Refugees are not a crisis but a trend and their labour market integration takes decades of collective effort & incentives.

1. Labour market integration of refugees
in Europe
From crisis to opportunity?
DEPARTMENT CRIMINOLOGY, CRIMINAL LAW AND SOCIAL LAW
RESEARCH GROUP SOCIAL LAW

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First time asylum applicants, EU-28

5. Of hope and illusion

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7. Hope
• Recovering European economy
• Demographic ageing and labour market shortages
• Male, young and skilled migration (!)
• Groundswell of support and sympathy

8. Illusion
• Levels of education & literacy
• Formal qualifications & their recognition
• Labour market segmentation & informal economy pull
• Mobility requirements vs. limitations
• Language, culture, networks, psychology
• Refugee crisis = labour market shock

9. Partial data for Belgium (2016 & 2017)
• 4/5 refugees has no reported higher education (with regional
differences)
• 1/5 is illiterate
= worst group profile on Belgian labour market
• Of refugees registered in a Fedasil centre & allowed to work,
3% has actually worked (a bit) in 2016
• Of refugees registered to work with public job placement
agencies, app. 1/5 has actually worked (a bit) in 2016-17
• Only 1 in 4 of officially ‘highly qualified’ recognized refugees
has taken steps for degree recognition

10. Obstacles

11. Lessons learned: Flow
• Integration/activation services in sync with process of asylum
application, as much as possible, as fast as possible
• Match housing/education with employment opportunity:
‘labour’ > labour
• Facilitate labour market access: transition support services, as
personalized as possible
• Alternatives for regular employment / flexibility

12. Lessons learned: Stock
• A collective effort: civil society, social partners, companies, media, …
• Services require access to services: dispersal and mobility
• Refugee networks for refugees
• Communicate success stories

13. Bottom Lines: Employment Outcomes
• Hard to measure: informal, mobile, not all are formally ‘unemployed’
or entitled to assistance services, substantial
intragroup/national/regional differences, etc.;
• Actual employment rate around 15% or lower
• Predictions of long-term unemployment risk for app. 75%
• Family reunification is the big question/risk

14. Bottom Lines: Realism and Patience
• Refugee integration needs speed but is hard and takes time
– ‘time2employment’
• Collective sense of urgency and responsibility is needed
• Political courage to make it a priority
• The clock ticks : targeted and temporary incentives
• Continued priority or risk of alienation & ‘precarisation’

15. Refugee Gap

16. ‘We find that (…) the outcomes for refugees
are consistently worse than those for either
EU or non-EU other migrants. Not only does
this labour market gap not seem motivated
by the different observable individual
characteristics, but 60–80 percent of the
“refugee gap” conditional on age, gender
and education remains unexplained even
when we control for unobservables using
origin area, entry cohort and destination
country effects.’

17. devosmarc