Immigrant transnational entrepreneurs in New York: Three varieties and their correlates

The structuration model linking macro‐ and micro‐level societal structures and individual actions in a reciprocal causality is applied to the analysis of the relationship between immigrants' transnational entrepreneurship and their assimilation to the host society. Depending on immigrants' economic and sociocultural resources and their location in the economic and political structures of the host city/country where they reside and the home‐country/region they originate from, their transnational business engagements may combine with assimilation and ethnic entrepreneurship may not lead to integration into the host society. This argument is empirically illustrated by comparing three kinds of entrepreneurship and the (trans)national/ethnic commitments they generate. These three types are represented by New York Chinese global traders, Jamaican ethnic entrepreneurs, and Dominican small‐scale investors in home‐country businesses. Although these entrepreneurial activities do not exhaust the types of business pursued by these immigrants (there are also in New York local Chinese and Dominican entrepreneurs, and Jamaicans involved in business in their home‐country), they have been recognized and investigated in each group.