Trang Nguyen gives a working paper on ‚New sub-cultural perspective on ethnicity and illegal markets‘

This project is based on an ethnographic case study on the open illegal cigarette market in Berlin dominated by Vietnamese migrants. It starts from the working hypothesis which argues that there may be different sub-groups within an ethnic community with distinct normative systems, that these sub-normative systems are emergent during the migration process rather than imported, and that they influence the decision to engage in criminal activity in different ways.
The findings are expected to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between crime and ethnicity: whether crime is the problem of the ethnic minority or of the new cultural system of a sub-group which has evolved as part of the migration experience.