Abstract
Punjabi Immigrant Mobility in the United States provides an examination of the creation of an ethnic niche in taxi driving by Punjabi immigrants in New York City. In Chapter One, Diditi Mitra provides a history of Punjabi migration to the United States and establishes class and race as the analytical focal points of the book. Class and race are chosen as frames of analysis based on grounded theory arising from the author’s interviews with taxi drivers, and ethnicity is not used since the concept of ethnicity was not prominent in the interviews. Additional data is gathered from taxi worker organizers, one Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) administrator, lawyers, case proceedings, and taxi fleet owners.
Chapter Two discusses latent and manifest functions of immigration laws passed in 1965, 1986, and 1990. Despite each law’s intention to control non-white immigration, Mitra demonstrates how each law created opportunities for Punjabi immigrants to enter and work in the United States. Chapter Three provides a structural analysis of how newly arriving Punjabis entered the taxi-driving industry in New York, replacing native-born whites, in search of suitable work despite constrained choices as non-white immigrants. Chapter Four examines the rules of the TLC and the Punjabi immigrant drivers’ racialized experiences of the TLC rules. Chapter Five examines methods Punjabi immigrants use to mitigate their stigmatized race and class status in the United States, including the deployment of the Asian model minority stereotype, co-ethnic support networks, and the invocation of American immigrant history and ideals of freedom and opportunity. Chapter Six briefly contextualizes the arguments of the book by placing Punjabi immigrants as actors within a structural macro framework of race and class in the United States, immigration laws, and TLC rules. Mitra’s book could be useful as a supplemental text for an undergraduate course on race and class or immigration.