Migration and Migrant Entrepreneurship in a German-Polish border region

Abstract

Social sciences are interested in ethnic entrepreneurship as a chance for migrants to (better) integrate into the host labour market, and in consequence into a host society. Th e multidimen-sional models capture a wide range of factors at the bottom of the economic behaviour of migrant entrepreneurs, and they increasingly consider that migrants might profi t in business from sustaing their social ties with the country of their origin. Looking at Polish migrant entrepreneurs in eastern German regions bordering to Poland we plead for a relational perspective which considers migrants' business activities in relation to the patterns of trans-border residential mobility and complex social and economic transformations in Polish and German border regions.