Ethnic Diaspora by Restaurant
By 
An issue I’ve always been curious about…
But, as MIT legal historian Heather Lee tells it, there was an important exception to these laws: Some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list. Voila! A restaurant boom was born.
“The number of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. doubles from 1910 to 1920, and doubles again from 1920 to 1930,” says Lee, referring to research done by economist Susan Carter. In New York City alone, Lee found that the number of Chinese eateries quadrupled between 1910 and 1920.
Lee was digging through old immigration records in 2011, as part of her doctoral dissertation, when she discovered evidence that this legal change had fueled a rise in restaurants. She found a flood of applications from Chinese immigrants after 1915 seeking merchant status to start up restaurant businesses, along with applications from others brought over to work in these establishments.
I did a fair amount of interstate driving in the 1990s and found it fascinating that nearly every small town across these great United States of America had one, and very often only one, Chinese restaurant. It was evident that these were almost always a single-family owned restaurant and were generally staffed by second and third generation Chinese immigrants. This was a pattern that was not necessarily followed, or at least not followed so evenly, by other ethnic diaspora restaurants (Italian is probably the closest), and so it occurred to me to wonder why different diasporas had different patterns of settlement. Obviously I never did a deep dive, and in the case of the Chinese community it appears that there were specific legal structures that brought this outcome about that simply weren’t present for Italian, Mexican, or Japanese cuisine. I’m sure that there’s been some great stuff written about how different genres of ethnic food make their way across the landscape of Middle America (more Ethiopian, please!) and I’d love to know more about the subject.
Photo credit: By 1700-talet – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33113297