Lebanese fashion designer

Meet some immigrants well-suited to America's new economy

Victor Sawan is the perfect man for a rapidly changing and unpredictable economy. Brought up amidst the chaos of Beirut, he later emigrated to Brazil, another land not noted for its stability. Two decades ago he came to Los Angeles, seeking his fortune in what may be America's most baffling metropolis.

"Having lived in three different countries, I've been opened up to every kind of experience," the 50-year-old entrepreneur said in a modest office above his Wesley-Mien furniture factory in South Los Angeles. "I grew up in Lebanon where there is a very entrepreneurial culture. In Brazil, I learned humility."

Sawan also learned something about humility in America. He started off in the furniture business sweeping floors, later graduating to the assembly line. Far from either of his native cultures, he soon learned English and Spanish to supplement his Arabic and Portuguese. He also discovered how to sell metal bed frames, eventually forming a partnership with Martin Bender, the Jewish American who founded the company two decades ago. Today the firm employs some 100 workers in Los Angeles, owns a factory in Mexico, and sells a line of over 100 frames, many of them designed by Sawan himself.

People always say, "you foreigners work too hard," Sawan observes, as he walks the company's sprawling factory floor. "But a foreigner like me comes here to work. When you're an outsider, you try harder. And the more you try, the better the chance you'll succeed."

THE SUPER-IMMIGRANTS

With his feet now firmly planted in three cultures--Arab, Latin, and American--Sawan epitomizes what may be the ethnic cutting edge of American entrepreneurialism. In a complex economy where a willingness to change, to turn on a dime, to relate to varied groups of people is becoming critical, Americans from the chaotic crossroads of the Middle East have shown great proclivity for starting businesses, particularly in the inner city.

Veterans of the Casbah trading culture, Middle Easterners seem to adapt quickly to the general disorder and bureaucratic roadblocks in the typical urban economy. Functioning amidst the multi-ethnic cacophony--and occasional corruption--of Los Angeles, New York, or Houston does not bother people whose entrepreneurial culture was shaped in historically polyglot Old World cities like Beirut, Teheran, Jerusalem, Cairo, or Damascus.

Indeed, people of Middle Eastern descent have the highest rates of entrepreneurialism in America--above even groups like the Chinese and Cubans who are more often hailed for their entrepreneurial accomplishments. In a 1996 study published in the Journal of Human Resources, Americans of Middle Eastern descent--a mix of Christians, Muslims, and Jews--exhibited a rate of self-employment better than twice the national average. Among the many ethnic groups surveyed, only Korean Americans and Russians (most of them Jews) had comparable rates.

In another study of the ethnic cauldron of greater Los Angeles, demographers James Mien and Eugene Turner found that Americans of Israeli, Iranian, Lebanese, and Armenian heritage had the highest rates of entrepreneurialism. Only Taiwanese, Koreans, and Russians were comparable.

These entrepreneurial patterns are likely to produce eventual economic consequences well out of proportion to the size of the groups in question. Together, Middle Easterners in Los Angeles constitute about 300,000 to 400,000 souls--the numbers are as unreliable as prices at a Jerusalem soul This is a modest population in a metro area of 15 million, yet their influence is felt powerfully across a series of industries--from the thriving garment, jewelry, and textile businesses located near downtown to diverse manufacturers, retailers, and distributors spread throughout the regional economy.

Many Middle Easterners admit that, at their core, they are driven by insecurity--a sense that no business or legal contract is an adequate safeguard. Kharchig Darakjian, an Armenian businessman, has seen his family lose fortunes both in the Middle East and later in Ethiopia. "In business we Armenians have always had to be so much faster than others because we always ended up losing what we had," explains Darakjian, who now runs a software firm with offices in Russia, the United States, Armenia, and France. "A man like me knows how to lose and lose honestly. Money goes and comes; for an Armenian, it's like knowing your name."

ETHNIC SUCCESSION IN AMERICAN CITIES

The current economic upsurge of immigrants from the Casbah follows an old motif in American economic history. From the beginnings of our nation, certain ethnic groups have had commercial influence well beyond their numbers. Historical circumstances, religious culture, work traditions, and differing proclivities and skills among various American immigrant groups have produced vastly different economic effects.

This was first seen even before the American Revolution, when Quakers and other dissenters were unusually important in laying down our earliest commercial infrastructure. As they settled in the colonies, particularly around Boston and Philadelphia, these God-fearing people prized education, thrift, and enterprise to a degree unmatched by other new arrivals. By the early nineteenth century, dissenters dominated the country's trading economy, and in the ensuing decades they drove the first stages of industrial development as well.

The most important of these early innovators were British Quakers like Samuel Slater, who brought with him the technology for the construction of the nation's first textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Working through Quaker and family networks, Slater ultimately built a strong financial interest in ten mills, employing more than 1,000 people across New England.

Ethnic specialization of this sort continued across the nineteenth century and into the modern era. German mechanics and engineers, arriving largely in the late 1840s and 1850s, played a preeminent role in developing the first foundries and factories across the upper-Midwest. Chinese and Japanese farmers, operating in a hostile social climate, were the first to develop the vegetable operations and fruit orchards that would make California the world's leading grower of premium crops. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews from Eastern Europe brought the small business skills that launched the New York

garment industry. Barely 10 percent of Poland's turn-of-the-century population, Jews made up 40 percent of her shoemakers and 80 percent of her tailors.

In New York, Eastern European Jews often entered fields like garment manufacturing by pooling resources from several different families. Hours were long, conditions often brutal, and competition enormous. But by the 1920s these newcomers controlled between 50 and 80 percent of all the hatmakers, furriers, tailoring shops, and garment-makers in the nation. They achieved a dominance over the American clothing industry that lasted until the arrival of the Sephardim and Asians in the last ten years.

Some academics have written that "the Jews were fortunate to arrive just as the garment industry was about to develop," economist Thomas Sowell notes. Sowell observes that "I could not help but think that Hank Aaron was similarly fortunate--that he often came to bat when a home run was about to be hit."

BUILT FOR BUSINESS

The truth is, some specific ethnic characteristics conditioned the Jews' success, and much the same is true of today's entrepreneurial Middle Eastern immigrants. Shaped by an ethnic consciousness similar to that of the Jews of yesteryear, new immigrants are sweeping into the garment industry. In New York, for example, Chinese, Indians, and Syrian Jews are replacing earlier practitioners of the business. The whole New York blue jeans industry, including brands like Jordache and Gitano, has been dominated by Syrian Jews, a tiny group whose trading culture goes back at least two millennia.

"The [European] Jews don't have the balls--they're not gutsy and they don't want to put in the bucks," observes Doreen German, a New York designer who has worked closely with Indian, Israeli, and North African manufacturers. "Their parents want them to be professionals. The Asians have the stick-to-itiveness to fight in this manufacturing business. That's why down the line it will be all Indians, Orientals, and the Sephardic Jews."