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<\/a>Ilyas Tekin, a Turkish engineer, arrived in Ottawa in 2010 and immediately started up a business.<\/p>\n\u201cWe are not selling engineering services,\u201d Tekin says. \u201cBut I thought I could manage a good business here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tekin could have become a certified professional engineer in Ontario, but it would have been complicated.\u00a0 O The immigrant personality<\/span><\/p>\n As a group, immigrants may be predisposed to these kinds of risks by their nature.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re committed to make your immigration work, you\u2019re committed to make your business work,\u201d says Dragana Mrdjenovic, a coordinator for the entrepreneurship class at Ottawa immigrant services centre LASI Worldskills.<\/p>\n Immigrants are more likely to be self-employed than any other group in Canada. Roughly 13 per cent of immigrants choose to work for themselves in Canada, according to the 2006 Census, compared to 10 per cent of the Canadian-born population.<\/p>\n For newcomers who face barriers to getting a job in Canada, self-employment is termed a \u201csurvival strategy,\u201d according to focus group research conducted by Ottawa\u2019s Social Planning Council. The reality may also be that immigrants generally possess characteristics that make them good entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n<\/del>n top of providing documentation for his decades of work in Turkey, he would have had to find a job where he would spend between one and four years working under a Canadian engineer. In his sixties,<\/ins> and with two daughters and his wife to support, the prospect seemed daunting. Opening his own business, despite the undeniable risk involved in self-employment, was more attractive to Tekin.<\/p>\n