I am studying these enterprises as an attempt to understand how theoretically, these enterprises, conceptualised as occurring in developing society, differ from those occurring in western/developed ones. First, I want to contribute to the growing immigrant entrepreneurial literature, and also interrogate it. On the flip side of it, the study is also a contribution to south-south migration which is often difficult to find in the migration literature.
One key objective is to examine Nigerian migrants' propensity to self employment, but also I want to explore how their activities serve as continuity, or discontinuity/break to those pursued by their fore bearers in Accra. Of course issues about operational strategies and profiling will also be explored.
I will be interested in suggestions that point to appropriate methodological strategies including sampling, data collection instruments and analyses.
You could start with the brain drain/brain waste approach. Immigrant entrepreneurs are usually more skilled than average migrants. On the other hand, in the case of irregular immigration, the returns to human capital are very low (McKenzie, David, and Hillel Rapoport. "Can migration reduce educational attainment? Evidence from Mexico." Evidence from Mexico (June 1, 2006). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3952; Coniglio, Nicola D., Giuseppe De Arcangelis, and Laura Serlenga. "Return Decisions of Undocumented Migrants: Do Network Effects Help the High‐skilled Overstay?." Labour 24.s1 (2010): 93-11). Thus, the skilled immigrants are most likely to return to home country when they cannot work legally. But, the self employment might be the possibillity to increase the returns to human capital, even if the entrepreneurship is informal. This is especially likely to happen in the developing economies, where you could find some underserved markets and the growing potential is higher than in the developed world. Moreover, the immigrant entrepreneurs might take additional advantage over domestic entrepreneurs by exploiting the transnational networks, which give acess to financial capital, technology transfer and so on. This advantage might be a decisive factor of success in the developing economy, where the sources of external financing are limited.
I am not sure if I understood well your idea, but I hope this might help:)
Legros, M., Karuranga, E., Lebouc, M. F., & Mohiuddin, M. (2013). Ethnic entrepreneurship in OECD countries: A systematic review of the determinants of performance for ethnic companies. International Business & Economics Research Journal (IBER), 12(10).
The experience in Bolivia for studying informal migrant enterprises is not about "country to country" migrants, but "rural-urban" migrants. For applied methodology you must see the four books of ALBÓ, GREAVES y SANDOVAL: Chuquiago la cara aymara de La Paz. On that work they have also applied an oral-statistical methodology taking live an economical biographies from the migrants itselves for mesuring the time for having economical succes on self-employement, after the migration step and passing by different jobs before.
Best regards
Hugo C. Boero
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