Do welfare policies matter for immigrant entrepreneurship? An analysis in the context of France
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Author | Michael Samers |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13105 |
Department of Geography, University of
Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA
Correspondence
Michael Samers, Department of Geography,
University of Kentucky, 817 Patterson Office
Tower, Lexington, KY 40502, USA.
Email: michael.samers@uky.edu
Abstract
There is little research on the relationship between welfare
policies and immigrant entrepreneurship. Accordingly,
this paper examines changes in three welfare domains:
child-care, health/medical insurance, and unemployment
insurance in the context of France since roughly the 1980s,
but with a focus on the 21st century. Given changes in
French welfare policy, I show that immigrants' greater access
to fluctuating, sometimes declining, but overall increasing
spending in the three domains, can be positively correlated
with slowly increasing immigrant entrepreneurship since
the early 2000s. However, I also argue that welfare policies
do not seem to have a significant effect on the levels and
survival of immigrant-owned firms in France. The findings
of this paper should nonetheless be taken with extreme
caution in light of the obstacles to analyzing this relation-
ship. As a consequence, I provide an assessment of three
possible research designs as a route towards better under-
standing this relationship.
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
Do welfare policies matter for immigrant
entrepreneurship? An analysis in the context of
France
Michael Samers
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13105
Received: 26 February 2021 Revised: 25 September 2022 Accepted: 28 November 2022
INTRODUCTION
The vast body of work on immigrant entrepreneurship shows substantially different levels of immigrant entrepre-
neurship across countries, but the reasons for this variation remain unclear (Rath & Schutjens, 2019). One possible,
but often neglected explanation is the role of welfare policies. European welfare states are alleged to have undergone
systematic retrenchment since the 1980s. Yet the paucity of research on the relationship between ‘actually-existing’
welfare policies over time and immigrant entrepreneurship is glaring. This is significant for two reasons. First, as
48
© 2022 International Organization for Migration.
Int Migr. 2023;61:48–66.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
DO WELFARE POLICIES MATTER? 49
Villares-Varela et al. (2017) underline (see also Brieger & Gielnik, 2021), there is much less attention to family and
gender in the immigrant entrepreneurship literature and welfare policies are likely to have an impact on both. Second,
European governments (and especially the French government) are ostensibly concerned with unemployment among
immigrants and refugees, and promoting entrepreneurship is considered a vital part of this strategy (OECD, 2010,
2019; OECD/European Union, 2017). While robust welfare policies as a potential under-labourer for entrepre-
neurship are by and large ignored in official reports, some European Union officials do acknowledge their value
(EUR-LEX, 2012).
Given the potential significance of welfare policies for entrepreneurship, I undertake an exploratory analysis
of this relationship in the context of France. I draw on welfare policy change and data on three types of national
welfare expenditures (family/child-care, health/medical care, and unemployment insurance) over approximately the
last 40 years and correlate it temporally with uneven data on immigrant 1 entrepreneurship between 2002 and 2018.
Much of the analysis focuses on only the last 20 years, as data on immigrant entrepreneurship is sparsely and incon-
sistently collected during this period which also limits the possibilities for multi-variate analysis (see e.g., Blavier &
Perdoncin, 2020, p. 52). Nonetheless, the empirical research in this paper offers a sketch of what policies might
matter, and what quantitative and qualitative data might need to be collected and analysed for examining the rela-
tionship between welfare policies and immigrant entrepreneurship in France, and perhaps elsewhere.
I provide three essential contributions in this paper. First, I argue that changes in the French welfare system over
approximately the last 40 years means that immigrants have had greater access to fluctuating, sometimes declining,
but overall increasing social entitlements in the three domains I analyse. While this might partially explain the secu-
lar increase in immigrant entrepreneurship, I argue secondly that welfare policies do not seem to have a significant
effect on the levels and survival of immigrant-owned firms in France. At the same time, given data limitations and
the obstacles to establishing a more robust assessment of the relationship between welfare policies and immigrant
entrepreneurship, I provide an assessment of three possible research designs to better understand this relationship.
The paper has the following structure. In Section 'Welfare policies and (immigrant) entrepreneurship: a review
of a diminutive literature' of this paper, I review the literature on the relationship between welfare states and (immi-
grant) entrepreneurship. In Section 'Case study selection, data, and its limitations for an initial study', I discuss the
available data and its limitations in terms of studying this relationship, and in Section 'Welfare policies in France',
I turn to a preliminary empirical analysis of the French case, presenting both a qualitative and quantitative analysis
of certain welfare policies. This is followed by a discussion of changes in immigrant entrepreneurship over time
in Section 'On the relationship between welfare policies and immigrant entrepreneurship in France', including an
attempt to draw a connection between welfare and immigrant entrepreneurship. In Section 'Outline of a brief agenda
for further research', I outline a brief agenda for further research by considering different research designs for explor-
ing this relationship further, and in Section (the Conclusions), I reflect further on the extent to which welfare policies
might matter for immigrant entrepreneurship.
WELFARE POLICIES AND (IMMIGRANT) ENTREPRENEURSHIP: A REVIEW OF A
DIMINUTIVE LITERATURE
It may be tempting to begin with a discussion of welfare policies in France through the comparative framework of
restructured welfare regimes or states in the Esping-Andersen (1999[2000]) tradition. However, as Hassenteufel and
Palier (2019) argue, it is not possible to create a singular narrative of reform for the welfare system in France, but
rather different ‘sequences’ for each sector of the system. Similarly, it may also seem appropriate to begin with the
comparative welfare and immigration literature. One of the hallmarks of this latter literature is its emphasis on the
stratification of rights in which not just citizenship, but ‘denizenship’ (gradations of citizenship such as length of time
in the country) and other intersectionalized axes of difference (gender, skin colour, and so on) figure prominently
(Sciortino & Finotelli, 2015). However, with some exceptions (Kofman, 2004; MIPEX, 2020; Sainsbury, 2012), what is
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