The Mobility of Entrepreneurs and Capital: Taiwanese Capital‐Linked Migration

Abstract

Much of the literature concerning international investment focuses on the movement of capital or trade flows and does not cover the persons who migrate with the capital, even though in a globalizing economic system new conditions emerge for the international migration of capitalists. On the one hand, capital owners have been recruited directly by business migration programmes in countries such as Canada, Australia, and the US. On the other hand, global economic restructuring, one part of which entails increasing foreign direct investment from a wider range of countries, has induced the migration of an entrepreneurial/managerial class. This article analyses the relation between the mobility of capital and of entrepreneurs by investigating Taiwan’s capital‐linked migrations. It aims to show that people can integrate migration and capital investment as a strategy to best serve their interests. Although their moves are mediated and constrained by different migration channels (governmental policies, recruitment agencies, transnational corporations, etc.), capital‐linked migrants are not passive players in international migration systems. They actively position themselves with regard to migration channels and select active strategies that best suit their objectives. Sometimes immigration serves capitalists’ interest in capital accumulation, at other times capital investment serves as the means for securing a second nationality. In this way, Taiwanese capitalist mobility has been incorporated into the open‐ended logic of flexible capitalism itself. Such understanding of the processes of capital‐linked migration and its implications contribute to new theories of the relationship between international flows of capital and international migration.