Studying ‘up’ in migrant entrepreneurship The role of nationality and citizenship in realizing privilege

‘Migrants’ are often depicted as lacking agency and subject to ‘restrictions, limitations, and discrimination’ (Benson & O’Reilly 2018: 11). This narrative, however, is largely the result of scholars’ long-established tendency to almost exclusively focus upon migration in South-to-North contexts (Ilhan-Nas 2011; Dheer 2018). Indeed, more recent studies of migration in inverse ‘North-to-South’ contexts have revealed how migrants cannot be assumed to be disadvantaged and, in fact, in such contexts can become privileged. These studies, however, have largely attributed such privilege to migrants’ ethnicity (Fechter 2005; Fechter & Walsh 2010; Hoang 2014; Lundstrom 2017), financial capital (Beaverstock 2002; Sklair 2012), and human capital (Vance et al. 2016). By contrast, in this paper, which comparatively analyses migrant entrepreneurs from the global North and South in the ‘middle-ground’ environment of Poland, it is found that privilege and disadvantage are predominantly realized by another factor, namely, migrants’ nationality and citizenship. In doing so, the study not only contributes to helping fill a gap in the migrant entrepreneurship literature surrounding migration away from economically developed economies, but also helps to propel the role of nationality and citizenship into the Intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; 2017) debate, subsequently complicating notions of privilege in migration research.