Abstract

Refugee integration policies in Europe have typically followed a ‘settle-first’ approach, prioritising language acquisition and other integration investments before or alongside sustained labour market entry. The arrival of Ukrainian refugees under the EU Temporary Protection Directive created divergent integration arrangements across receiving countries. While Ukrainian refugees in both Germany and the Netherlands received immediate legal status and labour market access, the Netherlands adopted a comparatively ‘work-first’ approach, with limited formal integration requirements and voluntary language provision. Germany combined immediate employment access with a more institutionalised integration framework retaining stronger settle-first elements, including structured language acquisition and labour market support. This study examines how the integration trajectories of Ukrainian refugees differ between these two policy contexts. For a more robust interpretation of this cross-national comparison, we additionally examine Syrian refugees who arrived around 2015 and were subject to more similar settle-first integration arrangements in both countries.