Project News

Conference Report: Immigration & Entrepreneurship: An Interdisciplinary Conference

The United States has long been an immigrant society as well as an entrepreneurial society. This is no coincidence: immigrants launch new enterprises and invent new technologies at rates much higher than native-born Americans. The conference, an interdisciplinary endeavor, looked at how newcomers have shaped and in turn been shaped by American economic life. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, economics, engineering, Asian American studies, gastronomic sciences, geography, management studies, and others—engaged in lively discussions of topics such as patterns and geographies of ethnic entrepreneurship, barriers to immigrant entrepreneurial success, and policy implications of historical and contemporary research on immigrant entrepreneurship.

German-American Immigrant Entrepreneurs Discussed at the 40th Annual Symposium of the Society for German-American Studies in San Antonio, TX

San Antonio hosted the Society for German-American Studies’ 40th Annual Symposium, dedicated to the general topic “German Seed in Texas (and other) Soil: Weighing Location and Culture.” The place was well chosen: From the mid-19th century, today’s economic and cultural center of South Texas faced a large influx of German immigrants, who accounted for more than 10 percent of the local population in the 1890s.