Switching it up: migrant entrepreneurs as the integration facilitators

Extant studies on migrant entrepreneurship have observed how these entrepreneurs have made considerable contributions to their local communities through their businesses, in economic, social and even cultural terms. Applying the lens of integration, this paper seeks to explore how entrepreneurs, with lived experiences of being ‘refugees/migrants’, support integration processes for other local residents; migrant and non-migrant alike. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to moves towards redressing the critiques of understandings of integration that focus on the migrant as the sole subjects of a (primarily) one-way process of adaptation to their host society (Klarenbeck, 2021). Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with 30 entrepreneurs living in one city in the UK, it demonstrates how these entrepreneurs enable processes of integration for those around them - including customers, employees and the wider public - in multi-dimensional ways. Moreover, it demonstrates their purposeful intention in assuming this role of ‘integration facilitator’, filling perceived gaps in existing support infrastructures. Therefore, this paper argues, through their actions the entrepreneurs provide a critique, implicitly and at times explicitly, of an austere and hostile Britain. This paper seeks bring debates on migrant integration into conversation with migrant entrepreneurship, shifting the focus from the migrant as the subject of these processes to the enabler.