Tesseltje de Lange e.a.: Highly Skilled Entrepreneurial Refugees: Legal and Practical Barriers and Enablers to Start Up in the Netherlands

This article analyses how highly skilled refugees experience barriers and enablers to entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. Using the welcoming talent model, the article claims that material and procedural norms as well as the governance of support for refugee entrepreneurship in the Netherlands needs a new design. Through socio‐legal research on the experiences of highly skilled Syrian refugees, private support structures and municipalities with migration, integration and welfare policies and practices, we reveal that financial independence through entrepreneurship requires not just entrepreneurial skills but meeting the right people and not running into municipalities propagating work first. Policies and practices need to be developed in which welcoming entrepreneurial (highly skilled) refugees is key. Welcoming policies and practices are to offer refugees nationwide, equally accessible, transparent support structures, and access to finance instead of barriers towards financial independence.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine that after obtaining your Masters, for the past 10 to 15 years, you have worked as a doctor, a lawyer, or ran a well‐established international business. War has made you leave it all behind. Arriving in Europe, more specifically the Netherlands, you receive an asylum status on grounds of subsidiary protection and are housed in a medium‐sized city. Next, you are invited to discuss your career opportunities with a municipal civil servant, not necessarily someone with a migration background, not someone very entrepreneurial, but a good civil servant nonetheless. You want to retrain as a doctor or lawyer, you want to open a business again and in broken Dutch you explain your ambitions. The answer is likely to be a no: you’re too old, the plan is too vague or too risky, your language skills are too poor, there is no policy, no money, no support. Or so it seems.

The perspective of highly skilled entrepreneurial refugees on their economic integration in a host society has as of yet received scant attention in contemporary migration studies. Policy and research predominantly emphasize labour market integration via waged employment. Awareness of the opportunities of self‐employment as a means to economic integration, or as we prefer to call it: “financial independence,” is however, increasing. The need to stimulate refugee entrepreneurship was recognized at the global (UNCTAD, 2018) and EU level in the 2020 Entrepreneurship Action Plan (European Commission, 2013; see also Solano et al., 2019). Article 26 of the EU Qualification Directive stipulates that Member States shall authorize beneficiaries of refugee status and subsidiary protection to engage in self‐employed activities subject to rules generally applicable to the profession and to the public service, immediately after the refugee status has been granted. Allowing for refugee entrepreneurship is, thus, a policy‐relevant topic and a legal obligation. We draw lessons from an interview case study on the opportunities offered to highly skilled entrepreneurial refugees from Syria in the Netherlands to present new perspectives on highly skilled entrepreneurial refugees and the support organizations.

Continue here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/imig.12745