Empirical evidence suggests that immigrants appear to be more entrepreneurially active than native people. While the formation of new firms by immigrants has been widely studied, the literature about the performance of these new ventures created by immigrants after their inception remains scarce and anecdotal. This study sheds light on firm-internal and firm-external factors that affect the life expectancy of new firms created by immigrants within a local economy during a period of recession, when the creation of firms is particularly important. The results show that immigrant entrepreneurs are more likely to quit their businesses earlier than their native counterparts. We argue that this may be partially explained by the liability of foreignness faced by immigrants.
The economic integration of immigrants has become a challenging topic in the European political agenda. This is especially true for countries that are struggling to survive the economic recession which started in 2008. In this context, entrepreneurship emerges as an alternative to unemployment. While the self-employment propensity of immigrants is well documented, little is known about the performance of these ventures. This article contributes to the literature by comparing and explaining the differential earnings of self-employed versus salaried immigrants in Spain. A binary logistic regression is applied to explore data collected by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project for 2005 and 2006. Our findings show that self-employed immigrants’ income exceeds that of salaried workers. Human capital and location-related environmental variables were found to be the best predictors of both self-employed and salaried immigrants’ earnings.
This study explores how immigrants perceive their entrepreneurial selves and their strategies to find opportunities when migrating to a new country. It focuses on their journey to find these opportunities and their experiences from the endeavour. Thus, it focuses on the conditions of immigrant entrepreneurs and their experiences by capturing entrepreneurs' experiences across different phases of their entrepreneurial endeavours. The article addresses the recent surge in the entrepreneurship literature focusing on immigrant entrepreneurship, including its consequences for integration, job creation possibilities and relationship to the national economy. Findings show that immigrant entrepreneurs adopt a multi-strategy opportunity approach during the early phase that then influences their self-image. Furthermore, for the immigrant entrepreneurs included in this study, identifying and capturing these business opportunities become as important as how they perceive themselves. In addition, the immigrant entrepreneurs' affective motivation served as an essential mechanism leading their strong self-image towards their aspirational goals. In addition, their descriptions indicate that most of them chose to start their ventures out of passion and enthusiasm rather than out of necessity.