East Asian and European entrepreneur immigrants in British Columbia, Canada: post-migration conduct and pre-migration context

Abstract

This paper addresses the limitations of theoretical models of immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship by observing that the pre- and post-migration experiences of business owners who entered Canada through the business immigration programme in the 1980s and 1990s were not, as these models assume, from the working class but members from the entrepreneur class. The orientation of that programme toward bolstering investments in provincial manufacturing sectors does not, however, coincide with business immigrants' accumulation strategies. Through an examination of two groups of immigrant manufacturers, East Asians and Europeans, the paper concludes that the post-migration accumulation strategies of each group differ because their pre-migration experiences with politico-institutional processes and structural developments in the (newly industrialising) economies of the Asia-Pacific and the (post-industrialising) Euro-American region differ. Although the 'new' East Asian and 'new' European immigrants face the same immigration selection process and the same opportunity structures in setting up a variety of light manufacturing rms in Canada, they differ substantially in their selection of a business language, in the continuation of their line of business, in their acquisition of production skills, in their reliance on product designs by others, and in their multicultural and co-ethnic employment practices.