Beschreibung

"Roughly a decade ago, the entry and admission of refugees has prominently returned to the political agendas in Europe. With that, researchers and policy-makers have shown increasing interest in factors that determine the participation of refugees in receiving societies, labor markets and education systems. The analyses in this paper address the conflicting views in sociology of migration on whether premigration capital benefits refugees after arrival or whether it erodes with refugee migration. On the one hand, social and economic capital is accumulated over the life course and is expected to benefit the individual also after the migration process. On the other hand, fleeing to another country represents a pivotal break with the power to eliminate advantages of pre-migration capital. This paper uses sequence analysis combined with cluster analysis to identify typical integration trajectories of refugee women and men in Germany and explores whether these trajectories vary with pre-migration socioeconomic resources. Importantly, I also account for characteristics of the individual refugee journeys in shaping post-migration biographies, to the extent that the data allows. I rely on a rich set of survey data combined with administrative employment data. Given that individual factors and migration experiences may play out differently for refugee women and men, the analyses are run separately by gender. The results imply that social and economic capital does not completely erode over the migration process. Men, however, have an easier time to capitalize on their pre-migration skills in terms of entering paid labor. More educated women are instead overrepresented in education-intense biographies. Furthermore, longer and riskier journeys are associated with lower participation profiles after arrival, at least for refugee men. Overall, the study illustrates the need to further disentangle how refugee migration processes and selection patterns shape subsequent integration trajectories." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))