The great escape? Globalization, immigrant entrepreneurship and the criminal economy

Scholars have long posited that an ethnic division of labour influences the opportunity structures faced by immigrants, relegating them to the margins in the formal, informal and criminal economies. Opportunity structures, however, are embedded in broader economic contexts and, as argued by the globalization literature these contexts appear to be undergoing a striking change. This articles explores the extent to which dynamics of economic globalization have altered the ethnic division of labour in the core sector of the criminal economy – the illicit drug trade. A plausibility probe of patterns of immigrant participation in the illicit drug sector in Japan, Germany and the US reveals that rather than altering the nature of ethnic divisions of labour in the criminal economy, globalization appears to be reinforcing existing patterns of selective marginalization and empowerment.