A new approach to migration: communities on the move as assets.

Abstract

The aim of this article (opening the special issue) is to examine the impact of migration on a specific set of issues at the regional level: innovation, entrepreneurship and economic performance. In particular, we look at migration through a new lens of analysis, which we have termed the “Communities-on-the-Move (CoM)” approach. In a nutshell, this approach focuses on migrant communities, emerging from the capacity of specific national/regional groups to carry the heritage of their social capital when moving from one place to another. More precisely, the CoM approach focuses on the social capital migrants can rely on to “bond” their in-group relations and to “bridge” with extra-group ones during the migration process. The CoM approach represents a different, though complementary approach to the analysis of diasporas in the migration literature. Indeed, CoM relates to diasporas similarly to how “clustering effects” relate to “networking activities” in the regional economics of innovation literature. CoM approach takes account of the local effects such communities generate in the localities they are embedded in (“clustering effect”), while the related ‘diaspora communities concept’ captures the non-local “networking activities” that connect ethnic communities across the world. As we will also maintain in the following, through this specificity the CoM approach is likely to capture a significant impact on innovation, entrepreneurship and economic performance, which would remain otherwise hidden by using more standard approaches to migration.