Immigrant entrepreneurs face many challenges in the various early phases of their companies’ existence. These challenges are often referred to as “the liability of newness”. While some of these challenges are common to all entrepreneurs, the immigrant entrepreneur has an additional set of challenges. This article describes those challenges in the immigrant entrepreneurial experience in the Swedish agri-food industry. A qualitative research design is used. Interviews were conducted with 25 immigrant entrepreneurs who planned a business, had started a business, or had exited a business. Various websites and tax reports provided secondary data. The research, which covered a two-year time frame, identifies the strategies and actions the immigrant entrepreneurs adopted and used to try to overcome those challenges. The following strategies and actions were identified: use of business support, virtual embeddedness, family and ethnic groups, entrepreneurial experience, and niche markets. The companies in which the entrepreneurs recognized the gravity of those challenges early in their life cycle were more likely to survive beyond the start-up phase. The article, which also reviews much of the current literature on immigrant entrepreneurship, has implications for business support advisory services and policymakers who are involved in the effort to achieve economic (and social-cultural) integration of immigrants into their host countries.

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The agri-food sector in Sweden, as in much of Europe, faces dramatic pressure to promote entrepreneurship, especially in rural areas where population aging and population decline pose grave economic threats to local communities. One solution is the government policy of supporting the entrepreneurial ambitions of newly arrived immigrants. The policy is seen as doubly beneficial: support for rural areas and support for immigrants not yet prepared to enter the regular workforce. Immigrant entrepreneurship seems to have the potential to lessen the harmful effects of current socioeconomic challenges. This paper examines the immigrant entrepreneurship experience in the agri-food sector in Sweden. A qualitative research approach is used to evaluate interviews with 25 immigrant entrepreneurs on the various factors that motivated them to become selfemployed entrepreneurs. The main factors are the lack of other employment opportunities, the desire for work autonomy and flexibility, and the chance for a better standard of living. The results show that personal characteristics and previous entrepreneurship experience are the best predictors of business success. The paper concludes with a call for a model for immigrant entrepreneurship and for more government reforms and policies aimed at supporting the immigrant entrepreneur.

The recent forced migration to Europe has created more challenges for the labor market integration. However, the Swedish government encourages unemployed immigrants to seek employment in the farming, gardening, and forestry industries. Thus, this article focuses on the matching process in the Swedish agricultural sector by using an exploratory, qualitative, in-depth interview with representatives involved in the matching process. Immigrants experience challenges of Swedish language proficiency, lacking a driving license and adapting to new cultures in the workplace, while employers attribute challenges of effective hiring process and the absence of evidence of immigrants’ work experience. Furthermore, the employment service offices struggle with scant knowledge of agricultural employment that needs to be combined with limited contact with employers and the bureaucratic delays caused by requirements of qualifications validation. The paper concludes with a Labour Market Matching Model, which focuses on critical aspects before, during, and after the matching process.