How kinship resources alleviate structural disadvantage: self-employment duration among refugees and labor migrants

Aliaksei Kazlou,Karl Wennberg

doi:10.1108/jec-03-2020-0025

Abstract

PurposeEconomic integration of refugees remains a challenge for developed countries. Although refugees differ greatly from labor migrants in available resources and motivation toward self-employment, prevailing studies on minority and ethnic entrepreneurship tend to lump these different categories of migrants together. Based on theories of migrants’ economic embeddedness, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which family- and kinship-based resources affect self-employment duration among refugees and labor migrants.Design/methodology/approachBased on Cox regression models, this longitudinal study estimates the self-employment duration of 10,519 refugees and 2,503 labor migrants starting businesses in Sweden in the period 2006–2012.FindingsResults reveal that while refugees are at a disadvantage to labor migrants in terms of self-employment duration, their higher level of family embeddedness in part helps them overcome these disadvantages. For refugees but not for labor migrants, co-location in an ethnic enclave also lowers the risk of them becoming unemployed after a spell in entrepreneurship.Originality/valueThis original paper provides empirical and theoretical contributions to research on migrants’ self-employment success. It also discusses contributions for research on entrepreneurs’ social embeddedness and refugees’ entrepreneurship.

Highlights

Recent decades have seen increasingly large waves of uprooted individuals and families migrating across borders as refugees, with a need to establish themselves in a new country
When it comes to industries of operation, 20% of self-employed refugees are active in the hotels and restaurant industry, compared to only 8% among labor migrants
In this study, we set out to examine the duration of self-employment among labor migrants and refugees in Sweden using a longitudinal design with a rich set of individual- and familylevel factors

Summary

Introduction

Recent decades have seen increasingly large waves of uprooted individuals and families migrating across borders as refugees, with a need to establish themselves in a new country. Many host countries are increasingly open to migrating entrepreneurs. Distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article Journal of Enterprising commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors.

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