Events

Prof. Dan Wang
Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise
Columbia Business School
Columbia University

How does entrepreneurial strategy vary by a business owner’s immigration status?  Immigrants are often touted as more entrepreneurial than their non-immigrant peers, but heterogeneity in immigrant status creates variation in access to resources and networks that can factor into venture success.  Immigration status often reflects one’s social position in a host country, permitting some immigrants access to more lucrative economic opportunities and better social services while excluding other immigrants.  With a sample of 1,004 immigrant founders, 62% of whom are undocumented, we analyze applications they each submitted to a California state administered program that distributes grants to support the growth of their ventures.  Findings reveal that undocumented immigrants — who represent the group with the most vulnerable immigration status — are most likely to plan for the expansion of their businesses, with a higher proportion of their projected spending devoted to capital expenditures (CapEx) than other immigrant groups.  Furthermore, from a natural experiment, wherein some applicants received a higher grant amount than they expected, undocumented immigrants were more likely to invest the unanticipated surplus into expanding their businesses than immigrants with other status.  These results permit novel theorization into how immigration status shapes an immigrant founders’ critical agency, which in turn, manifests in their decisions about entrepreneurial strategy.