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Migrant Entrepreneurship: Mapping Cross-Border Mobilities and Exploring the Role of Spatial Mobility Capital

Project Title
Migrant Entrepreneurship: Mapping Cross-Border Mobilities and Exploring the Role of Spatial Mobility Capital
Description
Social and technological transformations, including highly diversified migrant populations and facilitated international travel and communication, have intensified the phenomenon of cross-border migrant entrepreneurship. This involves migrants physically moving themselves across local and transnational borders for business opportunities, as well as migrants running transnational businessesfrom their places of residence. This project will map the diverse cross-border mobilities of first generation migrant entrepreneurs and examine whether spatial mobility constitutes an asset or not for migrant entrepreneurship, and under what conditions. It uses mixed methods and includes case studies from Switzerland, Spain and South America. The main research questions are: (a) What types of capacities for spatial mobility exist among migrant entrepreneurs, and why do such differences exist? (b) To what extent does the capacity of spatial mobility constitute an asset for migrant entrepreneurship and the livelihoods of migrants, and under what conditions can it be transformed into social and economic capital? Studying cross-border migrant entrepreneurship offers a unique opportunity to understand the shift from long-term and permanent migration to increasingly more temporary and fluid mobilities, thus advancing our empirical and theoretical understanding of the Migration-Mobility Nexus.
Principal Investigator
Status
Ongoing
Investigators
Mittmasser, Christina
Organisations
Internal ID
39868
Identifier
https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/1917
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  • Publication
    Open Access
    Theories of voluntary and forced migration
    (London and New York: Robert McLeman and François Gemenne, 2018)
    Piguet, Etienne 
    No clearcut delineation can be made between voluntary and forced migration, but it is fair to say that most attempts at theorizing migration – in the sense of suggesting general frameworks of understanding based on regularities1 – address cases where potential migrants retain a fairly high level of agency and are not “forced” to move. On the contrary, as stated by Zolberg: “The most obvious thing about refugee flows is [for most social scientists] that they are unruly” (Zolberg 1983: 25), and thus hardly suitable for theorization. However, with the growing salience of concepts such as “mixed migration” (Van Hear, Brubaker, and Bessa 2009) and “survival migration” (Betts 2013), and calls to go beyond the structure versus agency dualism in migration studies (Bakewell 2010), a promising perspective of investigation opens up for reembedding forced migration within a more general migration theory framework or within the even broader framework of a theory of social transformation, development and crisis (Castles 2003; Lubkemann 2008; Van Hear 2010; de Haas 2014). As I have argued elsewhere, such a move would also be fruitful in the specific case of environmentally driven migration studies (Piguet 2013), a subfield which developed to a large extent in isolation but is marked by a shift from monocausal environmental “push” theories toward “a greater integration of context, including micro-level, meso-level, and macro-level interactions” (Hunter, Luna, and Norton 2015: 377). Achieving a full reconciliation of these schools of thought is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I will try here to pave the way by giving a brief overview of some of the main theoretical directions suggested by researchers of both voluntary and forced migration.