Immigration and economic development: a symposium.

• Author: Tribble, Marcela

In this issue, our second in the "Symposium on Immigration and Economic Development," we offer a collection of papers on immigrant entrepreneurship, location decisions and the brain drain.

Entrepreneurship

One concern in the immigration and economic development field is the extent to which immigrant entrepreneurs contribute to economic growth and development, how they go about making their contribution and how government can assist them. AnnaLee Saxenian, with help from her colleagues, Yasuyuki Motoyama and Xiaohong Quan, study Indian and Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, California. Saxenian, et al., document the unprecedented contribution immigrant entrepreneurs made not only in California, but also to the U.S. economy on the whole. This is perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of how immigrants used networks to develop businesses, especially securing start-up capital, creating markets and building labor forces. Of special interest is how immigrant entrepreneurs built partnerships with others in their home countries to the benefit of both. Hadewijch van Delft, Cees Gorter and Peter Nijkamp examine ethnic entrepreneurship in several European cities looking at successful strategies and programs employed by public decision-makers to expand or grow businesses.

Location Decisions

Immigration literature often talks about pull factors--reasons why immigrants are drawn to certain localities--and push factor--reasons why they leave their homelands. Sandra Kaufman, William Olson and Miron Kaufman, using a very innovative analytic technique borrowed from physics, try to determine whether immigrants to the United States located where they did either...