If you are in Vietnam thinking about moving to the United States, the first question is usually not the visa or the plane ticket. It is: once I get there, what do I do for a living?
The familiar answer is nails. That answer is true, but only partly — and the part it leaves out is the part that matters most to someone still packing.
The nail industry is genuinely large, but it is not everything
Estimates drawn from the American Community Survey put about 12% of Vietnamese Americans in the labour force in work as manicurists and pedicurists, with another 2% elsewhere in the beauty industry. More than half of all nail salons in the United States are owned by Vietnamese Americans, and in California roughly 80% of licensed manicurists are of Vietnamese descent.
Those are big numbers. But read them closely: 12% plus 2% is about one in seven. The other six in seven Vietnamese people working in America are doing something else — engineering, nursing, accounting, auto repair, driving, teaching, running restaurants, factory work, writing software.
"Vietnamese in America means nail salons" is how it looks from far away. It is off, and if you build your plans on it, being off gets expensive.
The real picture, in numbers
According to the Pew Research Center, about 2.3 million people of Vietnamese origin lived in the United States in 2023 — the fourth-largest Asian origin group, roughly 9% of the Asian American population. Among them:
- Median household income is $86,000 a year.
- 36% of those aged 25 and over hold a bachelor's degree or higher.
- 68% of households own their home.
- 11% live below the poverty line.
- 60% were born outside the United States — which is to say, they travelled the road you are considering.
That last figure is worth pausing on. Most Vietnamese people working in America today were not born there. They arrived, and they made it work. A median household income of $86,000 is not the profile of a community that knows only one trade.
If you do choose nails, know this first
Nail work is a reasonable choice, particularly for someone newly arrived with little capital and unsteady English. But go in holding the real numbers.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2024 median pay for manicurists and pedicurists at $34,660 a year, or $16.66 an hour. There are about 210,100 such jobs nationally, and employment is projected to grow 7% between 2024 and 2034, faster than the average across occupations.
That is what employees earn. Owning a salon is a different proposition — higher, but with capital, a lease, and risk attached.
More important than any figure: this work requires a licence. BLS states plainly that workers must complete a state-approved programme and pass a state licensing exam. Without the licence you cannot work legally, however good your hands are.
Licences are issued state by state and are not interchangeable. Required training hours and fees differ between states, so check with the board of cosmetology in the state where you will actually live — not with a relative's experience in a different one.
The real barrier is not skill
For someone preparing to move, the two largest obstacles are usually not technical ones.
The first is English. Pew finds 56% of Vietnamese people aged 5 and over are proficient in English — meaning 44% are not. English does not decide whether you find work. It decides which work you find, and how long before you can move to something better.
The second is that Vietnamese credentials rarely transfer automatically. Doctors, pharmacists, nurses, engineers, teachers, lawyers — most of these occupations require a state-issued licence in the United States, and a foreign qualification must be evaluated, re-examined, sometimes topped up with further study. Many people arrive holding a profession and work at something else for a few years while the paperwork moves. That is ordinary and it has a way out, but it is better known in advance than discovered on arrival.
What to do before you board
Three things can be done from Vietnam, and all three are free or nearly so:
- Pick the state first, then the occupation. Licensing requirements, wages and living costs vary enormously between states. Work that supports a family in Texas may not in California.
- Look up the licensing requirements for your intended occupation in that specific state, on the state licensing authority's own website. This information is public and costs nothing.
- Start on English now, even if you expect to do work with little conversation. It is the only item on this list you can improve every day without waiting on paperwork.
You do not need to pay an intermediary to learn any of the above. Every occupational licensing requirement in the United States is published openly on the relevant state's website.
Why we wrote this
Saigon Sentinel is a newspaper for the Vietnamese community in America. But our search data shows a substantial share of readers arriving from outside the United States — Vietnam is our second-largest source of traffic — searching exactly this: "what work do Vietnamese people do in America", "what job to do when I get to America".
This one is written for both. For someone still preparing to leave, it is the real occupational picture to plan against. For readers already here, it is something to send to the relative back home asking exactly these questions — an answer with figures and sources attached, instead of rumour.
Bảo Nguyễn
Bảo Nguyễn founded Saigon Sentinel to give the Vietnamese diaspora truly independent, in-depth community coverage at a time when misinformation moves faster than fact-checks and the language barrier makes verification harder than it should be. He sets the editorial standards and quality controls that govern the reporting, chooses the subjects, writes and edits each article, reads it against its sources before publication, audits published output, and handles corrections.