Immigrants and entrepreneurship

Magnus Lofstrom and Chunbei Wang

IZA World of Labor, 2019, No 85v2, 85

Abstract: Immigrants are widely perceived to be highly entrepreneurial, contributing to economic growth and innovation, and self-employment is often viewed as a means of enhancing labor market integration and success among immigrants. Accordingly, many countries have established special visas and entry requirements to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Research supports some of these stances, but expectations may be too high. There is no strong evidence that self-employment is an effective tool of upward economic mobility among low-skilled immigrants. More broadly prioritizing high-skilled immigrants may prove to be more successful than focusing on entrepreneurship.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; self-employment; innovation; immigrants; immigration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J18 J31 J38 J61 L26 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/85/pdfs/immigrants-and-entrepreneurship.pdf (application/pdf)
https://wol.iza.org/articles/immigrants-and-entrepreneurship (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrants and entrepreneurship (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:2019:n:85

Access Statistics for this article

IZA World of Labor is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc

More articles in IZA World of Labor from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ().