Settle first or work first? A comparative longitudinal analysis on the trade-offs of refugee integration policies
Projektlaufzeit: 01.12.2025 bis 31.12.2027
Kurzbeschreibung
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.
Ziel
This project systematically analyses the trade-offs of the contrasting work-first and settle-first integration policies for labor market participation, employment quality and lanugage acquisition of Ukrainian and Syrian refugees in the Netherlands and Germany.
Methoden
Drawing on harmonised longitudinal survey data from four sources, we compare trajectories in paid employment, destination-country language proficiency, and occupational downgrading across both refugee groups and countries. We apply entropy balancing to improve comparability across refugee populations and national contexts. By centering the comparison on Ukrainian refugees across two distinct integration contexts and using Syrian refugees as an additional cross-national comparison, the study provides new evidence on how national integration arrangements structure refugee integration trajectories over time.
Leitung
