"Sell” Canada for less: the motives and success for business immigrants and the policy implications
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Date
2016
Authors
Zhu, Yu
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Abstract
According to Citizenship and Immigration of Canada, Canada has been competing with the United States, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and the emerging economics, especially in the Asian Pacific region to attract the limited number of active entrepreneurial talents to Canada, in order to bring in people with business skills and investments. However, business immigrants came under various Canadian immigrant investor schemes that have been underperforming according to recent governmental reports. Policymakers expect newcomers under the investor and entrepreneur scheme to boost Canadian economy, to help Canada integrate into the global economy and assimilate into Canadian society. However, the inferior economic performance of business immigrants indicates that the policy making might have certain limitations and a boundary. Such boundary and limitations are caused by the generalization and lack of understanding of the business immigrant population. Business immigrants emigrate from their home country with different motivations and diverse pre-migration backgrounds (industry, language fluency, local connections to host country, etc). Currently, immigration entrepreneurship research dominantly focuses on the post-migration adaptation and overlooks the pre-migration backgrounds and motives. It is widely identified in the field that the post-migration adaptation and acculturation is correlated to the business immigrants’ pre-migration settings. However, very little research has been conducted in both pre-migration and post-migration settings collectively. In this thesis, I argued that (1) immigration motives and pre-migration backgrounds of business immigrants are critical to predict the success in the post-migration setting; (2) development of four prototypes of business immigrants based on empirical data where the prototypes emerged resulting from in-depth interviews with the local business immigrants in Manitoba; 3) conceptualized dynamic transformation process of business immigrants based on three timelines, namely home country, in transformation and host country.
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Business Immigrant, Entrepreneurship