Are asylum seekers more likely to work with more inclusive labor market access regulations?

Michaela Slotwinski,Roman Uhlig,Alois Stutzer

doi:10.1186/s41937-019-0046-2

Michaela Slotwinski, Roman Uhlig + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41937-019-0046-2

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Abstract

In the face of recent refugee migration, early integration of asylum seekers into the labor market has been proposed as an important mechanism for easing their economic and social lot in the short as well as in the long term. However, little is known about the policies that foster or hamper their participation in the labor market, in particular during the important initial period of their stay in the host country. In order to evaluate whether inclusive labor market policies increase the labor market participation of asylum seekers, we exploit the variation in asylum policies in Swiss cantons to which asylum seekers are as good as randomly allocated. During our study period from 2011 to 2014, the employment rate among asylum seekers varied between 0 and 30.2% across cantons. Our results indicate that labor market access regulations are responsible for a substantial proportion of these differences, in which an inclusive regime increases participation by 11 percentage points. The marginal effects are larger for asylum seekers who speak a language that is linguistically close to the one in their host canton.SummaryInclusive labor market access regulations substantially increase the employment chances of asylum seekers, in particular if the language distance is short.

Highlights

Refugee migration is likely to challenge Western democracies for years and to spur discussions about humane as well as efficient asylum processes
There is the concern that easy access to the labor market attracts migrants2; on the other, restrictive policies preventing early economic integration might lead to high long-term costs for the receiving countries
It visualizes the development of the employment rate of asylum seekers between 2011 and 2014 in the cantons which are grouped by the relative openness of their labor market towards asylum seekers

Summary

Introduction

Refugee migration is likely to challenge Western democracies for years and to spur discussions about humane as well as efficient asylum processes (see, e.g., Hatton 2017 or Hangartner and Sarvimäki 2017 for recent analyses). The index captures four aspects: (i) the temporal expansion of the employment ban (yes/no), (ii) the duration of the work permit process, (iii) whether there is restricted access to some sectors or strict application of the priority rule for domestic workers (yes/no), and (iv) whether there are additional salary deductions for employed asylum seekers (yes/no). One fourth of the cantons have a rather inclusive regime These cantons refrain from imposing any further extension of the employment ban, do not restrict employment to specific sectors, apply no additional salary deductions, and have low administrative hurdles when it comes to the employment of asylum seekers. We apply a simple linear model to empirically test whether a less restricted labor market access leads to higher labor market participation of asylum seekers, and whether there are differences resulting from the heterogeneity in basic assistance and integration measures. The disaggregated employment rates further allow us to explore any interaction effect between labor market access and language distance

Results

Interaction between the effect of labor market access and language distance

Conclusion

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