WHERE AND WHEN TO START THE INTEGRATION PROCESS?

Alessandra Venturini

The attention of the media and politicians is focused on the integration of refugees and, more generally, on the integration of all foreign migrants. Studies looking for the most efficient policies suggest the need for better skills matching and a rapid transition to employment to avoid periods of isolation that reduces integration capabilities. Labour-market integration research shows, however, that migrants tend to congregate in “migrant jobs” and tend also to remain there, with very little probability of exits (Strom et al 2013). Thus policies which advocate a rapid labour-market transition should also offer continuous training (one day a week, two days a month etc.) to help asylum-seekers and migrants really integrate into the labour market.

This debate, however, focuses attention, on the one hand, only on the last phase of the migrant integration process and, on the other hand, the asylum process, which starts already before the move.

The phases and actors that influence the process of integration for labour migrants are numerous but the sequence is clear.

The migration process starts in the sending country. The first actors that influence the migrant performance are, therefore, the government, the private organisations and associations and the families of the migrants in the country of origin. Their actions (e.g. signing bilateral agreements) can reduce the cost of migration and can favour integration by providing accurate information (not least pre-departure training) on the labour market, languages courses and the social rules prevailing in the destination country.

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Then, in the country of destination the institutional actors who produce and implement the legislation that determines admission to the country, the acquisition of citizenship, or access to welfare affect the migrant-integration process. They produce a self-selection because they affect the migration-destination choice. But they can also produce an active selection affecting the quality of inflows: the cap on the H1B visa for STEM workers in the U.S. and the EU Blue Card Directive are examples of this.

In addition, there are also labour-market actors in the destination country. Firms, trade unions, and welfare institutions all play a very important role in the labour-market integration of migrants. Their actions are not so much at the national as at the local level.

If the integration process is not successful other local level actors provide integration policies (language, training, support measure etc.) which should favour a return to work.

The integration process briefly described above is impacted by all these actors and actions and varies enormously according to the laws implemented and the functioning of the labour market in addition to the quality of the migrants. The same legislation that defines the rule of entry into a country can produce full labour-market integration in one case and low integration in

another. Take Germany and Italy. The former has 4% unemployment, the second 12% (with more than double of this figure in the South and among the young). The same selection at entry will not produce the same result in the two different labour markets, then. There are, however, some national groups which show very high labour force employment rates1 _{in all destinations. Take, for}

instance, the FPilipinos, where the efforts before departure and support at destination from the

FPilipino community spur employment integration. Thus, the integration of labour migrants is a long process that starts in the sending countries, before departure and the destination countries should invest in it with bilateral agreements, and compulsory pre- departure training to smooth passages in the following phases.

Labour migration is thus mainly a bilateral international phenomenon, which is impacted both by the actions of the sending country and those of the destination countries.

The forced migration of asylum seekers is, instead, much more complex: it is not simply an international and a bilateral problem. The move starts in an area of conflict and, depending on the management of the phenomenon, many different actors intervene. These include the countries of first asylum, the arrival countries, the countries of final destination and the countries of resettlement. Their interventions affect the final integration of the refugees in the country of destination. It is, then, a multilateral phenomenon.

First of all, asylum seekers show up with their illegal arrivals in the most proximate region. But this is not only a regional problem because migrants go where it is easiest to arrive, typically to nearest safe regions. The country of destinations can be divided into two groups: countries of

arrival and transit where the migrants arrive irregularly by land or sea, and then countries of the

asylum seekers’ final destinations. The policies implemented by the transit countries affect the number, quality and timing of entrance to the country of final destination. But then the policies implemented by the country of final destination (i.e. national or skill selection) affect the integration process in the arrival country too,, and can transform integration into a permanent or a temporary phenomenon. In addition, the countries of arrival invest most of their public and private resources into first assistance, while the countries of permanent settlement are mainly left to deal with the integration process. This issue is in part articulated in the debate on intra EU solidarity and on the mechanism to implement migrant relocation among EU countries. But the strong implication for asylum integration is mostly neglected.

However, refugees are not a regional problem but a global one. This process is also affected by other potential countries of resettlement. If the resettlement ability of UNHCR were improving and if they were settling, say, a million Syrians in 2016, instead of 100,000 as they did in 2015, things would change. The pressure on the border countries of arrival would be reduced, many lives would be saved and the integration process simplified. While spontaneous arrivals touch only nearby countries, resettlement policies cover the far away countries as well. The asylum responsibility is global because political conflicts are distributed around the world (Petterson and 1We refer here to the probability of being employed equal to 1. See Di Bartolomeo A., Kalantaryan S., Bonfanti S., 2015, Measuring the Integration of Migrants a Multivariate Approach Interact Research Report 2015/1

Wallensteen 2015). When Vietnamese boat people fled through China in 1970, it was perceived as an international problem. The Middle East refugee crisis is not only a European responsibility. The number of countries interested in the resettlement of asylum seekers could also increase and might include China and Russia which are important actors in international political but also international economic arenas. Many of these problems have, after all, economic roots.

The actions of countries of first asylum determine EU asylum pressure for border countries. In the case of Syria it is well known that Lebanon, a small country with 4.3 million citizens, hosts 1,200,000 Syrian refugees and Jordan, another small country, 850,000.2 _{When Lebanon decided to}

close the border, Turkey accumulated some 2,500,000 refugees in less than a year. During the same period Greece received about 800,000 asylum seekers3 _{and the flow declined only when the}

EU made an agreement to finance first assistance in Turkey.4 _{International solidarity versus putting}

all burden on the countries of first asylum should be the question at the centre of the debate and at the heart of the actions of the other destination countries.

EU countries concentrate upon intra-EU solidarity, namely the redistribution of asylum seekers and the redistribution of the cost of first assistance; or on the best job-matching policies to spur asylum seekers’ social and economic integration in the society and labour market of destination countries. These problems are of a manageable size. But more attention should be devoted to the process of forced migration, to supporting countries of first asylum and to dealing with their increased impoverishment and growing regional instability.

The multilateral nature of responsibilities means that the level of governance of asylum and refugee admission systems should be much broader and more complex.

International coordination is needed to help nation states to face this human, economic and governance challenge.

To favour coordination, an important tool would be better forecasting of the asylum dynamic. This would help to provide timely assistance, avoid deaths on the journey to a safe land and to optimize human and economic resources in the destination areas. To some extent the modeling of future asylum dynamics is possible. The estimates of Tim Hatton (2016) of previous refugee flows are a point of departure and an attempt at forecasting should be tried. A monitoring unit could be attached to UNHCR, which is the best placed agency to understand how many Internally Displaced People (IDP) will move. Asylum outflows could then be forecast on the basis of IDP information (see growth rate in Fig.3). Bilak et al. (2015) estimated the number of asylum seekers globally to be 37 million in 2015. The newly displaced amount to 3.8 million in the Middle East, 3 million in Central Africa, 1.4 million in South Asia, 1 million in West Africa, 700,000 in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, 400,000 in East Africa, 400,000 in the Americas and 200,000 in South-East Asia The whole world has its crises then and there will be others: think, for example, of a North Korean refugee event.

2 IOM 2015 3 IOM 2015

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According to the IOM, 86% of Internally Displaced People live in developing countries, i.e. countries of first asylum, and are potential asylum seekers. Political conflicts are by no means limited to the Middle East, though the largest increase in the last ten years took place there (see Figure 3). The rest is distributed around the world and for that reason our approach has to be global and governance needs to be multilateral.

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A better management of the refugee process will also favour the integration ofallow to distinguish

refuges who want to stay for a short time, of from those that want, instead, to resettle or to become citizens of the destination country. This kind of management will solve many integration policy dilemmas. What should have priority? Language courses, civilization courses, cultural courses or professional training courses or only labour-market skill matches at the lowest level? The complexity of the actors involved in the asylum process risks forcing labour-market integration before a minimum of social intergration. Without strong coordination differentiated integration according to the country of destination “model” will prevail. This is so because the actors who define the migration policies at the national level and the functioning of the labour market, which differs from one country to another, will dominate the entire process.

References

Bilak, A., M. Caterina and G. Charron, 2015, Global Overview 2015: People Internally Displaced

by Conflict and Violence, Internal Displacement Monitoring Center,Geneva.

Di Bartolomeo A., Kalantaryan S., Bonfanti S., 2015, Measuring the Integration of Migrants a Multivariate Approach Interact Research Report 2015/1 http://hdl.handle.net/1814/34679

Hatton, T.J., 2016b, “Refugees and Asylum seekers, the crisis in Europe and the future of policy,”

Discussion Paper, No. 11271, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.

Internal Displacement Monitoring Center and Norwegian Refugee Council, 2015, Global Overview 2015. People internally displaced by conflict and violence. http://www.internal- displacement.org/assets/library/Media/201505-Global-Overview-2015/20150506-global-overview-2015-en.pdf

IOM (International Organization for Migration), 2015, “How the world views migration,” IOM

Report, International Organization for Migration, Geneva.

Pettersson, T. and P. Wallensteen, 2015, “Armed conflicts, 1946 – 2014,” Journal of Peace

Research, Vol. 52, No. 4, pp.536–50

Strom S, Venturini A., Villosio C., 2013, Wage assimilation: migrants versus natives, internal migrants versus foreign migrants, MPC-RSCAS 2013-30.

Venturini, A., 2016, “Assimilation of migrants in the labor market: What is missing in the economic literature,” in P. Fargues and A. Weinar, eds, INTERACT Project in print.

Figure 1 The actors and instruments of integration for labour migrants

Country

of Origin:

Associations, Entrance, selection, FamilymembersCitizenship

Integration policies

From INTERACT: Venturini A., 2016.

Integration

Figure 3 Changes of IDP figures over the last decade