Introduction

Immigrant businesses illustrate the ever more visible footprint migrants are leaving in Western societies over the last years. Over the past decades, most Western countries including the Netherlands have seen a notable increase of immigrant business ownership, especially for migrants originating from nonWestern countries (it’s 2007, CBS Stateline 2009). While immigrant entrepreneurship can be a promising alley enabling individuals to gain economic mobility and social recognition (Van den Tillaart 2001, Chennai 1997), it is commonly discredited on the grounds of being low value-added, little innovative, and marginally profitable (Light & Rosenstein 1995, Waldinger 1996, Kloosterman, Rath & Van der Leun 1997).

Explorative studies by Van den Tillaart (2001), EIM (2004) and Rusinovic (2006), however, suggest that the traditionally gloomy image of migrant entrepreneurship needs to be reassessed as a “new” group of migrant entrepreneurs – namely the children of migrants or the so-called second generation – has started businesses in more promising sectors of the economy. From a theoretical perspective, the thesis contributes to the field by
broadening our understanding of migrant entrepreneurship Most of the current literature on migrant entrepreneurship has emphasized human and social capital is an important driver for becoming an entrepreneur (see, e.g., Fairlie 1999, Clark & Drinkwater 2000, Ram et al. 2000, Levent et al. 2003, Arenius & De Clercq 2005, Wilson et al. 2007, Andersson & Hammarstedt 2010), while I attempt to address the outcomes of migrant ventures and want to focus more on firm and firms’ strategy characteristics.

Research Problem

Exploring migrant entrepreneurship has become an interesting and important research field covering many issues (Kloosterman & Rath, 2003). Therefore, this thesis takes a broad approach that allows taking the whole context of migrant entrepreneurship into account. More specifically, migrant entrepreneurship in Dutch cities encompasses many important issues, for example:

• To what extent does entrepreneurship contribute to happiness, success
  and upward social mobility?
• What is their contribution to the local economies?
• How does migrant entrepreneurship affect integration?