Inside his jewelry store on bustling Union Street in Flushing, Ikhwan Rim walks quickly past the bright gold necklaces and bracelets, pausing only momentarily to answer his phone. An owner of a small business in Flushing is on the line. He received a ticket from the New York City Department of Health, and needs help understanding the violation since he doesn’t speak English.

By profession, Rim, a Korean-American, considers himself a jewelry shopkeeper, but his passion is helping immigrant entrepreneurs in Flushing.

He is the executive director of Union Street Business Association, a group that advocates for small business owners, many of them new to this country. Often their complaints reflect a misunderstanding of what’s expected of businesses in the city compared to their home countries.

Rim experienced that clash of cultures firsthand in 2013 when he decided to close the doors to his Korean restaurant after facing years of excessive fines for what he describes as trivial violations imposed by the New York City Department of Health.

He said that in 2011, a health inspector fined him $1,000 for a broken tile, causing his restaurant rating to fall to a B grade. Although he was told his restaurant rating would return to an A grade if he fixed the tile, a different inspector showed up.

Rim said the second health inspector claimed that the size of Rim’s dishwasher and cutting board violated the city’s health code. Rim said he was fined another $1,000 even though the initial inspector failed to cite him for those violations.

Many former and current immigrant small business owners share similar stories. Bilal Malik, who owns Malik Grocery and Halal Meat in Flushing, has been fined for not having individual price tags on canned food items, and he’s been given two $300 tickets this year for not clearly displaying signs that read “no refund available.”

The city’s Health Department did not respond to a request for comment about the plight of small business owners, but Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned on the promise of reducing fines on small business, announced in July that his administration cut the total amount of fines to small businesses in half in the fiscal year that just ended.

“A thriving city of diverse neighborhoods depends on small businesses to create jobs, serve their communities, and enrich the city’s economy,” de Blasio said in a statement. “Small businesses need support and resources—not onerous fines for violations that don’t pose any risk to consumes.”

However, many residents in Flushing still feel city agencies unfairly target them by imposing excessive fines for violations that do not pose an immediate risk to customers.

And despite the number of violations issued to small businesses in the city decreasing from 19,409 to 11,923 in the last fiscal year, the relationship between city regulators and small business owners in Flushing remains tense.

Dian Yu, executive director of Flushing’s Business Improvement District (BID), works with the city’s inspection agencies and small businesses. He describes himself as a middleman who helps to bridge the gap. He believes many health inspectors are out of touch with what it’s like to run a small business as an immigrant. “The city will hire an Ivy League graduate to run a program based on what they think city needs,” he said.

Although the burden of excessive fines caused headaches for Rim, he considered himself lucky. Because he speaks English, Rim was better able to protect his business. Many immigrant entrepreneurs are left guessing about a health inspector’s expectations and are confused about the regulations.

Rim adds that immigrant owners of small restaurants feel afraid when they see health inspectors, often opting to shut their business down for the day to avoid the fines. He believes inspectors use the language barrier to their advantage because small business owners won’t argue back, underscoring the vulnerability of immigrants who own small businesses.

A 2013 report published by One Flushing, a community-based economic development center, found that restaurants in Queens have higher health violations on average than restaurants in Manhattan. With small businesses predominating in Queens and 67 percent of Flushing’s population foreign born, Rim and others believe small business immigrant owners have been singled out.

Some restaurant owners feel that the city health codes, which stipulate how meats need to be kept at certain temperatures and raw fish needs to be frozen before being served, demean their culture.

“[Korea] is not a third-world country,” Rim said. “If we knew certain foods was bad, we wouldn’t eat it, nobody would eat it, but we have been eating it this way for thousands of years.”

But Yu believes city regulators also play an important role in ensuring customer safety and satisfaction. He said customers dining at small restaurants complain about poor quality menus, appliances, and food. Pointing to the dirty streets outside his office window, Yu says business owners can do a better job meeting the city’s sanitation standards.

Marilyn Bitterman agrees. Bitterman, district manager of Community Board 7, feels that despite the important role small businesses play in Flushing’s economy, de Blasio’s efforts to lower fines has hurt the community. She says streets have gotten dirtier and more crowded because police were told to take a hands-off approach in ticketing small businesses. As a result, she said, customers are beginning to avoid downtown Flushing.  “Small businesses know better,” she said. “They are playing dumb.”

Yu says it is more complicated than that. Many immigrants who own businesses are unaware of programs aimed at helping to clarify rules and explain the benefits of owning a small business. “City agents need to grasp that it’s not about how much information they make available to businesses, but how much information businesses are able to take,” Yu said.

The same report published by One Flushing found that nearly 63 percent of small businesses in Flushing had five or fewer employees. That means if one person left for a day to attend a business assistance workshop or contest a fine, 25 percent of the workforce would be missing. For businesses that rely on manual labor, losing one person is a huge financial burden.

Rim and Yu both agree that a more effective approach would be for inspectors to disseminate information to small business owners in their own language and to provide one-on-one consultations.

“[Flushing] is built by immigrants and the city is not doing enough,” Yu said. “They take for granted the amount of money being drawn from the neighborhood. And the amount invested and put back into the city is totally out of sync.”