris at the spa at Shutters on the Beach hotel.
Nguyen couldn’t compete with Harris in ambience or conversation — I barely got her to utter her name. Harris spent half an hour working on my right hand, gently using compresses infused with tangerine and peppermint as well as a hazelnut and menthol scrub. Nguyen did my left hand in 10 minutes without explaining what she was doing.
To my inexpert eye — this was my first manicure — Harris did the better job, but the nails buffed by Nguyen certainly looked better than usual. If I wanted a weekly manicure, I’d be glad to have the cheaper Vietnamese option available.
And I wouldn’t worry about the economic menace of foreign manicurists. American workers have survived this immigrant invasion with their paychecks intact, and their fingernails in better shape than ever.
