by Elizabeth Kolsky, ekolsky@pratt.edu
Assistant Professor of History, Pratt Institute
This paper seeks to create space for a group of under-acknowledged (and over-exploited) immigrants in New York City: South Asian taxi drivers. Struck by the contrast between their large numbers—who doesn't have an Indian cabby story?—and the sense (from talking to a few) that most are advanced degree-holders driving only temporarily, I set out to discover a bit more about the history of the community. Located in the cracks between a national history of discriminatory legislation and a diasporic narrative of success, the story of South Asian taxi drivers works defiantly against the grain.
A Brief History Of U.S. Immigration And Naturalization Law
The first naturalization law, ratified in 1790, provided citizenship rights for all "free white persons." In 1870, the law was amended to include the naturalization of people of African nativity and descent. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, free white persons, primarily from northern and western Europe, entered the country in large numbers and became citizens.
Asians, however, were not as well-received. The first "Orientals" to immigrate to the United States were Chinese laborers who came to California during the gold rush of the 1850's. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese began immigrating. The first few years of the twentieth century saw Indians, mostly Punjabi Sikhs who had arrived by boat in Western Canada, crossing the loosely guarded border into Washington state. And by 1908, Indians were arriving directly into San Francisco's port. These Asian immigrants, the "Chinks," the "Japs," and the "ragheads"—as the turbaned Sikhs were derogatorily called—were not eligible for citizenship.
When the United States began passing laws actively restricting immigration, Asians were the first to be shut out. As a result of successful lobbying by west coast unions that resented competition from Chinese labor, the Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 prohibiting the entrance of all Chinese immigrants. In 1917, the west coast labor lobby triumphed again, this time with the creation of the "Asiatic Barred Zone," which banned immigration from all Asian countries except Japan. And in 1924, Japanese immigration was halted. These laws not only prohibited further immigration from Asia, they also formally denied citizenship to Asians living in the United States.
In 1924, the United States passed the Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the Permanent National Origins Quota Act. As its name suggests, this law established a series of quota laws targeted to (1) restrict the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans and (2) favor northern and western Europeans: "Quotas were set in proportion of the size of each country's contribution to the total population of the United States in 1920 (1890 became the base year in 1927), and a limit of 115,000 was imposed for all countries outside the western hemisphere." As the northern and western Europeans were the earliest to immigrate in large numbers, their quotas were highest.
In the 1940's, recognizing the political salience of its image of freedom and accommodation, the United States began opening its borders. The booming war economy had eased fears of unemployment and the bigoted aspects of West coast trade unionism that those fears engendered.
In 1943, to reward its wartime ally and demonstrate the generosity of American democracy, an annual quota of 105 Chinese persons was permitted to enter the country with naturalization rights. In 1946, India was given an annual quota of 100 persons.
In 1952, the U.S. passed the McCarran-Walter Act, increasing the total annual Asian immigration quota to 2000 persons, and establishing preferences for visa allocation. Interestingly, this law recognized as Indian any person of Indian ancestry coming from any country. Thus, a citizen of Britain whose grandparents came from India, would fall under the Asian Indian quota.
Finally, in 1965, the United States passed the landmark Hart-Celler Act, abolishing nation-of-origin restrictions. Effective June 30, 1968, immigration and naturalization exclusion on the basis of race, sex, or nationality was prohibited.
Focusing On South Asia
Under the Hart-Celler Act, new immigration criteria was based on kinship ties, refugee status, and "needed skills." Between 1820 and 1960, 34.5 million Europeans immigrated to the U.S., while only one million Asians—mostly Chinese and Japanese—immigrated. An unintended, unanticipated, and highly evident effect of Hart-Celler was the burgeoning of Asian immigration.
Literature on South Asian immigration to the United States pays short shrift to pre-1965 immigrants, namely the Punjabi Sikhs who settled on the West coast in the early twentieth century. Indeed, one would think that the inclusion of India in the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone was mere coincidence were it not for the work of Bruce La Brack and Joan Jensen, whose book, Passage from India, traces the struggles and successes of early South Asian immigrants.
In the early 1900's, Indians came to the Pacific Northwest from Canada to work in lumber mills and logging camps. As they moved down into California, they began working in mills, farms, and railroad construction. Though their numbers were small, there were violent racial incidents that directly targeted them—"anti-Hindoo" violence—in Washington, California, and Alaska. Indians were included on the list of enemies of California's Asiatic Exclusion League, formed in 1907. By 1908, when a boat from India docked at San Francisco, the front page of the San Francisco Call displayed a photograph of a group of turbaned Sikhs. The headline read: "The Hindoo Invasion."
South Asian immigrants have a history of legal controversy regarding racial classification. This confusion of classification had implications for naturalization rights. The slippage between racial and skin color categories was problematic for the citizenship status of Indians in the early twentieth century. Because Indians were classified with Chinese and Japanese as Orientals, of the "mongoloid race," they were denied the citizenship rights accorded only to "free white persons." However, the courts had been interchangeably using the terms "white" and "caucasian," making room for the Indian argument that while their skin color was brown, they were in fact caucasian, and thus deserved citizenship rights.
In 1920, when Bhagat Singh Thind, a United States World War I army veteran, was denied citizenship, he sued. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind that "white" and "caucasian" were not synonymous in the eyes of the "common man," and that, "free white persons were words of common speech, words to be interpreted in accordance not with science but rather with the understanding of the `common man.' And according to the common man white was not synonymous with caucasian." Between 1923 and 1926, the INS sought to revoke the naturalization certificates of seventy Indians. The issue of the racial classification of Indians had not, however, been resolved.
In direct contradiction of the federal stance of the 1920's, and until 1977, the U.S. government (including the U.S. Census Bureau) formally classified South Asians as caucasian/white. The 1970 Census questionnaire provided the following categories for self-identification: White/Caucasian, Negro (or Black), Indian (American), Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Korean, Other. In 1974, the Association of Indians in America (AIA) began negotiating with federal agencies for classification of South Asians as a separate category, and more specifically for recognition as a minority group eligible for federal protection against discrimination. A February 18, 1975, memo distributed to staff of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, a federal agency devoted to minority group rights, specifically included among minority groups "Blacks, Spanish-surnamed Americans, American Indians, and Asian Americans (or Orientals)," and specifically excluded Pakistanis and Indians. In 1977, AIA won the first stage of the battle, with federal acknowledgment of the category "Asian Indian," which appeared on the 1980 Census questionnaire.
South Asians in the United States: A Demographic Profile
In the 1980's, 46% of the yearly 600,000 immigrants entering the United States were from Asia. New York City became home to between 15% and 20% of these immigrants each year after 1965. Many South Asians have specifically designated New York City as their port of entry. The 1980 Census shows that the northeast had proportionally more Indians than any other major Asian nationality, 46,708 of whom lived in New York City.
Between 1870-1965, a total of 16,013 Indians immigrated to the United States. In the first decade following the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, 96,735 Indians immigrated. For the most part, these new Indian immigrants entered under the needed skills preference of the 1965 law. In 1975, 93% of Indian immigrants were either professional workers or their spouses and children. In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau claimed that the 361,351 Indians living in the United States formed the most highly educated, skilled, and paid group among new immigrants. As Jensen notes: "The second wave of Indian immigration was thus much different from the first, when workers had crowded the ships." By the 1980's, 25,000 Indians were immigrating to the United States each year, and among immigrant groups, they were among the quickest to naturalize.
South Asians in the United States: A Seamless Success Story?
Very limited research has been done on South Asians in the United States. The CLIO electronic catalog in the Columbia Library system has only thirty books classified under the subject "East Indian Americans," the proper subject search line according to Columbia's South Asian librarian, David Magier. To put that number in context: the subject "Chinese Americans" draws 191 entries; "Japanese Americans" 293 entries; "Korean Americans" 57 entries; "Asian Americans" 225 entries; "Mexican Americans" 655 entries; "Hispanic Americans" 499 entries; "West Indian Americans" 9 entries; "Afro Americans" over 5000 entries; "Irish Americans" 141 entries; "Italian Americans" 205 entries; "German Americans" 200 entries; and finally, "European Americans" recommends a new search under "wasps persons."
The stories that books on South Asian immigration tell are one: the theme is success. The common narrative goes something like this. The Hart-Celler Act contributed to the "brain drain" from South Asia, funneling the passage of the economically and educationally advantaged. Indians in America are described as a well-trained professional elite, representing large numbers of doctors, engineers, and scientists. Of the post-1965 "new immigrant groups" (including Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Dominicans, and Mexicans), the 1980 Census indicated that Indians had the highest mean family income, above even that of native-born Americans (different from Native Americans).
In his 1977-78 survey of 345 Indians residing in New York City, Parmatma Saran found that 84% of them were college-educated (far above the 15% of college-educated Americans), more than 50% had received advanced degrees, and 75% held jobs as engineers and healthcare professionals before coming to the United States. Saran states:
Indian immigrants in the New York area have achieved occupational positions that demand high levels of educational achievement . . . this places them among the more affluent segments of American society.
In addition to Saran's work, many fieldwork studies, including Maxine Fisher's The Indians of New York City and Arthur and Usha Helweg's An Immigrant Success Story, provide in detail the experiences of middle-class South Asian immigrants in the New York metropolitan area.
A Seamless Success Story?: Probing the Profile
To a non-New Yorker, these narratives offer convincing evidence of a remarkably successful immigrant group. However, one need spend very little time in New York City to encounter working-class South Asians that contradict this fantasy scenario. On my daily morning errands, I pick up a newspaper from the neighborhood newsstand, operated by a South Asian man, and buy fruit from the South Asian greengrocer next door. If I decide to travel by taxi to one of the myriad Indian restaurants lining East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, my chances of being picked up by a South Asian driver are 50%. In my neighborhood, the only tamasha rivaling the evening gathering of South Asian taxi drivers at the gas station on Lafayette and Broadway, is the morning crowd of South Asian food vendors filling their carts with roasted chestnuts or ice-cream, depending on the season, at Nice Ice on Bowery and Bond. Why are these communities neglected in the literature? Might this be a third wave of immigrants?
As I bring to the foreground one large group of non-professional South Asian immigrants in New York City, taxi drivers, I will work towards resolving these questions.
A Brief Overview of the Taxicab Industry: The Industry's Point of View
Yellow taxicabs are a defining feature of the New York City landscape. The City is home to 45,266 licensed taxi drivers and 12,187 yellow medallion taxicabs. (A medallion is a metal license bolted to a cab's hood that makes the car official.) Taxicabs are a $1.5 billion industry, supporting 30% of public transportation in Manhattan. In 1991, the average cab traveled 58,200 miles and generated $82,000 in revenues (including tips). The average shift was 10 hours, during which a driver took 30 trips to service 40 passengers. The average net income of a taxi driver in 1991 was $22,000.
Taxi driving careers tend to be short. In 1991, 25% of first-year drivers failed to renew their licenses, as did 21% of second-year drivers and 17% of third-year drivers. Most drivers exit the industry within four years of becoming licensed. Low pay and crime are the primary reasons for the high turnover rates of new drivers. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's (an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services) June 1996 report, entitled Violence in the Workplace: Risk Factors and Prevention Strategies, taxi driving is the most life-threatening job in America. Taxicab drivers have the highest risk of workplace homicides of any occupational group, nearly forty times the national average and more than three times the rate of liquor stores, which had the next highest rate. In 1994, eighty-six taxi drivers were killed. Homicide rates for taxicab drivers and security guards were one and a half times higher during the early 1990's than they had been during 1983-89. Taxicab services had the highest rate of work- related homicide during the 3- year period 1990-92 (41.4/100,000). This rate was nearly sixty times the national average rate of work- related homicides (0.70/100,000).
In 1992, 90% of new drivers were immigrants, as were over 80% of all licensed drivers. Of the new applicants in 1991, 37% were college graduates, while 59% had received some college education. Furthermore, 70% of these applicants had recently worked in a low-skilled job, and 9.5% of them in professional jobs. The median age of all drivers was 39 and the median age of new drivers was 32.
Next to English, the most common first languages among the 2,500 immigrant applicants in 1991 were Urdu (15.7%), Punjabi (12.7%), Arabic (11.1%), and Bengali (10.6%). (English, of course, is most common language because it is spoken by the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian drivers who numerically dominate the industry.) In 1991, 43% of all applicants for licenses were born in South Asia (21% Pakistani, 11% Indian, and 11% Bangladeshi), a sharp increase from the 10% in 1984. In that same time period, U.S. born applicants dropped from 26% to 10.5%. Most drivers do not drive full- time, and some don't drive at all in a given year. There are approximately 16,000 licensed South Asian taxi drivers (43% of the total 40,000 licenses), and around 5,000 (43% of the 12,000 full-timers) full-time South Asian drivers.
The taxi industry, too, is tied up in America's botched history of South Asian racial classification. In 1984, when applying for licenses, drivers were asked to indicate their race/ethnicity. The choices given were: white, black, Indian, Asian, Hispanic. As a result, the TLC was surprised to find their drivers to be 34% white, 27% black, 15% Indian, 12% Asian, 11% Hispanic, because: "The Indian category, originally meant to refer to Native Americans, [was] selected by most drivers born in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as some drivers born in northeastern Africa." Recognizing the impossibility of a New York City workforce composed of 15% Native Americans, the questionnaire was amended in 1992 to include the category Asian Indian.
Each year since the 1980's, more Pakistanis and Bangladeshis applied for taxi driver licenses than arrive from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Half of all new applicants have lived in the U.S. for six years or more before applying for a taxi driver's license, and 73% of them know someone who drives a cab.
A Brief Insight into the Taxicab Industry: The Drivers' Point of View
In 1992, the Lease Driver's Coalition (LDC) was formed under the auspices of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) in order "to bring together predominantly South Asian yellow cab drivers to fight for civil rights and combat the oppressive conditions they face from garage owners, the TLC, and the NYC police." According to the LDC, and the many drivers interviewed in Vivek Bald's documentary "Taxi-Vala/An Autobiography," life on the streets is far bleaker than is depicted in the NYC Taxicab Fact Book. Contrary to the TLC statistics, drivers work many more hours than are documented, often 12-hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, netting $50 on a good day. Each day, drivers face unsafe working conditions, racial discrimination, and police brutality. And while the police are quick to issue moving and parking violations, they drag their feet in responding to crimes against drivers, often turning drivers' complaints into opportunities to enact their own racist brutality.
For example, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on January 17, 1995, a Pakistani driver was assaulted by two officers against whom he had recently filed a complaint. According to the driver, the officers yelled: "The U.S. is a country only for white people! You Paks—you're not allowed to drive in our patrol area! You sand niggers have to go back to Pakistan." On May 26, 1994, Saleem Osman, co-founder of the LDC, came to mediate a dispute between a motorist and a Pakistani cab driver. He was arrested by the police, and told: "Go back to your own country. There's no black mayor in New York anymore—so you better watch out." In October 1993, after three cabbies had been found dead in a twenty-four hour period, the LDC organized a massive protest. In a rare and tremendous demonstration of solidarity, cabbies drove down the streets of lower Manhattan, shouting, "WE WANT JUSTICE." The third driver's body had been found by another driver, more than forty-eight hours after the murder, slumped over the wheel of his car on the side of the highway, the meter still running, without even a violation ticket. How, one driver from "Taxi-Vala" wondered, had the violation-manic police failed to ticket this vehicle—much less discover the body!—sitting on the open road in a car that had been reported missing days earlier?
The LDC is highly critical of the TLC, claiming they have done little to protect the livelihood or lives of its drivers. The NYC Taxi Drivers Union, which was formed in 1966, has also been ineffective in securing benefits and improving working conditions for drivers. One reason for this is that since 1979, when the union acquiesced to the leasing system that exists today, the union's organizing power has weakened. Medallions are now disparately spread among large and small garages, some unionized and some not. Currently, there are approximately 1600 unionized medallions and exactly 12,187 medallions in total (a number limited by New York law). While the average driver, working over-time and under duress makes an annual salary of $19,000, owners make on average $1000 per cab per week. The cap on the number of medallions has driven their price up to $250,000.
The LDC has faced similar organizing obstacles. According to ethnic niche theory, niches minimize one of union's biggest obstacles: ethnic rivalry. However, Bhairavi Desai, Head Organizer at the LDC, notes that the biggest obstacle inhibiting solidarity among taxi drivers is the job itself. Most South Asian drivers are ashamed of their job, are unwilling to accept it as their lot in the land of opportunity, and do not rally around a worker identity. Johanna Lessinger remarks: "Indians holding such low status jobs are often deeply ashamed of their lack of success. Their shame is often intensified by the very high aspirations with which they arrived in the U.S. as well as by the proud self-image of Indian immigrants as a group."
Taxi Drivers or Doctors?
How can the tale of a singularly successful and professional immigrant group stand in light of the evidence of a growing number of non-professional South Asian workers in New York City? The most frequently cited works on South Asians in New York City (e.g., Fisher's and Saran's books) make no mention of taxi drivers or of other non-professional groups. The TLC notes a marked increase in South Asian drivers between 1984 and 1991. Is the evidence growing faster than the literature, the bulk of which was published before the mid-1980's? Has a new immigration wave not yet been researched or documented? Do the aspirations and background of this new group bear any relationship to the post-1965 educated elite professionals?
The immigration profile of South Asians has been changing, and in the 1990's we are beginning to find some scant documentation. Published in 1991, David Reimers' article, "Recent Third World Immigration to New York City, 1945-1986: An Overview," cites the newsstand work dominated by Indians and Pakistanis, indicating a glimmer of academic recognition for working-class South Asians in New York City. Roger Daniels' Coming to America notes that in 1980, while the median income of a full-time Indian worker (the highest among Asian Americans at $18,707) was almost $2,000 higher than that of the next highest Asian American (Japanese), 7.4% of Indian families were below the poverty level, as opposed to 4.2% of Japanese families. Daniels states: "Characteristically, the more recent immigrants were less well off. Those who immigrated after 1975 earned much less—about $11,000 per full-time worker—and more than one post-1975 family in ten was in poverty."
It is important to remember that the Taxicab Fact Book states that most new immigrant applicants have been in the U.S. for six years or more, indicating, perhaps, the failure of other opportunities. Most South Asian cab drivers have been in the States for some time before they enter the industry, which they do with a high rate of education and a high rate of previous employment in low-skilled jobs. They tend to leave the industry within four years of entry, as new South Asians drivers continue to apply for licenses. Thus, it seems safe to say that while taxi driving does appear to be a stopover on some longer journey, the South Asian immigrants who enter the taxi industry probably do have different class backgrounds from the doctors and engineers of the late 1960's.
Roger Waldinger claims that one factor which explains New York City immigrants' success at capturing low-skilled employment sectors is that their social origins predispose them to take jobs native New Yorkers would not accept. This theory does not seem to apply to South Asian taxi drivers—they are not driving because it is better than work they could find at home. Rather, it appears they are driving temporarily because they came here with unrealistic expectations of boundless opportunities and are unable to find work suited to their education and skills. So how have these thousands of disappointed laborers been pushed out of sight?
Johanna Lessinger's ethnography, From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrants to New York City, comments upon the South Asian community's denial of its poor: "There is considerable debate among Indian immigrants themselves about who these people are and how they came to be here. Successful immigrants tend to regard these less successful fellow immigrants as something of an embarrassment to a group proud of its wealth and success." Lessinger contends that Indian immigrants have subscribed to the myth of their own success, obscuring the poverty, discrimination, and racism that affect South Asians in the United States: "These stories of less successful Indian immigrants tend to undermine a common view of Indians as exceptional immigrants who have somehow bypassed periods of economic hardship, psychic pain, or the shock of adjusting to a new society. …Although most Indians settle into a prosperous middle-class professional life within a decade of arrival, a certain number of Indian immigrants never find the dreamed-of professional job and remain members of the American working of lower-middle classes."
On Wednesday, May 13, 1998, New York City's 45,266 yellow cab drivers went on strike, blasting into the public eye in protest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's proposal for new "safety rules." The Mayor's proposal, a response to the 41% increase in the number of accidents involving all taxis (yellow cabs, car services, and liveries) between 1990 and 1996, includes mandatory drug and alcohol testing for new cabbies, heightened penalties for driving infractions, and higher liability insurance requirements. These rules come in the heyday of a discipline-crazy mayor, who has made a name for himself by creating a quasi-police state bent upon cutting crime and cleaning the city's streets by implementing such dubious measures as $55 tickets for jaywalking in a city characterized by its teeming pedestrians.
Drivers argue that they are already unfairly targeted by the police and by the myriad of existing city laws, and that these new measures are racially and xenophobically motivated. Vijay Bali, leader of the United Yellow Cab Drivers Association, questions: "Thousands will lose their licenses, and who will replace them? I ask you: Is this being done because the driver today is basically a minority person? Is this because of bad publicity and politics and a city that has a bull's eye on the driver's back? Has the taxi driver been made an object of hate?" Drivers claim that they have no problem with the implementation of new laws. What they object to is their exclusion from the legislative process and the system which indiscriminately revokes their livelihood for reasons big and small. Drivers plead for representation in the drafting of new regulations, and for the voice which they have historically been denied.
This paper is a preliminary inroad into a much needed field of research. Students of the diaspora must do a better job than the ethnographers of yesteryear in recognizing the implications of class differences and other intra-community fault-lines. Factors which have shaped the manifold marginalization of South Asian taxi drivers include not only a changed job market, the absence of workplace rights, and a hostile police force, but also their erasure from the immigrant community and its singular narrative of success. Currently, drivers are taking their protest to the streets, demanding recognition and rights in a society built on the rhetoric of freedom andjustice for all. The voice they seek is a voice denied by not only by the American legal establishment, but by their fellow immigrants who continue to deny their presence. As one young South Asian journalist, candidly commented: "this is a group of South Asians whom most of us middle class desis prefer not to recognize!"