Linchpin Thoughts

Finding the edge of the literature: Immigrant entrepreneurs

Immigrant entrepreneurship is a controversial topic among the masses. Immigrants tend to feel low status and to be marginalized socially and geographically. Here, on the outer boundaries of mainstream society (in literal and figurative ways), immigrants find ways to “make it work”. Often criticized for their “informality”, migrants could also be seen as able to improvise and succeed in the absence of complete information or “sufficient” resources. Ironically, immigrants are often not lauded for this thrift and creativity. They are often despised or made society’s scapegoats for being “illegal” and doing “illegal” things (which is the term some use for immigrants’ informal ways).

Some political advisers have even written complete books on how to publicly describe immigrants in a way that will highlight their criminal nature, and package them as a threat to culture as well as to tangible resources. On the other side of the debate, migrants are recognized for putting more into the system than they take out economically. They are also seen for their wealth of cultural resources and for their thrift and ability to do so much with so little. Additionally, many migrants are not only thrifty in terms of doing a lot with very few tangible resources or merely “getting by” economically, but are at the head of powerful enterprises such as eBay and facebook.

Which paints the true story of immigrant enterprise? Are migrants illegal workers that threaten to take scarce resources from the native born, or are they hardworking contributors to society? Perhaps the real question is why both of those perspectives exist side by side in American society today. In fact, those opinions span party lines and social class. Migration seems to be one of the most divisive political issues in the United States today.

Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich (1990) noted that the immigrant business sector is complex in that it intersects with the primary and secondary sectors of the labor market and intersects with formal and informal sectors (READ: the immigrant business sector is not any one of those or exclusive to any one of those, just as no one of those things is exclusive to the immigrant business sector!).

This can be seen in the three figures below. Note that the scaling (Eg. The ratio of formal to informal or primary to secondary) is not accurate and not known in the case of formal/informal labor. The point of the three figures is to show that primary labor takes place in both formal and informal sectors, as does secondary labor. Finally, the immigrant sector overlaps with all four types of labor: formal primary, formal secondary, informal primary, and informal secondary labor. Although migrants are often depicted as operating mostly in the informal secondary labor sector, this does not apply to all migrant experiences.                                                                              

 

Somewhere at the intersection of the literature on informality, public opinions about migration and ethnic economies there are new frontiers to explore related to questions about how immigrants do business in each of these four quadrants.