Exploring the Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Their Entrepreneurial Engagement

Abstract

This study explores how immigrants perceive their entrepreneurial selves and their strategies to find opportunities when migrating to a new country. It focuses on their journey to find these opportunities and their experiences from the endeavour. Thus, it focuses on the conditions of immigrant entrepreneurs and their experiences by capturing entrepreneurs’ experiences across different phases of their entrepreneurial endeavours. The article addresses the recent surge in the entrepreneurship literature focusing on immigrant entrepreneurship, including its consequences for integration, job creation possibilities and relationship to the national economy. Findings show that immigrant entrepreneurs adopt a multi-strategy opportunity approach during the early phase that then influences their self-image. Furthermore, for the immigrant entrepreneurs included in this study, identifying and capturing these business opportunities become as important as how they perceive themselves. In addition, the immigrant entrepreneurs’ affective motivation served as an essential mechanism leading their strong self-image towards their aspirational goals. In addition, their descriptions indicate that most of them chose to start their ventures out of passion and enthusiasm rather than out of necessity.