The Labour Market Integration of Humanitarian Migrants in OECD Countries: An Overview
While humanitarian migration is still the least commonly used channel leading to permanent residence, its increase over the last decades has raised concern about its socioeconomic impact within OECD member countries. Humanitarian migrants are often charac
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The Labour Market Integration of Humanitarian Migrants in OECD Countries: An Overview Pieter Bevelander and Nahikari Irastorza
8.1 Introduction The substantial international migration to Europe and to other Western countries over the last four to five decades has raised public concern about its socio-economic impact, including the labour market integration of newcomers. The economic structural changes that occurred during that time period together with changes in migration policies in many Western countries since the 1970s have gradually resulted in lower levels, and slower trends, of immigrant economic integration. The growing gap in employment rates between natives and immigrants is, in fact, partly a product of a shift from labour migration-oriented policies towards policies and programs favouring family reunification and humanitarian migration. The large migration flows of humanitarian migrants to Europe since the beginning of the Syrian war during the second decade of the current century have made the reception and integration of this refugee population a priority issue in the agendas of scholars and policy makers and also policy-oriented scholars in host countries. International migration to Western countries has contributed towards the establishment of a dual labour market with natives employed in the primary and immigrants working in the secondary labour market. Categories of migration may line up with labour market segmentation. For example, humanitarian and family-reunion migrants base their decision to migrate, in part, on a different set of intentions and are therefore less positively selected for labour market inclusion (Borjas 1994; Chiswick 2000). The significant growth of the foreign-born population in a number of European and other Western countries—and the consequent employment gap between natives and immigrants—has also lead to migration policy reforms. Most countries have P. Bevelander (B) · N. Irastorza Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare, Malmö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] N. Irastorza e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Kourtit et al. (eds.), The Economic Geography of Cross-Border Migration, Footprints of Regional Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48291-6_8
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turned towards more restrictive immigration, integration and citizenship policies for immigrants in general and refugees in particular. This chapter provides an overview of the labour market integration of humanitarian migrants in relation to these policy shifts. The first section briefly describes different patterns of international migration to OECD countries, with a specific focus on the Europe context. Next we summarize the literature on the labour market integration of humanitarian migrants. A case study of Sweden is then presented to illustrate the trends discussed in the previous two sections. Despite the uniqueness of the Nordic economies, there are several re
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