Welcome to foreigners

The integration of immigrants is one of the most challenging issue a government should manage nowadays. Supporting access to the labour market involves migrants to work in a new cultural and entrepreneurial contest. In this paper, we investigate on the relationship between migrants’ integration policies and self-employment rates at country level. In previous literature there are not findings which suggest whether promoting integration of migrants could increase entrepreneurial rates in a country: in order to fill this gap, we conduct an empirical analysis, collecting data of entrepreneurship levels (provided by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) and policy measures of integration (provided by the Migrant Integration Policy Index). We analyse the effect of integration policies on entrepreneurial activity of 38 countries from 2010 to 2014. We find that the general effect of integration policies on entrepreneurship is positive. We notice that typology of policy promoted by governments is a variable that affect entrepreneurship in different ways: supporting education and family reunion influences positively entrepreneurship, but promoting anti-discrimination measures disincentives migrants to start businesses.