Mai Tran, born to a well-to-do merchant family, arrived fom Vietnam at age 18. She is 35 now and owns a nail salon. (By Paul S. Howell for The Washington Post)

Latching On to a Niche

For the past seven years, Luna has washed the windows of the tallest buildings in Houston, among the highest in the world. He has cleaned the glass skins of Texas Commerce Bank and the Transco Tower, each more than 60 stories tall. He is proud of this. "It is a good job," Luna says in an English still thick with Spanish inflections. It is a job for men with courage.

His uncle taught him how to swing from the ropes. Luna remembers the first time he lowered himself off the side of a building. "I was afraid," he says. Now? "It is like walking on the ground."

From his perch high above the city, Luna can see clear across Houston. The downtown skyline and the Astrodome rise from a rumpled carpet of steaming trees. He can see the corner lot where Manuel Barrera waited for his day job. He can see, too, his neighborhood to the southwest, the new barrio, where he lives with his wife and two young children. Luna, now 33, left his home in Saltillo, Mexico, when he was 16. He crossed the border with the idea that he would stay a few years and return, like so many of the transnational "sojourners" in the past. His father back home, a true sojourner who picked crops in Florida for 40 seasons, long ago stopped asking his son when he was coming home. Luna is never going to return to Saltillo.

His decision to remain in Houston, to marry and raise a family, is part of the transformation of this broad-shouldered Texas town and is helping to make Houston one of the most diverse cities in the United States. Its population is 41 percent Anglo, 30 percent Hispanic, 25 percent black and 4 percent Asian. In the last two decades, the number of immigrants in Houston has soared. By 2000, one in five Houstonians will be foreign-born.

Right now, many people in Houston are only too happy to have immigrants such as Demetrio Luna around to clean their windows. The city is booming. Houston's economy, which endured cycles of giddy boom and brutal bust in the 1970s and 1980s, has been transformed. Unemployment now stands at 3.7 percent. Jobs go begging. Immigrants are welcome, at least by those who do not have to compete with them.

Luna, like many immigrants, has burrowed into a specialized work niche. Immigrants wash the windows of skyscrapers in Houston. Native-born Americans do not.

There are hundreds of such niches as those filled by the window washers. In Houston, whole villages of Mayans from Guatemala have been transplanted to work cleaning and stocking the shelves of the Randall's and Albertson's grocery store chains. Nigerians drive taxis. Vietnamese open nail salons. Indians practice medicine. Where once the domestic servants of the posh old-line Houston enclave of River Oaks were all black, today the maids and caregivers are almost exclusively Latino. The precise job niches and the immigrants who fill them change from city to city across America, but the overall pattern does not.

There was a time, a decade ago, when young workers from the Rust Belt and urban blacks washed the windows of Houston's high-rises. No more. This transformation has had two major effects. Those who buy or sell Luna's labor, such as his contractor and the building owners, benefit from lower wages and lower costs. Those who compete do not. They change jobs, acquire more skills or move to cities where immigrants are few.

Ray Cook has been a painter and a union man for 38 years, all his working life. His union local, which represents painters, glazers, tile layers and drywallers – the bedrock trades for the building industry – has dwindled from 2,000 members in the early 1980s to about 350 today because the work is now being done by non-union immigrants such as Luna. The average age of the local's members is 57. "They either retire or die," Cook says.

Cook used to despise the immigrants who stole their jobs. "I called those non-union painters a scab or a rat or worse," he remembers. "But I did a 180-degree turnaround. These immigrants, as you call them, they're good men. Most of them work hard, though they might not know what they're doing. But we're all workers. I don't have a problem with them anymore. I have a problem with the contractors."

In Houston, a union painter makes $17.94 an hour, which includes health, welfare and pension benefits. Demetrio Luna or Manuel Barrera, or any of their friends who can pick up a brush, will work for far less money and no benefits.

"I don't care what the economists say, our wage structure is based on how little the immigrants are willing to work for," says Richard Shaw, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO in Houston. "They're bringing our wages down, and we have the pillars of the community employing them at below minimum wage." The reason many Houstonians feel little animosity toward immigrants, Shaw says, "is because they're going to work 'em 'til they use 'em up."

Shaw also says that while Houston wants the cheap labor, the citizens have voted, repeatedly, against raising the minimum wage, improving the public schools or increasing funding for the county hospitals in the areas where the immigrants live.

In his service to the elevator classes, Demetrio Luna makes between $1,700 and $2,700 a month, depending on the work, and probably averages around $10 or $12 an hour, with no pension, benefits or insurance. He is satisfied with the money he makes and said he has no intention of joining a union, which he fears would make him less attractive to employers.

Luna has two young daughters – "having more in America is too expensive" – and his wife, who is a Mexican American born here, works as an assistant manager in a pawn shop. She has health insurance for herself and her children. Luna loves his shiny red, late-model Dodge pickup truck and dancing to the Tejano tunes at the neon-lit clubs. "I am okay," he says. Life is much better here than in Saltillo, even though, on average, immigrants across the nation earn 15 percent less than the native-born, and Mexican newcomers earn less than half of what other Americans make.

When asked how his daughters will fare in his new country, this new economy, Luna grows uncertain. "They will need to do better," he says.

The 'Good Immigrant'

Tran went to community college here and studied drafting and worked as a waitress in restaurants, including a place called the Brisket House, where she learned that Texans like baked potatoes with chives and sour cream, and even ketchup. "It was very confusing. And if you got it wrong – 'No chives?' – there was hell to pay." Mai Tran can laugh about this now. She is solidly middle class, and through her clients, gets orchestra seats at the opera.

At her sister's urging, Tran attended a school of cosmetology to study for 250 hours the art and science of the modern manicure. She discovered she was good with her hands and good for the hands she buffed and polished. With money she had saved working in the salon of another Vietnamese, Tran opened her own shop seven years ago on a tony shopping strip near Rice University. Her loyal customers like the care she puts into their nails. They also like Tran, for her smart-alecky, no-nonsense commentary and because she listens to the stories of their lives.

"She's my psychiatrist," says one devoted client, a criminal defense investigator who has been having her nails done every Thursday afternoon for years. "She knows everything about me."

Her salon is the calm in a storm of middle-class angst. Coffee klatch and way station. Tran knows not only her clients' favorite shades of polish, but the names of their boyfriends, husbands and children. She listens, all the while whittling away with her emery board, as they tell her of their travails at work, the boyfriend who forgets to send flowers, the illnesses of their parents.

Mai Tran, now 35, is the kind of immigrant who does not so much compete against the native-born but creates new economic possibilities. She complements the American economy – like maids or nannies or valet parkers or ethnic restaurants for the middle classes. The phenomenon of the nail salon is a new one, created over the last few years, whereby a million women who once saw the occasional manicurist for weddings or proms now visit weekly. There is now a Nail Industry, built largely by Vietnamese immigrants, supporting three magazines devoted to the subject (one in Vietnamese) and dozens of suppliers.

While the nail salon is fun for the clients, Tran herself does not have easy work. She spends 12 hours a day, year after year, at her little table, pushing back cuticles and buffing tips, with surgical precision, but over and over again. It has given her a piece of the American dream, but this is extraordinarily tedious work – and few native-born Americans with Tran's education and intelligence would submit themselves to the task of applying polish.

But Tran is the "good immigrant," the latest incarnation of the mythical Horatio Alger success stories. She did not take a job from anybody. She remade herself into a success story. Tran is about to open a larger salon, with more employees and subcontractors who will offer facials and massages.

"I have heard about the bad things that happen to immigrants," she says. "I've heard Americans are racists and all the rest. But when you come and work hard, they love you."

A Better Life

Trained first in India, where her parents were lower-middle-class teachers, she and all her siblings are now doctors. When Guntupalli came to America in the 1970s, there was a great demand for physicians, and today, so-called international medical graduates number 160,000 of the 650,000 physicians in the United States. An amazing 26,000 of them are from India, which is one of the world's largest producers of doctors. On the walls of her office at Ben Taub are pictures of her with President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the emergency rooms below, however, the indigent patients are lined up, gurneys pressed together, the dinged-out and the damaged, with no insurance, waiting their turns and soiling their sheets. It is a good hospital, but the one that draws some of the sickest patients, the street people, with nowhere else to go. Many of the doctors bustling about in their white jackets are immigrants.

"I've been here for more than half my life," Guntupalli says, but because of her last name and her lilting accent, even other physicians ask her, "When are you going back home?" She, like Tran, Luna and Barrera, will never go back home to live. They are the new Americans. "Initially, there is this hesitation," says Guntupalli, now 48. "The color of your skin, your accent, your last name. But no other country will offer you what America does."

Immigrant doctors now serve many of the most needy patient populations in the United States. They staff the clinics and hospitals such as Ben Taub, serving the inner cities and rural areas – jobs that many native-born doctors will not do. This month, Guntupalli will become president of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, which has been fighting to ensure that foreign-born physicians are not discriminated against before licensing boards or medical school selection committees.

As she makes a round of the intensive care unit, filled with the very ill patients, Guntupalli praises the work that immigrant doctors have done in America.

But the door is closing. The medical professions, and the government commissions that oversee immigration of the highly skilled, are forecasting a glut of physicians. As a result, the commissions are reducing the number of foreign-trained doctors who are allowed to practice in the United States.

But at the bottom of the ladder, where wages are cheap and the benefits of keeping it that way are many, there appears to be no similar effort.

No stopping legal immigrants, that is, who come to take their chance alongside Manuel Barrera.