Immigrant entrepreneurship in sydney: australia’s leading global city

Abstract

Sydney is Australia’s largest and most cosmopolitan global city and the fourth greatest immigrant city in the world today. Immigrant entrepreneurs have been a part of Sydney’s long immigration history. This paper explores the complex and uneven contemporary dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship in Sydney through the lens of Korean, Muslim, and recently arrived refugee entrepreneurs. First-generation Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in the Sydney restaurant industry cluster in the Sydney CBD and key suburbs of Korean immigrant settlement. Their story permits an understanding of the neighborhood impact of immigrant entrepreneurship and the contradictions underlying the emerging suburban ethnic precincts—Koreatown in this instance—in cosmopolitan neighborhoods. The experience of Muslim immigrant entrepreneurs in Sydney explores the role of religion is Sydney’s immigrant entrepreneurship landscape. Refugee entrepreneurs face greater barriers to entrepreneurship than other immigrants but have the highest rate of entrepreneurship of all immigrants. The explanation for this apparent paradox, and in understanding the dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship in Sydney overall, lies in the importance of looking at immigrant (and refugee) agency and their determination to make a better life for themselves and their family in Australia and rejecting a deficit approach to immigrant entrepreneurship.