THE NEW IMMIGRANT WAVE Koreans in Business Edna Bonacich, Ivan H. Light, and Charles Choy Wong A nyone familiar with the city of Los Angeles who has not driven through the downtown area in the last two or three years would be astonished at the transformation of the Olympic Boulevard area between Crenshaw and Hoover. The change has been dramatic enough to attract the attention of a national news magazine. Small business is flowering among the Koreans in Los Angeles. Immigrant Entrepreneurship The Korean community in the United States (and in Los Angeles in particular) is by and large a new one, a product of the change in American laws in 1965. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act the number of Koreans in this country had always been exceedingly small; but an unanticipated conse- quence of the new law has been a sharp rise in immigration from Asia, one-fifth of which is Korean, Asians now com- prise over one-third of all entering immigrants, and Koreans are the third largest group entering the United States--behind only Mexicans and Philippinos. The 1970 census reported 70,598 Koreans in the United States, 9,395 of whom lived in the Los Angeles-Long Branch area. These figures are widely believed to be undercounts, the national figure at that time probably exceeding 100,000. Recent immigration has raised the national estimate to 270,000. Asian immigrants who came to the United States before 1924, when immigration was effectively cut off, showed an unusual propensity to enter small business. The new Asian immigrants, however, of whom Koreans are one example, are very different from the old in two important ways. First, the immigrants themselves are no longer a largely unedu- cated peasantry. The second change has occurred not among the immigrants, but in the context into which they are mov- ing. Since 1924 the American economy has been transformed from one in which there was considerable small business and self-employment to a highly centralized economy with a small number of owners of large amounts of capital. The vast majority of the population have become wage earners. This shift in the economy has had a direct effect on traditional areas of Asian enterprise. But despite these two factors, Korean immigrants show a marked movement into small business. The question of how Korean immigrants get into small business is problematic because most come without prior experience. Entrepreneurship is not something they fall into "naturally" or out of habit, but must be learned on arrival. In this sense, despite higher levels of education, the new Korean 54 SOCI ETY