A Review of Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurship: Perspectives on Unequal Spatialities

1 Introduction

Migrant entrepreneurship is of increasing scientific and policy interest today. Rates of business creation and self-employment in migrant communities appear to be higher than the national averages in many countries and play an important role in local economies (IOM, 2019; Juchno & Agafitei, 2017; UNCTAD, 2018). Furthermore, the spatialities of migrant entrepreneurship have changed dynamically in recent decades. Transnational life course trajectories, coupled with contemporary social and technological transformations, have created new opportunities for migrants to move goods, capital, and ideas across national borders for business purposes (Ambrosini, 2012; Portes et al., 2002). Transnational migrant entrepreneurship therefore addresses economic geography’s central concern, which is to study the relationship between economic activities and the spaces where they are carried out and circulate (Barnes, 2009).

In 2009, Yeung stated that transnational entrepreneurs should not be viewed “as merely localised agents of economic change, for they embody different spatialities of economic action and processes” (2009, p. 211). He advocated for paying more attention to how cross-border entrepreneurship produces transnational spaces and connects multiple locations. Today, transnational migrant entrepreneurship is a burgeoning field of research that combines economic, business, and social science approaches (Harima & Baron, 2020; Muñoz-Castro et al., 2019; Zapata-Barrero & Rezaei, 2020). Yet, knowledge is dispersed across disciplines.

We will advance this field of research by critically discussing the literature on transnational migrant entrepreneurship based on a database of 155 scientific journal articles published since 2009, thereby providing an overview of existing knowledge and suggesting avenues for future research on this topic. While acknowledging that transnational approaches have significantly improved our understanding of migrant entrepreneurship, we recognise that a spatialities perspective—concerned with how this phenomenon is positioned in space—needs further development. This is important because entrepreneurs do not act, exchange, and move in a vacuum but in concrete material spaces. We contribute to this endeavour by identifying three under-researched dimensions for future research which address the diversity of geographical locations, spatial connections, and spatial mobilities involved in transnational migrant entrepreneurship. Moreover, we emphasise that unequal opportunities available to transnational migrant entrepreneurs depend on social markers such as class, nationality, gender, and ethnicity.

The article comprises six parts. Following the introduction, the second section briefly introduces our understanding of transnational migrant entrepreneurship in relation to spatiality, and the third describes our methodological approach. The fourth part identifies major topical areas of study in the literature: (1) the business advantages of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, (2) the determinants of becoming a transnational migrant entrepreneur, (3) the transnational networks of migrants, (4) the economic impacts of transnational migrant entrepreneurship on home and host countries, and (5) whether local environments enable or deter entrepreneurial success. The fifth section discusses future avenues of research, and further develops our proposed dimensions to examine contemporary spatialities of migrant entrepreneurship. The conclusions set the findings in a wider context.

2 Defining Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurship in Relation to Spatiality

The term “transnational entrepreneur” was first popularised by Portes et al. (2002), who applied it to “self-employed immigrants whose business activities require frequent travel abroad and who depend for the success of their firms on their contacts and associates in another country, primarily their country of origin” (p. 287). Studies on this specific form of entrepreneurship lie at the crossroads between sociologically oriented research on ethnic economies and economic/business-oriented research on international entrepreneurship. In this article, we use the term transnational migrant entrepreneurship for the following reasons. Compared with international entrepreneurs, transnational migrant entrepreneurs have migration experience, which has been recently recognised as key asset for their business activities (Elo et al., 2018). Moreover, international entrepreneurship is predominantly concerned with firm analysis whereas transnational entrepreneurship examines the cross-border activities of individual entrepreneurs (Drori et al., 2009; Etemad, 2018). Transnational migrant entrepreneurs can also be distinguished from ethnic entrepreneurs based on their ability to simultaneously engage with multiple places and develop ties that extend beyond a single ethnic economy (Henn, 2012; Honig, 2020). In current studies, however, the categories of transnational, international, and ethnic entrepreneur often overlap. These different research traditions have only recently begun to communicate with one another, and the interdisciplinary field of transnational migrant entrepreneurship is starting to become more unified (Harima & Baron, 2020). Following the most recent developments, we define transnational migrant entrepreneurs as former and current migrants who use transnational migration experiences and networks to develop businesses that are active in more than one country (c.f. Sinkovics & Reuber, 2021). Empirically, this definition can be applied using both quantitative (e. g. surveys) and qualitative (e. g. interviews and focus groups) methods.

The multiplicity of places, connections, and mobilities within which transnational business activities occur lead us to rethink the notion of spatiality. In transnational settings the spatial ontology needs to shift “from a static and circumscribed characterization of migrant economies to a more dynamic and flexible one” (Valenzuela-Garcia et al., 2018, p. 49). How can we then conceptualise space and spatiality in this context? Concepts of space are at the heart of geography research. Although abstract and difficult to grasp, “it is precisely the multiplicities and heterogeneous nature of space and spatiality—as abstract and concrete, produced and producing, imagined and materialised, structured and lived, relational, relative and absolute—which lends the concept a powerful functionality that appeals to many geographers” (Shoorcheh, 2019, p. 64). Broadly speaking, we understand spatiality as an entanglement of materiality, which refers to the physical characteristics of places as well as social practice and symbolic meaning. Therefore, the everyday actions and experiences of individuals transform material spaces into social spaces (Riaño, 2017).

In the context of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, specific spatialities arise when individuals simultaneously act in multiple locations and progressively develop meaningful social, economic, political, and symbolic connections by conducting and maintaining diverse mobilities across borders. In this article we attempt to demonstrate how a focus on these spatialities can advance our understanding of transnational migrant entrepreneurship. Thus, we propose to adopt a processual and relational understanding of space, with a focus on the social interactions that (re)produce space over time, as well as the power hierarchies that shape spatial settings and individuals’ options (Massey, 2005). As we will show through our literature review, this conceptual approach contributes to the field of transnational migrant entrepreneurship by highlighting the role of unequal spatialities in shaping different opportunities and constraints among transnational migrant entrepreneurs.

3 Methodology

We created and reviewed an interdisciplinary corpus of 155 journal articles on transnational migrant entrepreneurship published since Yeung’s work in 2009, applying rigorous methods and best practices to identify the most relevant literature (Haddaway et al., 2020). Focusing exclusively on journal articles is a pragmatic choice frequently practised in literature reviews (Aliaga-Isla & Rialp, 2013). We combined “automated” methods (using alerts and information-gathering software such as Feed Informer to both monitor existing literature and discover new publications) and “manual” methods (adding references from ongoing keyword searches in online databases and from the bibliographies of already-obtained articles). A complete list of databases and journals monitored via automated research is provided in the online appendix to this article. Our corpus includes scientific journal articles in English, French, German, and Spanish (the main languages spoken by our team members).

We selected journal articles on transnational migrant entrepreneurship based on the definition presented in the previous section. To begin with, we researched academic databases and journals using the keywords “transnational”, “migrant”, “entrepreneurship”, and synonyms of these (e. g. “transnationalism”, “migration”, “immigrant”, “entrepreneur”, “business”, “start-up”, “firm”) in English, French, German, and Spanish (see online appendix). We then checked each article to ensure that they actually covered on the topic, which led us to exclude several articles because the transnational dimension of migrant entrepreneurship was not explicitly mentioned. In a third step, we manually reviewed the bibliographies of the selected articles to identify references that the automatic search had missed. We repeated this process with newly selected articles until we could find no further salient references. These steps led us to identify 155 relevant articles (listed in the online appendix) published between 2009 and 2019, and originating from various disciplines (mainly economics, business and management, sociology and geography). Despite the inclusion of non-anglophone articles, only seven are in French, German, or Spanish, thus highlighting the predominance of English-language publications in the field. Nevertheless, we believe that this corpus allows us to develop an extensive overview of the state of the art. In addition to our main corpus, we also considered a special issue of the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies on transnational migrant entrepreneurship (2020) to include the most recent literature.

We reviewed each publication to identify key definitions of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, research questions, theoretical lenses, regional contexts, methods, results, and research gaps. Our team collaboratively discussed and synthesised this information in an iterative process. We first developed an overview of our knowledge about transnational migrant entrepreneurship. We then applied a content analysis methodology (Mayring, 2014) to inductively develop a set of preliminary codes for each article (examples of codes include: “choice of location for transnational activities”, “role of governments in promoting transnational entrepreneurship”, “commitment to the home country through economic actions”, etc.), which we subsequently reorganised into broader categories. Inspired by other literature reviews (Piguet et al., 2018), we worked with specific categories to ensure coherent analysis. This process enabled us to identify five main topical areas of research on transnational migrant entrepreneurship, which will be discussed in the next section.

4 Major Topical Areas of Research in Recent Literature on Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurship

This section presents an overview of five major topical areas of research—including results and gaps—on transnational migrant entrepreneurship since 2009, highlighting the strengths and limitations of current research: the first focuses on identifying the specific advantages of transnational migrant entrepreneurship and aims to empirically test the extent to which migration experiences can, under certain circumstances, constitute an asset for transnational business-related activities; the second attempts to understand the reasons, determinants, and motivations that lead migrants to engage in transnational businesses; the third analyses the composition of migrants’ personal networks and their potential utility in transnational business-related activities; the fourth assesses the economic impact of transnational entrepreneurs on the places where they conduct business; and finally, the fifth examines the role of local environments in supporting or deterring transnational migrant entrepreneurship.

5 Towards a Spatially-Sensitive Approach in Future Research: Locations, Connections, and Mobilities

Our literature review reveals a dynamic field of cross-disciplinary transnational migrant entrepreneurship research. Currently, there appears to be a genuine attempt to shift the focus from a single-location and deficit-based perspective to an opportunity-oriented and transnational approach. This literature addresses important topics for geographers and other scholars interested in spatial dynamics. Yet, geographic contributions on transnational migrant entrepreneurship remain scarce, as seen in Figure 1.

Besides the willingness to move beyond simplistic and static conceptualisations of space in the field, there is much potential to develop a more spatially informed understanding of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, which would benefit geography research as well as other disciplines by enabling a greater focus on the dynamic spatialities of transnational migrant entrepreneurship and the power relations that shape opportunities for different groups of entrepreneurs. We will now discuss these gaps in more detail.

Figure 1:

Overview of the disciplinary orientation of transnational migrant entrepreneurship studies published in scientific journals between 2009 and 2019, n=155

First, the range of locations selected by scholars for empirical work on transnational migrant entrepreneurship is, in most cases, limited to countries of the Global North. This results in most studies focusing on the destination countries of transnational entrepreneurs with migratory trajectories from the Global South to the North. Figure 2 shows that almost 70 % of the articles in our study corpus focus on migrants who move from low-income countries in Asia, Africa, and South America to high-income countries in Europe or North America. This reproduces traditional representations of transnational migrant entrepreneurship as an exclusively South-to-North trajectory and downplays the diversity of current mobilities including South-to-South trajectories. Some scholars expand this view by examining migrants who move from high-income countries to low-income countries (Elo, 2016; Harima & Vermuri, 2015) or between two high-income countries (Lundberg & Rehnfors, 2018). However, the richness of South-to-South mobility patterns is still largely overlooked. We thus call for more attention to the diversity of transnational migrant entrepreneurs’ spatial trajectories.

Second, there is scant research on the diversity of connections that transnational migrant entrepreneurs create between locations across national borders. Most research on transnational migrant entrepreneurship examines connections between destination and home countries. Yet, as pointed out in a study on Moroccan entrepreneurs in Milan (Solano, 2020), transnational migrant entrepreneurship today is characterised by “multifocality” rather than “bifocality”. By disregarding the diversity of existing connections, authors reproduce a simplistic view of migration that does not correspond to contemporary transnationalism characterised by multisitedness and resulting from onward movements (Moret, 2018), facilitated international travel, lower transportation costs, digital technologies, and the development of transnationally located families (Riaño, 2017). Although transnational migrant entrepreneurs are, to a certain extent, conditioned by their nationalities and migration backgrounds, they can potentially use their agency to develop ties beyond national or ethnic groups, and connect with multiple places through entrepreneurial practices. Therefore, we need to expand our understanding of how transnational migrant entrepreneurs develop connections with multiple locations and create social, economic, and political relationships.

Third, insufficient attention has been paid to the diverse mobilities developed by transnational migrant entrepreneurs. Many studies have shown that engaging in transnational business activities requires travelling and/or moving goods, capital, or ideas across national borders (Ambrosini, 2012; Dannecker & Cakir, 2016). While spatial mobility is an essential dimension of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, studies that focus on how circulation patterns shape transnational entrepreneurial spaces remain scarce. In order to gain a better understanding of the spatialities of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, we propose applying a mobility lens (Cresswell, 2010; Sheller & Urry, 2006) to seriously study if, when, where, and how transnational migrant entrepreneurs move, and across which borders. This involves paying specific attention to the multi-scalar movements of transnational migrant entrepreneurs (e. g. home, neighbourhood, city, region, international), the different material means used to move (e. g. telephone, computer, streets, cars, trains, boats, planes), and the diversity of mobility patterns embodied (e. g. linear, circular, cyclical, pendular, onward, repeated returns). Moreover, in our technologically connected world, transnational business activities increasingly involve moving goods, ideas, and capital via digital means, which reduces the need for the spatial mobility of entrepreneurs (Harima & Baron, 2020). Focusing on the complexity of mobility and immobility patterns involved in transnational migrant entrepreneurship would not only deepen our understanding of how entrepreneurs create transnational spaces but also challenge static and ethnic biases in the field.

Figure 2:

Origin and destination countries of migrants in transnational migrant entrepreneurship studies published in scientific journals between 2009 and 2019, n=155

Finally, it is important to examine the diverse spatialities involved in transnational migrant entrepreneurship from a power relations perspective to understand how such spatialities relate to social inequality. Particularly in the business and management fields, authors tend to overemphasise the idea that transnational linkages constitute a competitive advantage for economic success without considering that structural inequalities create different geometries of power among transnational migrant entrepreneurs and thus different opportunities to benefit from transnational resources. Zapata-Barrero and Rezaei (2020) accurately highlight that most typologies of transnational migrant entrepreneurship are based on motivations and social status but ignore dimensions of inequality such as access to mobility, space, and territory. Opportunities for transnational migrant entrepreneurs to mobilise skills are not context-neutral but depend on how specific markers of social difference (e. g. gender, nationality, or education) are valued in the locations where they develop business activities. Also, inequalities of power between locations in rich and poor countries, and their impact on transnational migrant entrepreneurship, need further examination. Different countries implement different policies and agendas to attract, promote or discourage transnational migrant entrepreneurship (Tung, 2008). Power relations and mobility regimes shape hierarchies of opportunities and constraints for different categories of transnational migrant entrepreneurs (Sandoz, 2021).

Overall, there is great potential to move beyond static or ethnic framings of transnational migrant entrepreneurship and to strengthen our understanding of this topic. From a conceptual perspective, this could mean deeper engagement with the diversity of spatialities involved, as well as examining emerging webs of geographical locations, connections, and mobilities. From a methodological perspective, this could mean diversifying the current range of approaches to include digital (Kozinets, 2020), mobile (Boas et al., 2020), and multi-sited (Marcus, 1998) methods in future research.

To go one step further, we propose some examples of questions for each of the three dimensions put forth in our analysis (locations, connections, and mobilities) to examine contemporary spatialities of migrant entrepreneurship (Figure 3). These questions arise from our critical literature review and build on the main shortcomings of current research, which we identified.

6 Conclusion

In this article we critically reviewed the literature on transnational migrant entrepreneurship published since 2009. We observed an increasing interest in this topic across a broad range of disciplines. Scholars have intensely studied the business advantages, characteristics, and networks of transnational migrant entrepreneurs as well as their impacts on specific sites (and vice versa). Yet, we observe that the new spatialities of transnational migrant entrepreneurship have not yet received adequate scholarly attention.

To address this gap, we proposed three crucial dimensions for future research which have been under-researched in past and current work, and which address the diversity of geographical locations, spatial connections, and spatial mobilities involved in transnational migrant entrepreneurship. We also advanced the following reflections: first, we argued that a processual and relational approach is necessary to understand how transnational entrepreneurial spaces are dynamically created and maintained through the everyday practices of individuals. Although geographers have so far marginally contributed to the field of transnational migrant entrepreneurship, the “relational turn” in economic geography (Bathelt & Glückler, 2003; 2018; Yeung, 2003) has addressed many of the shortcomings that we identified in this article and could therefore provide valuable tools for advancing our spatial perspective on this topic. Second, we encouraged researchers to include more diverse and multi-sited approaches to better grasp the diversity of the spatialities involved, particularly regarding transnational migrant entrepreneurship in the Global South and connections beyond the host and home countries of the studied entrepreneurs. Third, we suggested that in addition to empowering views that shed a positive light on transnational migrant entrepreneurship, more research is needed that addresses persistent social inequalities. It is important to ask how power relations between and across geographical locations and social groups shape the practices of entrepreneurs. In particular, the role of spatial mobility and immobility—and their relationship with social mobility—has not yet been sufficiently addressed in research on transnational migrant entrepreneurship.

In terms of future research, the discussion on how social mobility relates to transnational migrant entrepreneurship is immature but highly promising. Highlighting the role of locations, connections, and mobilities is important, not only to grasp the agency and creative potential of migrants but also to recognise that opportunities and constraints are unequally distributed across social groups and places. We need to advance our understanding of unequal spatialities in transnational migrant entrepreneurship and identify the mechanisms that enable individual and family businesses to move forward economically and socially. This is important not only for research, but also in the development of more inclusive places for migrant entrepreneurs, which could lead to better opportunities for success.