The influence of length of stay on immigrant entrepreneurship

Length of stay, a concept not properly addressed in migration studies, refers to the usual period spent by an immigrant in the host country up to the moment he/she is surveyed for research purpose. This paper adopted a mix approach that blends review, synthetisation and discussion of existing research to apprehend the use of this concept in the literature and draw useful insights on the extent to which it influences business establishment and performance. Our discussion concluded with the following notes: first, immigrant entrepreneurship researchers have so far favoured length of stay over firm age in predicting the entrepreneurial outcomes. Second, length of stay was used in two different ways: backward and forward. Third, immigrants with short lengths of stay or short settlement intentions tend to have lower propensities for self-employment compared to their peers who have longer settlement intentions, and they are most likely to locate their businesses within their ethnic communities. In contrary, immigrants with long length of stay or long settlement intention are in better positions to understand the mainstream market, more likely to behave like natives, have higher propensities to start a business, and prefer to locate their businesses outside the co-ethnic community.