Quantifying the role of arrival infrastructures in the labor market integration of refugees

Abstract

Across Europe, refugees face significant difficulties in finding employment. Many studies have attributed the disadvantaged labor market position of refugees to factors on the individual level, such as language barriers or health issues related to the experience of fleeing. While such explanations emphasize individual responsibility, ethnographic studies are increasingly contending that opportunities to integrate into the labor market can be restricted or enabled by arrival infrastructures. We contribute to this discussion by taking a quantitative perspective. Focusing on the Netherlands, we used extensive national register data that allowed us to follow refugees over time and break the concept of arrival infrastructures down into four dimensions, namely job access, neighborhood effects, enclave effects, and the local migration regime. In addition, because the Dutch dispersal policy distributed refugees–to a considerable extent–randomly across municipalities during the period under study, we were able to counteract problems of self-selection and reversed causality. We studied the labor market integration of refugees using competing risks analysis, taking educational enrollment and residential mobility into account. Our findings show that economic, social, and institutional arrival infrastructures manifest themselves at different scales but all matter in the labor market integration of refugees.