Can entrepreneurship help immigrants break through barriers and build belonging?

How do immigrants integrate into their host communities? Government programs help. Labor market access matters. But many immigrants forge their own path — by starting businesses. Entrepreneurship allows them to bypass systemic barriers: unrecognized qualifications, language limitations, outright discrimination. This study asks a deeper question. It is not just about why immigrants start businesses, but how the act of entrepreneurship itself becomes a vehicle for social and economic integration.

Through rich case studies of immigrant entrepreneurs in Jönköping, Sweden, Quang Evansluong, Marcela Ramirez-Pasillas, and Huong Nguyen Bergström trace the journey from exclusion to belonging. What emerges is a three-phase model — breaking-ice, breaking-in, and breaking-out — that reframes entrepreneurship not as an isolated economic activity but as a progressive path toward integration.

What We Studied

The researchers conducted an inductive, process-oriented case study of four immigrant entrepreneurs in Jönköping, Sweden. The entrepreneurs came from Cameroon, Lebanon, Mexico, and Assyria. Their businesses ranged from restaurants and hair salons to IT programming firms. Over three years, the team conducted 60 in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs and their networks — family members, colleagues, mentors, customers.

Secondary data complemented the interviews: social media posts, local news coverage, and direct observations of business operations. The theoretical framework combined acculturation theory (how immigrants adapt to new cultural environments), opportunity creation theory (how entrepreneurs generate rather than discover opportunities), and research on breaking strategies in immigrant entrepreneurship.

The key contribution is an inductive model showing that integration unfolds through three iterative, non-linear phases, each defined by a different relationship between the entrepreneur and the host society. The phases are not sequential steps to be checked off. They overlap. They circle back. They are messy. That realism is part of what makes the model useful.

Key Insights

Phase 1: Breaking-ice — opportunity born from exclusion

The journey begins with rejection. Immigrants face closed doors in the labor market — job applications go unanswered, qualifications are dismissed, cultural barriers feel insurmountable. In this phase, entrepreneurial ideas emerge as a response to exclusion. One entrepreneur, unable to find hair products suitable for African hair types, opened her own salon. Another, tired of fruitless job applications, started a Lebanese restaurant in a market with no such offering.

The entrepreneurial impulse here is not primarily strategic. It is emotional. Identity-driven. The immigrant is pushed to create because the alternative — continued marginalization — is unbearable. The theoretical frame maps this to Berry's marginalization strategy in acculturation: the immigrant is excluded from the host society and struggles to maintain connections with the home culture. Entrepreneurship becomes the first act of agency.

Policymakers who see immigrant entrepreneurship as purely economic are missing half the picture. The initial decision to start a business is often a survival response to social exclusion, not a calculated market entry. Support programs should acknowledge this emotional dimension and provide not just business training but psychological and social resources.

Phase 2: Breaking-in — building bridges through business

Once the venture is running, it becomes a platform for integration. Entrepreneurs interact daily with local customers, suppliers, and institutional actors — building relationships that would be difficult to forge through employment alone. The business creates a reason for contact. It gives the immigrant a role in the community that is defined by contribution rather than by origin.

In this phase, entrepreneurs actively seek local knowledge: how to navigate municipal regulations, how to market to Swedish consumers, how to build supplier networks. They learn by doing. Each transaction, each negotiation, each customer complaint is a lesson in cultural adaptation. The business is both the product and the curriculum.

Integration programs that separate language training, cultural orientation, and business development are working against the natural grain of how immigrant entrepreneurs actually integrate. The business itself is the integration mechanism. Programs that support the venture support the integration.

Phase 3: Breaking-out — from survival to growth

In the final phase, the entrepreneur moves beyond survival and local embeddedness toward broader market engagement. The business expands. New customer segments emerge. The entrepreneur's network extends beyond the immigrant community and the immediate neighborhood into mainstream business circles. Some entrepreneurs at this stage begin mentoring other immigrants — passing forward the integration pathway they followed.

This phase corresponds to Berry's integration strategy: the entrepreneur maintains connections to their heritage culture while fully participating in the host society. The business is no longer a coping mechanism. It is a source of identity, status, and economic contribution.

The transition from breaking-in to breaking-out is where many immigrant entrepreneurs get stuck. They have a viable local business but lack the networks, capital, or institutional knowledge to scale. Targeted support at this stage — mentoring, access to mainstream business networks, export assistance — can accelerate both business growth and deeper societal integration.

The process is iterative, not linear

The three phases do not unfold in a neat sequence. Entrepreneurs move back and forth. A setback in the business can push someone back to breaking-ice. A new opportunity can catapult someone from breaking-in to breaking-out. The model captures this messiness, which is one of its strengths. Real integration is not a straight line. Neither is entrepreneurship.

Support programs designed as linear progressions — first language, then training, then business launch — do not match the actual experience. Flexible, ongoing support that adapts to the entrepreneur's current phase is more effective than rigid stage-gate models.

Takeaways

Recognize entrepreneurship as an integration mechanism

Starting a business is not just an economic activity for immigrants. It is a social process that creates connections, builds identity, and generates belonging. Policy frameworks should treat immigrant entrepreneurship as part of the integration toolkit, not as a separate economic development category.

Design support for each phase

Breaking-ice entrepreneurs need encouragement and basic startup support. Breaking-in entrepreneurs need help navigating local institutions and building customer bases. Breaking-out entrepreneurs need access to broader networks and growth capital. One-size-fits-all programs miss these distinct needs.

Value qualitative, lived experience in research

The richness of this study comes from its method. Sixty interviews over three years. Four deeply analyzed cases. The three-phase model could not have emerged from survey data alone. For scholars studying entrepreneurship and integration, this is a reminder that process research requires process methods.

Impact

This study contributes a dynamic, process-based model to a field that has often treated immigrant entrepreneurship as a static phenomenon — counting businesses, measuring revenue, comparing survival rates. Evansluong, Ramirez-Pasillas, and Nguyen Bergström show that the real story is in the journey, not the destination. The three-phase model offers both researchers and practitioners a vocabulary for understanding where immigrant entrepreneurs are in their integration process and what kind of support they need at each stage.

While this study does not focus on family businesses, the findings resonate with business families that include immigrant members or that operate in multicultural contexts. The dynamics of identity, belonging, and community-building through enterprise are not exclusive to immigrant entrepreneurs — they echo in any family that has used business as a vehicle for establishing itself in a new environment.

Recommendations

• For immigrant entrepreneurs: Your business is doing more than generating income. It is building your place in the community. Lean into the relationships it creates — with customers, suppliers, and local institutions — as pathways to deeper integration.
• For policymakers: Integrate entrepreneurship support into immigration and settlement programs. The evidence shows that business creation accelerates social integration in ways that employment alone often cannot.
• For support organizations: Tailor programs to the entrepreneur's phase. Early-stage immigrants need different resources than those ready to scale. Flexible, phase-aware support is more effective than standardized programs.
• For researchers: Longitudinal, qualitative methods are essential for understanding integration as a process. Cross-sectional surveys capture snapshots; they cannot reveal the iterative, non-linear dynamics this study documents.