In Queens, Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Rewriting the Local Economy
From Jackson Heights to Flushing, family-run businesses are scaling up — and increasingly hiring across the borough.
Queens has long been the most linguistically diverse place on earth, and that diversity is turning into economic firepower. Along the commercial corridors of Jackson Heights, Flushing, and Corona, immigrant-owned businesses are expanding from single storefronts into small chains.
The fictional grocery brand Ríos Market started as one shop on Roosevelt Avenue and now operates six locations, sourcing produce favored by the neighborhood's Latin American and South Asian customers. Its founder credits a rotating-credit lending circle, not a bank, for the early capital.
Borough officials say these businesses are increasingly the borough's largest private employers. Their growth has also made Queens a laboratory for the kind of neighborhood capitalism that big-box retail once threatened to erase.
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