The Mobility of Entrepreneurs and Capital: Taiwanese Capital‐Linked Migration

Abstract

Much of the literature concerning international investment focuses on the movement of capital or trade flows and does not cover the persons who migrate with the capital, even though in a globalizing economic system new conditions emerge for the international migration of capitalists. On the one hand, capital owners have been recruited directly by business migration programmes in countries such as Canada, Australia, and the US. On the other hand, global economic restructuring, one part of which entails increasing foreign direct investment from a wider range of countries, has induced the migration of an entrepreneurial/managerial class.This article analyses the relation between the mobility of capital and of entrepreneurs by investigating Taiwan's capital-linked migrations. It aims to show that people can integrate migration and capital investment as a strategy to best serve their interests. Although their moves are mediated and constrained by different migration channels (governmental policies, recruitment agencies, transnational corporations, etc.), capital-linked migrants are not passive players in international migration systems. They actively position themselves with regard to migration channels and select active strategies that best suit their objectives.Sometimes immigration serves capitalists' interest in capital accumulation, at other times capital investment serves as the means for securing a second nationality. In this way, Taiwanese capitalist mobility has been incorporated into the open-ended logic of flexible capitalism itself. Such understanding of the processes of capital-linked migration and its implications contribute to new theories of the relationship between international flows of capital and international migration.

Migrants as transnational development agents: an inquiry into the newest round of the migration–development nexus

“…Other multinational companies from the US and Europe followed suit (Cornelius et al, 2001). The Taiwanese experience parallels this case (Tseng, 2000).…”

“…Moreover, as in the Chinese case, the separation of Taiwan and the People's Republic makes for uneasy relations between business persons from Taiwan investing in mainland China on the one hand, and the government of the People's Republic. In order to circumvent such problems, quite a few Taiwanese business persons active in mainland China therefore acquire dual citizenship and act under labels such as American or British (Tseng, 2000).…”

Flexible Acculturation

“…Flexible acculturation is different from instrumental ethnicity and instrumental identity (Ip, Inglis and Wu 1997;Rios 1992;Tseng 1999). The idea of "instrumental" is narrower than "flexible" because the former is often strictly linked to the idea of market calculation while flexible acculturation is also related to other social aspects.…”

“…These terms include transnational ethnicity (Kearney 1991), bifocal cultural consciousness (Rouse 1992), situated ethnicity (Eriksen 1993), instrumental citizenship (Rois 1992), and instrumental nationality (Tseng 1999). Most of these terms differ from previous primordial concerns in earlier dias-pora studies and celebrate flexible strategies of transmigrants.…”

Self-organizing innovation networks, mobile knowledge carriers and diasporas: insights from a pioneering boutique hotel chain

“…In migration research, the relationship between mobility and networks (and identities) is central to research on transnational migration and diasporas. Tseng (2000) provides insights into how 'transmigrants' build social fields that cross geographical, cultural and political borders. Pre-migration networks and cultural attachments may persist and be reworked.…”