Migration and Migrant Entrepreneurship in a German-Polish border region

Social sciences are interested in ethnic entrepreneurship as a chance for migrants to (better) integrate into the host labour market, and in consequence into a host society. Th e multidimensional models capture a wide range of factors at the bottom of the economic behaviour of migrant entrepreneurs, and they increasingly consider that migrants might profit in business from sustaing their social ties with the country of their origin. Looking at Polish migrant entrepreneurs in eastern German regions bordering to Poland we plead for a relational perspective which considers migrants’ business activities in relation to the patterns of trans-border residential mobility and complex social and economic transformations in Polish and German border regions.