The European Commission has been encouraging Member States to acknowledge the essential contribution that immigrant entrepreneurs have to a sustainable growth and the increase of employment. In Portugal the Census data, from 1981 to 2011, allows to highlight the upsurge of foreign employers and the increase of their relative importance in the total employers of the country. The data also highlights that not all the municipalities attract equally foreign employers, nor all nationalities have the same entrepreneurship rates or invest in the same economic activities. This article aims to emphasise the importance of census data to characterise this phenomenon, using indexes (of foreign entrepreneurship and foreign employers’ dissimilarity) and location quotients (according to nationality and economic activities of the foreign employers).

keywords: foreign employers, entrepreneurship rates, employers dissimilarity index, location quotient