Although immigrant entrepreneurs have accounted for a significant growth in small businesses in the United States over the past decades, we still have limited information on how immigrants access loan capital to seed their new ventures and grow established businesses. This study seeks to shed light on availability of loan programs for immigrant entrepreneurs and better identify potential obstacles these immigrants experience in funding. The findings show that immigrant business owners experience issues with accessing capital due to lack of knowledge about available resources, technical difficulties, and reluctance to obtain loans from financial institutions. The loan providers also identified key constraints such as language barriers and trust issues. This study suggests that government entities as well as other loan providers need to improve communication as well as accessibility to loan programs in order to bridge the resource disparity for immigrant entrepreneurs in accessing loan capital. © 2017, © 2017 Journal of the Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship/Conseil de la PME et de l'entrepreneuriat.

small business Barriers to access loan capital immigrants

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