ABSTRACT
Contrary to the tide of popular anti-immigration sentiment currently washing over much of the destination countries in the global North (Lesińska, 2014) and global South (Banda and Mawadza, 2014; Whitaker and Giersch, 2015), a dispassionate consideration of the relevant evidence suggests that immigrants make a positive socio-economic contribution to their destination countries, not least by introducing demographic and cultural diversity (Sepulveda et al., 2011). As well as their vital contribution as workers in essential but often unpopular sectors of the economy (Virdee, 2014), such as cleaning, care work, catering or construction, they are also playing a growing role as business owners. In the UK it is estimated that one in seven new start-ups are owned by immigrants 1 (Duedil, 2014), part of a wider trend in which “entrepreneurship by immigrants is increasingly important to Western capitalist societies” (Low and Collins, 2007, 16). With regard to the gender distribution of these migrant entrepreneurs, this same report (Duedil, 2014) shows that a lower proportion of migrant women start businesses compared to British women (25.9% and 29.1% respectively); however, there are exceptional nationalities where migrant women entrepreneurs actually outnumber men (for example, Thai, Filipino and Vietnamese women entrepreneurs). Moreover, the proportion of female entrepreneurs is higher than that of the British-born among over 60 nationalities, including Zimbabwean, Singaporean, Chinese, Russian or Brazilian (ibid). This significant presence of migrant women entrepreneurs challenges the standard image of dependency on men and labour market subordination (Morokvasic, 1999).
