Abstract

In many cities in both eastern and western Germany, refugees have migrated to socially disadvantaged areas that, at least in western Germany, often already had a high proportion of migrants (Helbig and Jähnen 2019; Weber 2022; Wiedner and Schaeffer 2022). In urban sociology, it is precisely those neighborhoods with a high proportion of migrants that are characterized as arrival neighborhoods or arrival cities, which are supposed to offer good integration conditions due to the existing migrant infrastructure and intra-ethnic networks (Hans et al. 2019). On the other hand, due to their social problematic situations, these neighborhoods can also be seen as barriers to integration because they offer less favorable development conditions due to their unfavorable social composition (Hanhörster and Wessendorf 2020). Because of the conflicting theoretical perspectives, we aim to investigate the small-scale conditioning factors of refugee integration.In the present project, we want to investigate the role of small-scale characteristics within German cities on refugee integration. In doing so, we want to focus on the immigration of refugees from 2014 to 2016 and measure their medium- and long-term integration, as well as the short-term integration of refugees from Ukraine 2022.For the project, we can draw on a number of small-scale data sources that have rarely been used in research so far. These include the BBSR's Inner City Spatial Monitoring (IRB), which since 2005 has provided information at the small-area level on proportions of foreigners (including by nationality), poverty, and migration in Germany's largest cities. These data are supplemented by data collected by the applicants from other large cities (see Helbig and Jähnen 2019). Furthermore, the applicants have small-scale data on migrant infrastructures in Germany (Wiedner et al. 2022), which on the one hand can be seen as a mediator between social structure (share of foreigners) and integration of refugees, and on the other hand also as an independent causal factor. These data will be linked to indigenous panel data on refugees from 2014 to 2016. This includes the Refugees in the German Educational System (ReGes) study, the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany, and the georeferenced data of the IAB's Integrated Employment Biographies (IEB). The focus on labor market integration is particularly relevant because more than 30 percent of the refugees from 2014 to 2016 are still (as of 2022) unemployed and 50 percent receive benefits from SGB II. [Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)]