Keywords

1 Introduction

Suburbanisation or decentralisation of employment and population is a notable trend that has characterised the spatial evolution of metropolitan areas in the United States in the past few decades (Glaeser & Kahn, 2001; Kneebone, 2009; Hill & Brennan, 2005). Suburbs are defined as populated areas spreading outward from a central city’s boundaries, often still within that city’s corresponding metropolitan area. Sometimes termed as urban sprawl, such spatial transformation is often associated with the decline of central cities (Downs, 1999). Various explanations have been offered to understand these trends. People moved outward by ‘voting with their feet’ to pursue more spacious housing, better schools, and various amenities (Mieszkowski & Mills, 1993). Businesses were also attracted to suburban locations for their cheaper land cost, proximity to highway transportation, as well as access to workers and clients (Glaeser & Kahn, 2001). In 2000, about 65% of all residents and 60% of all jobs are now located in suburbs, and job growth was particularly strong in higher-income suburbs in the 1990s (Holzer & Stoll, 2007). Newer estimates from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2017 suggest that over 60% of Americans perceive their neighbourhoods as suburban (HUD User, 2022).

The same period witnessed the inflow and growth of immigrant populations in the US and their geographic dispersion from a few established immigrant gateways towards a wider range of metropolitan destinations (Singer, 2004) and rural areas. Within metropolitan areas, immigrants have also gradually suburbanised as part of a spatial assimilation trajectory or settled directly in suburban locations while bypassing a central city ethnic enclave step board altogether. Alongside the location choices of the native-born minority population, these demographic patterns have made US suburbs more diverse than ever before, becoming ‘melting-pot suburbs’ (Frey, 2011; Hardwick, 2008). These trends are especially pronounced over the last 30 years. More than half of all minority groups and immigrants now live in suburbs (Frey, 2022; Suro et al., 2011). The suburbanisation of diversity, however, coincides with the suburbanisation of poverty (Kneebone & Garr, 2010; Kneebone, 2017), raising the question of whether they are parallel or interrelated processes (Terbeck, 2021) and blurring the wealth dichotomy between central cities and suburbs. Re-urbanisation by wealthier individuals and families has forced poorer and vulnerable populations further away from central cities toward cheaper housing and other business opportunities.

Immigrants tend to have higher self-employment rates than comparable native-born populations driven by both necessity and opportunity motivations. Immigrant entrepreneurs play an important role in the US economy, creating jobs, generating revenues, and revitalising communities (Bowles & Colton, 2007; Fairlie & Lofstrom, 2015). Traditionally, they are depicted as disadvantaged main street business owners who rely on family labour and operate on relatively small scales, serving a largely co-ethnic clientele in central city ethnic enclaves. Examples abound from Chinatown in New York to Little Havana in Miami (Portes & Zhou, 1992) on such business and community landscapes.

The intra-metropolitan geographic distribution of the ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship is inevitably tied to both the changing characteristics of the businesses themselves and the larger contextual shifts of their communities. Recent years witnessed the expansion of immigrant entrepreneurs into more industries, including the high-tech sector (Saxenian, 2002; Liu et al., 2014) and higher engagement in transnational activities (Wang & Liu, 2015). Such industrial diversification and international linkages loosened their historical reliance on ethnic neighbourhoods and opened new opportunities for their locational choices. For some businesses, ethnic communities are still the sources of protected markets, financing, worker pool, and customer base (Zhou, 2004). As the minority and immigrant populations move to suburbs and create fertile grounds for ethnic business formation, suburban ethnic enclaves also emerge in this context (Logan et al., 2002). Thus, the evolving migrant entrepreneurship in the US is deeply embedded in the spatial and structural shifts within US metropolitan areas among all residents but especially among the minority and immigrant populations. Such business concentrations, interacted with the varying physical, economic, social, and institutional structures of the suburban areas, generate new dynamics and form distinctive entrepreneurial spaces from those in the cities.

Numerous terms were coined to capture the flourishing ethnic business scene in the suburbs, including ‘ethnoburbs’ in Los Angeles metropolitan area (Li, 1998) and ‘globurbia’ in Toronto metropolitan area (Zhuang & Chen, 2017). Beyond the case studies, a comprehensive analysis of the ‘suburban ethnic economy’ found that from 1990 to 2010, ethnic businesses suburbanised for both ethnic markets and the overall economy with around 17% of the variation in ethnic economy suburbanisation attributable to ethnic residential suburbanisation (Somashekhar, 2018). Using business-level data, Liu and Jeong (2022) also documented the varying suburbanisation trends of Black-, Asian-, and Hispanic-owned businesses for 60 MSAs. Minority-owned businesses maintained strong growth in central cities despite the decentralisation trend, though suburban firms generally outperform their central city counterparts. Immigrant suburbanisation has been both a response to increasing job opportunities and other amenities outside of the city and a catalyst for new economic development (Liu & Painter, 2012). A vibrant and diverse business landscape has, in turn, become an attractive feature of certain suburban neighbourhoods, further feeding into the residential suburbanisation process of minority and immigrant populations. Beyond the interacting residential and business location choices, policy also plays a role. A growing number of cities, especially outside of the traditional immigrant gateways, have sought to take advantage of immigrants’ entrepreneurial spirit and harness the economic benefits associated with business formation. These strategies range from information-hub related assistance centres to place-based approaches to address their gaps (Huang & Liu, 2019).

Atlanta serves as an interesting case study in point to portray the intersected dynamics of suburbanisation, immigration, and entrepreneurship in the US within a metropolitan area. The region experienced substantial population and employment growth over the last decades, which also expanded the geographic boundaries of the area. From the 1980s, immigrants’ inflow to the south started to surge at a faster pace as the Latino population grew over 300% between 1980 and 2000 throughout the south, a phenomenon called ‘Hispanic hypergrowth’ (Singer & Suro, 2002). As an important city of the ‘Latino New South’ (Smith & Furuseth, 2006) or ‘Nuevo South’ (Winders, 2011), Atlanta is considered a prominent emerging immigrant gateway destination that continues to attract immigrants (Singer, 2008). Between 1990 and 2008, the immigrant population grew by over 400% in the Atlanta MSA, with Asian immigrants and Hispanic immigrants registering growth at over 200% and 800%, respectively (Liu, 2012). By 2016, nearly 14% of the region’s population was made up by immigrants (Wilson, 2020). These demographic changes happened in a polycentric metropolitan area (Lee, 2011) with shifting economic, social, and institutional dynamics, producing new spatial manifestations of migrant entrepreneurship. Buford Highway, a bustling multi-ethnic retail and residential corridor through western DeKalb County, displays unique traits that are different from traditional ethnic enclaves (Walcott, 2002). Given these contexts, it is not surprising that policy innovations emerge in the area. Welcoming America, a non-profit consortium of immigrant-inclusive welcoming cities and organisations, was headquartered near Atlanta, and efforts were put in place to move policies and strategies from local municipality level to a regional level through a ‘one region’ pilot programme (McDaniel et al., 2019). This initiative seeks to harmonise the policies adopted by individual participating cities by creating a general inclusive framework that guides local efforts.

In summary, the evolving geography of migrant entrepreneurship in the US is linked to the changing landscape of these businesses, the spatial patterns of their communities, and the policy environments. This chapter follows this framework by answering two related questions accordingly. First, what are the general scale, growth, characteristics, and industrial composition of migrant and ethnic businesses? Second, what are the intra-metropolitan spatial transformation patterns of immigrant entrepreneurship in the US and how are they shaped by population suburbanisation? We also briefly discuss the local policy responses. Unlike much previous research that uses self-employment as a proxy for business ownership or includes all businesses (non-employer and employer), our focus is exclusively on employer firms. We use Asian- and Hispanic-owned firms for studying immigrant/ethnic entrepreneurship. Finally, we conduct a detailed case study of Atlanta to further illustrate polycentricity, the suburbanisation of businesses and population in a booming Sunbelt immigrant destination and the associated entrepreneurial dynamics and policy responses.

2 Migrant Entrepreneurship in the US

We utilise the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners (SBO) for 2012, Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs (ASE) for 2014 through 2016, and Annual Business Survey (ABS) for 2017 through 2019 to trace the growth of ethnic businesses. Each of these surveys provides data on ownership and economic indicators, which can then be aggregated at various geographic levels. The representative survey samples come from the universe of all non-farm businesses that file tax forms with the Internal Revenue Service. We focus solely on employer firms in this study, as these Census surveys do not include information on non-employer firms past 2012. This move narrows upon existing literature and has the advantage of focusing exclusively on firms with at least one paid employee and larger economic impact (Kerr & Kerr, 2020; Liu & Jeong, 2022; McManus, 2016). Employer firms represent about 20% of all firms in the US (Liu & Jeong, 2022).

The Census Bureau defines ownership as having more than 50% of the stock or equity of a business. Public SBO data on the nativity status of majority owners is not aggregated at any geographic level lower than the entire country in 2012, and also cannot be linked to our economic indicators of interest in either survey year. Therefore, we utilise majority-Asian and majority-Hispanic-owned firms to operationalise the concept of migrant entrepreneurship. While not a perfect fit, these groups make up a good portion of immigrant-owned firms. In 2017, ABS data show that Asian- and Hispanic-owned firms made up over 62% of employer firms that were majority-owned by an entrepreneur born outside of the US. Furthermore, just over half of all Hispanic-owned employer firms had owners who were born outside of the US; 84% of Asian-owned employer firms had migrant owners. Therefore, this specification allows us to explore implications for both the immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship spaces. Our performance indicators include firms’ number of employees, annual payroll (in thousands of dollars), and annual receipts/sales (in thousands of dollars). Since data are aggregated, we cannot utilise individual firm-level economic indicators or follow specific firms over time. However, averages for each specific ownership group are calculated.

Table 9.1 displays the number of Asian-owned, Hispanic-owned, and total employer firms from 2012 to 2019 at the national level, as well as ethnic owner groups’ share of the total. Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms grew at a much faster rate (each at about 20%) during that period than did all employer firms, at just over 6%. Additionally, Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms grew in their share of all firms from 2012 to 2019 (from 8.87% to 10.07% and from 5.3% to 6.01%, respectively). The average business performance indicators in 2012 and 2019 for employer firms fall into three subgroups, presented in Table 9.2: White-owned, Asian-owned, and Hispanic-owned. It should be noted that firms can fall into a racial group and the Hispanic ethnicity group since they are not mutually exclusive. Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms have lower mean employment bases, annual payrolls, and annual sales/receipts than their White-owned counterparts at the national level. White-owned employer firms employ nearly three to four more workers than Asian- and Hispanic-owned firms on average, at about 12 against between eight and nine in 2019. Similarly, White-owned firms’ average annual payrolls and sales/receipts are at or nearly double that of the averages for the minority groups in both years. However, all subgroups saw growth in their average performance indicators between 2012 and 2019. Asian-owned firms’ average annual payroll grew the most of any indicator (39%), while Hispanic-owned firms’ average annual sales/receipts grew by the smallest amount (just over 1%). These numbers show the lingering performance disparity between minority-owned and White-owned firms even when we zoom in to the more successful employer firms. It is, however, worth noting the fast-growing trajectory of average Asian employer firms both in terms of number of employees and payroll.

Table 9.1 Number of Employer Firms in the U.S., 2012 to 2019
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Table 9.2 Employer Firm Performance Indicators, 2012 & 2019
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Table 9.3 displays the industry breakdown separately for White-, Asian-, and Hispanic-owned employer firms in 2019. The rows indicate the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) groups that make up the greatest ten shares of all employer firms in the country. Each cell represents the percentage of employer firms in a given demographic ownership group that belonged to a particular industry; the top five for each group are highlighted in grey. For example, 14.95% of White-owned employer firms in 2019 were classified as belonging to ‘professional, technical, and scientific services’. Nearly a quarter of Asian-owned firms are in the ‘accommodation and food services’ category, while Hispanic-owned construction firms led that demographic category at 16.39%. A significant share of Asian-owned firms (18.13%) is in ‘retail trade’ as well. There are overlaps between the three demographic groups: ‘professional, technical, and scientific services’, ‘health care and social assistance’, and ‘accommodation and food services’ appear across each top five concentration. In general, the types of work that Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms engage in are considerably different from their broader White-owned counterparts. While both minority groups have made ways into professional services as well as healthcare and other services, main street businesses like accommodation and food services remain a key staple in their industrial portfolio. Still, these trends, along with those presented in Tables 9.1 and 9.2, suggest the strong growth of immigrant entrepreneurship in both number and scale, as well as the expanded line of industries they are represented in. These emerging characteristics deviate from the traditional small mom-and-pop city storefront stereotype and open up the spatial location possibilities of ethnic businesses – which has implications for their geographic patterns within metropolitan areas.

Table 9.3 Industry Breakdown for Employer Firms in the U.S., 2019
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3 Suburbanisation of Migrant Enterprises in Selected Metropolitan Areas

Since the 2012 and 2017 surveys correspond with the five-year Economic Census, we further obtain detailed data at geographic levels below the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level. This allows for comparison of the number of firms in the central city of an MSA and those in the surrounding suburbs to examine their suburbanisation trends. We create data for ‘suburbs’ by taking the aggregate employer firm totals for each owner groups in each MSA and subtracting the respective figures from that MSA’s central city. This allows us to compare the relative economic impact of central city firms against their suburban counterparts. It should be noted that the Census Bureau shifts MSA boundaries when population distributions change, usually adding or reducing a single suburban/exurban county. Therefore, some MSAs contain slightly different constituent counties in 2017 compared to 2012. Regardless, city boundaries are stable across time. We compiled two separate lists of ten MSAs with the largest absolute number of Asian-owned (Table 9.4) and Hispanic-owned (Table 9.5) firms in survey year 2017; eight MSAs appear on both lists and all of the matches represent highly populated and diverse metropolitan areas.

Table 9.4 Top 10 MSAs Asian-owned Employer Firms, 2012 & 2017
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Table 9.5 Top 10 MSAs Hispanic-owned Employer Firms, 2012 & 2017
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Before proceeding to a discussion of changes in suburbanisation, we feel the need to make a general note on geography. While the MSAs in this sample represent diverse metropolitan areas in the US, the scope of their central city boundaries varies dramatically. For example, the city of Miami is small geographically when compared to the rest of its MSA, whereas the city of Houston has a large sprawling boundary that makes up much of its MSA. At the same time, a city can have a large city boundary but an even larger MSA boundary, as is the case with Atlanta. Even further, traditional immigrant gateways like New York City may exhibit different patterns based on their pre-existing density (Suro et al., 2011). Therefore, the reference points in 2012 differ among MSAs based on context. Even so, we can assess the relative change in spatial concentration of Asian- and Hispanic-owned firms from 2012 to 2017 and parse out interesting patterns.

The MSAs in Tables 9.4 and 9.5 are in descending order based on growth in the number of suburban firms from 2012 to 2017. As seen in both tables, the vast majority of MSAs, across both the Asian and Hispanic groups, saw increases in the suburban concentration of employer firms. This is especially clear in the Sunbelt, the warm region south of the 36th parallel booming with population and job growth (Olin, 2020). For example, the San Antonio MSA saw the greatest increase in suburbanisation of Hispanic-owned employer firms, at 6.67 percentage point growth, while Houston saw the greatest increase in this measure for Asian-owned employer firms at 4.93 percentage point growth. The former is especially interesting, given San Antonio’s location of Hispanic population and firm concentration. Only the Los Angeles, New York, and San Jose MSAs saw a decline in the suburban concentration of Asian-owned employer firms (at very small - 0.52, 0.25, and 1.74 percentage point changes, respectively), while only the Riverside and Washington D.C. MSAs saw declines for Hispanic-owned employer firms.

Additionally, the relative growth rates between Asian- and Hispanic-owned employed firms in the central city and those in the suburbs are noteworthy. From Table 9.4, Asian-owned employer firms in a majority of suburbs dramatically outpaced growth in their respective central cities. For example, the number of Asian firms in the city of Atlanta decreased by 5.26% during the five-year period, but the number in the suburbs increased by 27.12%. The city of Philadelphia saw virtually no change in the number of Asian firms between 2012 and 2017, while the number of firms in its suburbs grew by over 21%. In total, the number of suburban Asian firms grew faster than the number of central city Asian firms in seven of the ten MSAs; the only exceptions are the aforementioned Los Angeles, New York City, and San Jose MSAs. Table 9.5 mirrors this trend: eight of the MSAs saw higher growth for Hispanic-owned employer firms in suburbs than their central cities. The two exceptions, the Riverside and Washington D.C. MSAs, have the highest concentrations of Hispanic firms in their suburbs, at over 90% each. Similar to Philadelphia in Table 9.3, the city of Chicago experienced a small decline in the number of firms (−1.26%), but its suburbs boomed between 2012 and 2017 (+30.85%). The other traditional gateway on the list, New York City, has about an even distribution of Hispanic firms within its bounds and its (mostly dense New Jersey) suburbs, but the city saw an 8.69% decline in firms while the suburbs grew by 14.76%.

Tables 9.3 and 9.4 are indicative of a larger pattern: Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms mirror broader economic trends and experience varying degrees of suburbanisation (Liu & Jeong, 2022). Of the MSAs presented, emerging Sunbelt gateways seem to have greater migrant entrepreneurship presence and growth in suburban areas, while more established gateways still see reasonable presence of these businesses within the central cities, likely due to their historical settlement pattern in those areas. The ordering of MSAs in the two tables makes this even clearer, as Sunbelt cities appear to be leading the way in suburban business growth. Not only are firms (re)locating to areas further away from central cities in this region of the country, but new markets are likely simultaneously emerging out of necessity as population growth in these areas booms (Somashekhar, 2018; Jones, 2008). Therefore, we should think of suburbanisation and immigrant/minority entrepreneurship as iterative processes instead of separate and linear. The commonly held image of residential suburbs as solely White is misguided under present data, and this seems to hold for business growth as well (Strait & Gong, 2015; Kahn, 2000).

4 Atlanta as a Case Study

We provide a case study on the Atlanta MSA in our examination of the interaction between suburbanisation and migrant entrepreneurship as a Sunbelt city. It is an intriguing area of study with regards to suburban sprawl and immigrant populations. Additionally, local policy supports have been developed in localities within the area that have experienced substantive migrant- and minority-owned business development. Figure 9.1 below maps the city of Atlanta and the five core counties in its MSA. The city of Atlanta has 90% of its land in Fulton County, with the remaining 10% in DeKalb County.

Fig. 9.1
A map of the city of Atlanta with 6 metropolitan statistical areas highlighted. The Metropolitan areas are Conn County, Fulton County, Clayton County, Atlanta, Dexalb County, and Gwinnett County.

Core counties of the Atlanta MSA, from Social Explorer

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Table 9.6 and Fig. 9.2 use SBO data and ABS data to trace the change in Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms for the city of Atlanta and these five counties. Cobb County is missing data for Hispanic-owned firms in 2017 and is therefore not included in the table. Additionally, we utilise one-year American Community Survey estimates to track the growth in Asian, Hispanic, and foreign-born populations in each of these six geographies. The share each of these groups comprise in a given geography’s total population is also provided.

Table 9.6 Atlanta MSA: City and Counties Firms and Performance Indicators, 2012 & 2017
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Fig. 9.2
A bar graph of the percentage of growth versus Atlanta cities and counties. The maximum and minimum values of the percentage of growth are for Hispanic-owned firms in Gwinnett County with 65 and the foreign-born population in Clayton County with negative 15, respectively.

Atlanta MSA: City and Counties – % Growth (2012 to 2017)

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Across all categories, the city of Atlanta is the least diverse area in the core region. The number of Hispanic-owned firms in the city grew by nearly 50% between the 2 years (most of Fulton County’s change can likely be attributed to this difference), while the Hispanic residential population shrank by over 10%. Counting DeKalb as a mostly suburban county, the clear trend is growth across-the-board in Atlanta’s suburbs. Out of all the firms and population figures, only DeKalb’s Hispanic population and Clayton’s foreign-born population declined in this five-year period. The number of Hispanic-owned employer firms in Gwinnett County grew by a striking 64.94% in this timeframe, and sustained growth rates at over 20% in all other localities as well. Asian-owned employer businesses declined in the city of Atlanta but grew in all surrounding counties, especially northern counties, at rates ranging from 15.77% in Cobb County to 28.9% in Gwinnett County.

The Atlanta MSA has long been an example of polycentric urban sprawl. It is now comprised of 29 counties and has a number of population centres supporting the central city’s core. As the metropolitan area has expanded, poverty has also followed to the suburbs as poorer populations have been forced to move further out to access jobs and affordable housing (Lee, 2011). Additionally, as early as four decades ago, businesses and professional services’ concentration dramatically decreased in the central city (Gong & Wheeler, 2002). This move accompanies increasing ‘self-selective’ Asian and Hispanic residential movement into suburban counties, which supports the idea of growing ethnic networks within local communities (Strait & Gong, 2015). As a notable example, Buford Highway is a long stretch of road running through the upper northeast portion of DeKalb County and the bottom of Gwinnett County, the region’s most diverse geography. The thoroughfare is surrounded on both sides by vibrant immigrant businesses (Walcott, 2002) and intersects Interstate 285 (known as the region’s ‘Perimeter’), about 15 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta. Buford Highway’s economic activity is inherently local, as most of its community members live near the ‘mom-and-pop’ businesses they patron, own, or work at. In fact, as noted by Walcott (2002) and Strait and Gong (2015), the Buford Highway suburbs were distinctly made by Asian workers that migrated to the US and worked in construction teams in the area and Hispanic families searching for open land and a new life. Such residential mobility decreases overall measures of Black-White segregation in the region, but it also points to a need for specialised local policies to support migrant populations that may lack access to traditional funding sources for businesses or do not speak English or both (Ambinakudige et al., 2017; Altaher et al., 2019). However, another pressing trend for consideration is increasing gentrification, both within inner ring suburbs and Atlanta itself. New urban developments outside of the city and density-oriented developments along the city’s BeltLine corridor have rapidly increased property values and shifted demographics of nearby residents to higher-income and White suburbs (Immergluck & Balan, 2018; Markley, 2018). This has important implications for immigrants, especially those who are lower income and may not be able to start businesses immediately after moving.

Heavy rail public transit in Atlanta, through the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, only reaches the southernmost parts of this international corridor, making business activity relatively isolated to local ethnic communities and other regional residents that travel by car (Wilkins, 2021; Spieler, 2020; Henderson, 2006). However, as the area’s population has continued to suburbanise out of the boundaries of Atlanta, markets for Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms have followed car-induced expansion. ‘Atlanta’ definitively no longer simply refers to the city proper, but instead a conglomeration of dispersed regional economic centres. While the strip malls of the state road are mainly known for their international cuisine, they hold businesses of all kinds. Figures 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, and 9.6 are the authors’ pictures of business establishments along Buford Highway. Chinatown and Plaza Fiesta are two large shopping malls that serve both local Asian and Hispanic communities and the broader Atlanta region. Here and all along the road, it is common to see storefront signs labelled in both English and other languages (Fig. 9.3). Shopping and strip malls can additionally provide networks of support amongst migrant entrepreneurs within proximity to one another (Greve & Salaff, 2003). Such a booming business scene has also made the area more attractive to residents and visitors alike, sustaining the residential movement into the region, which in turn provides opportunities for entrepreneurial development.

Fig. 9.3
A photograph of Chinatown shopping mall.

Chinatown exterior, Chamblee GA, September 2022 by Liu

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Fig. 9.4
A photograph of Chinatown courtyard exterior.

Chinatown courtyard, Chamblee GA, September 2022 by Liu

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Fig. 9.5
A photograph of Plaza Fiesta shopping mall.

Plaza Fiesta exterior, Brookhaven, GA, May 2022, by Liu

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Fig. 9.6
A photograph of the interior of Plaza Fiesta shopping mall.

Plaza Fiesta interior, Brookhaven GA, May 2022, by Liu

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While the communities in this area may have started as a response to lower costs of living in Atlanta’s suburbs, there now exist concrete efforts to maintain community and business diversity along the corridor in face of rising rents. Non-profits and community groups play crucial roles in the process. For example, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce and We Love Buford Highway Inc. are key actors in the preservation of the area’s immigrant-driven business landscape. The former has founded partnerships with ethnic business groups, such as the Georgia Indo-American Chamber of Commerce and the Chinese Business Association of Atlanta (Huppertz, 2021; Malik, 2021).

Besides non-profit organisations, local governments have recognised the importance of immigrants as entrepreneurs and workers as well as their contribution to local economic development. A growing number of cities across the US have adopted welcoming and inclusive policies to better serve the needs of immigrants and integrate them in urban socioeconomic life (Huang & Liu, 2019). In Atlanta, multiple cities have engaged in these efforts and a new One Region Initiative by Welcoming America brings municipal government leaders to the same table to share ideas and best practices (McDaniel et al., 2019). As examples, Clarkston touts itself as the ‘Ellis Island of the South’ and has worked with the DeKalb County Community Development Office to stabilise immigrant businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic and Doraville plans to go beyond its Welcoming Week showcase of immigrant firms by establishing ‘Welcoming Hubs’ at government facilities. While it is too early to assess the relative effectiveness of these policies, there is reason to believe that such policy stances and environments will play a positive role in attracting immigrant residents and businesses to their respective jurisdictions.

5 Concluding Remarks

In conclusion, this chapter analysed the dynamic interaction between population suburbanisation in US metropolitan areas and the changing characteristics of migrant entrepreneurship, as well as the resulting intra-metropolitan geography of ethnic businesses. We first utilised the most recent publicly available Census business data and portrayed the rapid growth of Asian- and Hispanic-owned employer firms in the US in the last decade at rates faster than general businesses as a whole. While both Asian- and Hispanic-owned firms still fare worse on average than their White-owned counterparts, they have experienced large increases in their economic impact in terms of number of employees, payroll, and receipts/sales. Their industrial composition has expanded over the years beyond historical concentration in a few industries, which opens opportunities for wider locational choices. As a result, migrant entrepreneurship is no longer confined to central city ethnic enclaves but is shaped by the larger urban socioeconomic, spatial, and policy contexts. Our analysis between 2012 and 2017 suggest ethnic businesses exhibit suburbanisation trends similar to residential changes during this time with the growth in suburban counties surpassing that in central cities in most major American metropolitan areas we examined. In addition to national trends, we zoomed in to Atlanta as a case study and offered a detailed account of minority and migrant suburbanisation in a sprawling and increasingly diverse metropolitan area. Suburban counties in Atlanta had seen substantive growth of both minority and immigrant populations and businesses in the recent decade, showcasing the ‘suburban ethnic economy’ phenomenon as an interactive and mutually reinforcing process. Buford Highway stands as a vivid manifestation of a multi-ethnic commercial and residential corridor where ethnic businesses flourish. Recent redevelopment in the area, however, poses challenges for maintaining affordable rents and cost-of-living to accommodate the current residents.

Our analysis also highlighted the importance of policies and local institutions in facilitating and promoting migrant entrepreneurship in their jurisdictions. As compared to central cities that have more established infrastructure in place to support ethnic businesses, suburban areas and polycentric cores might be unprepared to engage with immigrant populations and their firms. A case study from Washington D.C. demonstrates that local government can help avoid further displacement as business costs (e.g. rent) increase and to boost economic conditions (Lung-Amam, 2021). Harwood (2022) outlined in detail different avenues local governments can take to support immigrant communities. Policies can include creative urban land use strategies, the creation of immigrant affairs offices and integration plans, and ‘front-line staff’ involved in ongoing efforts to help migrant businesses (e.g. literacy and sources of funding). An ‘immigrants and entrepreneurs’ local policy focus, with an array of public services and funding sources, may be most effective at attracting immigrant entrepreneurs (Reese & Khan-Welsh, 2022). Finally, community-based organisations can help local governments with implementation and filling in service gaps. This includes bilingual business assistance and microenterprise funds, which are especially important in times of crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic (Theodos et al., 2021).

This chapter examined the changing nature and geographic patterns of migrant entrepreneurship through national trends and a detailed case study of Atlanta, illustrating its spatial embeddedness in suburbanising metropolitan areas and its contribution to the process. Further research is needed to further disentangle such parallel dynamics as well as to evaluate the impact of local policies on immigrant-owned businesses.