Tan was born in China and has been in the UK for 12 years, having arrived with the intention of setting up a small restaurant business. Above, he expresses the views of many of the employers we interviewed. They knew and feared immigration raids but felt that they had few alternatives – whether, like Tan, because they could not find workers or, as with many of the interviewees, because there were other imperatives that required them to employ those without documents. In this chapter we explore some of the dilemmas and experiences of what Zhou terms as ‘enclave entrepreneurs’ who are employers ‘bounded by co-ethnicity, co-ethnic social structures and location’ (2004: 1042).

Drawing on the North American sociological literature, we have used the term ‘ethnic enclave entrepreneur’ to describe those businesses that employ co-ethnic workers and that are more likely to be clustered within ethnic enclaves, which are areas consisting of migrant groups concentrated in a particular spatial area, serving predominantly, although not exclusively, their own ethnic market (Portes, 1981; Portes and Bach, 1985; Light et al, 1994; Logan et al, 2003; Zolin et al, 2014). Entrepreneurship may be an option for some migrants, where social networks facilitate the construction of small-scale enterprises (Waldinger et al, 1990; Chaudhry and Crick, 2004; Wahlbeck, 2007; Kitching, Smallbone and Athayde, 2009; Bloch and McKay, 2015), and those whom we interviewed had made use of those opportunities and, particularly in their first period of entrepreneurship, this could result in a focus on businesses that specialised in the provision of services to their network communities. However, for some this meant being trapped in an ever-narrowing market, increasingly crowded out by new entrants. Consequently, some of the interviewees were only just surviving financially, or indeed had already experienced business failures.