Event Details

I studied 20,000 skilled migrants in Australia and found entrepreneurship is unstable. Many start but few continue. Men enter more often, while women face higher risks of leaving. Experience and recognition help, but discrimination creates instability.

This study examines skilled migrants’ employment and entrepreneurship in Australia. Using a three-wave longitudinal panel of 20,000 skilled migrants, it investigates how migrants enter, persist in, and exit self-employment during the early years of settlement. Results show that entrepreneurship is highly volatile: while it attracts steady inflows from both employment and non-employment, exit rates are substantially higher than in wage work, with only a small minority sustaining ventures across all waves. Subgroup analyses reveal sharp differences. Men are more likely to enter entrepreneurship, but women who do so face greater risks of downward exits into non-employment. Prior entrepreneurial experience and local credential recognition emerge as the strongest predictors of persistence, enabling migrants to transform fragile liminality into more durable practice. By contrast, discrimination and skill discounting reproduce structural liminality, resulting in ventures that are short-lived and unstable. The study advances liminality theory by showing how institutional barriers not only generate states of suspension but also stratify them across subgroups, reframing migrant entrepreneurship as a dynamic, uneven, and processual passage situated between constraint and agency.