Personal Insights & Thoughts: Refugee Integration Into the German Workforce
Refugee Integration Into the German Workforce
(Based on personal research - Nadia)
I'm setting out to investigate the challenges to refugee integration through exploring four broad areas—language barriers, educational shortcomings, societal biases and specific labor market characteristics. Below are key considerations in these areas.
For a comprehensive understanding of this topic, I apply two subject areas to my investigation— History and Economics. I use my 11th Grade historiography training to critically evaluate the values and limitations of the arguments, the data presented in my sources, and to examine the implications of Germany’s historically homogenous society. To this, I connect case studies of more recent migrations into Germany of both guest workers and immigrants from Turkey. I use Economics to analyze labor market composition, trends in refugee employment and their relationship to various policies and social stigmas, and to evaluate the long term economic impact of a growing refugee population in the context of an aging German labor market. For data that can be analyzed for historical trends and for a review of policies implemented to improve the social and economic condition of refugees, I draw on a balanced set of journals and reports issued by both governmental and non-governmental organizations. I interview German citizens for their perspective on refugees and the effects of resettlement on German society. I believe the refugee perspective to be critical, so I interview refugees recently resettled near my hometown of Detroit, Michigan about their experience in terms of both employment and social treatment (the US is the top refugee resettlement country in the world; Michigan among the top 5 states for refugee resettlement, and among the top 2 taking refugees fleeing from Syria in 2016).
Image below courtesy: AEIDL, Brussels, Belgium.
Language Barrier:
Almost half of the refugees who reached Germany in 2015 spoke Arabic, and while 28 percent of
surveyed first-time asylum applicants said that they spoke English, a mere 2 percent knew any German (Trines). Among refugees from the main countries of origin, German language skills were possessed by only 1.1 percent of Syrians, 0.6 percent of Afghanis, and 0.4 percent of Iraqis. Clearly, German language skills are virtually nonexistent among recent arrivals (Trines).
In July 2016, Germany’s government passed legislation requiring that asylum seekers take
integration courses, or lose government benefits and the legal right to remain in the country. The nine-month integration course was established in 2005, before the current crisis, and was designed to expedite the assimilation of approved asylees, helping them to obtain needed linguistic skills as well as softer cultural skills and understanding. The course includes a 60-hour cultural “orientation” unit introducing German society and culture, as well as 600 contact hours of German-language instruction. One goal is to enable participants to obtain an intermediate-level language certificate at level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages - CEFR (Trines).
The initiative was well intended and contented, but in practice pass rates for the B1 CEFR language certificate were below 60 percent (2013), and students who were successful tended to be those who arrived with better educations in the first place (Sauer). Insights received from refugees suggest that the shortcomings were in the implementation. Classes were crowded frequently with both adults and children, and the teachers while passably proficient in the language were often under-qualified to teach it. The compensation offered did not make teaching attractive if other job opportunities existed. Not surprisingly, the data suggests that almost as many students completed the course without significant German-language skills as those who did.
The language courses appear to be more effective in labor market integration for migrants with low and medium education than for those with a prior university degree. Some of this could be attributed to the fact that language courses are often only a first step before further labor market integration measures. Six months is also too short a period to base a conclusion. A longitudinal follow-up over 5-10 years would be needed to adequately evaluate long-term effectiveness. Also, evaluations of language courses have almost exclusively focused on pre- and post-assessment of language mastery, and not on labor market success. The limited micro-data available shows that there is no strong direct link between language knowledge and employment. For example, in an analysis with data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the employment rates of immigrants who arrived in the past ten years do not differ between those who are able to speak German well and those who are not (“Labour Market Integration in Australia, Denmark, Germany and Sweden”). After controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and migrant group, German language knowledge becomes a significant determinant of immigrants’ employment participation, but the result is not very robust.
A profound knowledge of the German language may, however, be important with respect to occupational attainment (Constant). This indicates that language mastery may have influence on the transferability of human capital. Perhaps even more importantly, a lack of German language knowledge could hamper young migrants’ access to vocational training - for example, by limiting their chances in a job interview - which in turn, makes them more vulnerable to losing employment at a later stage.
Educational Shortcomings:
A representative survey of 2,300 refugees from all countries of origin conducted in June of 2016 showed that 19 percent of respondents attended higher education institutions in their home countries and 13 percent had a university degree (Trines). The level of educational attainment varies with the country of origin, but generally falls below German attainment. According to 2016 estimates by the German Agency for Labor, given decades of war in Afghanistan, less than 50 percent of Afghan refugees had more than elementary education, while 27 percent did not have any form of formal schooling at all (Trines). Refugees from Syria are much better educated with more than 50 percent having had at least secondary schooling, and 27 percent having had some form of tertiary education, if not a degree (Trines).
Due to their low educational attainment, immigrants currently remain overrepresented in the less-skilled occupational sectors. As the German labor market places substantial emphasis on formal qualifications, particularly of the vocational kind, educational attainment will be an additional focus, since this is likely to affect present and future employment prospects (Kalter). This reliance on formal certification also tends to hamper labor market access of immigrants with high qualification obtained abroad (Kreyenfeld and Konietzka). Given that 50 percent of asylum seekers are below the age of 25, access to higher education is vitally important for the long-term social advancement of a sizeable numbers of refugees and their prospective families (Trines).
Many refugees are also not able to continue their education or else are able to do so only with a delay because they are denied access to higher education for bureaucratic reasons. To study in Germany they must prove their identity, the possession of a high school diploma, knowledge of German and the recognition of their need for protection from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Stampfl). In many cases, with passports and documents lost while fleeing, foreign school and university degrees unrecognized, and refugees’ insufficient knowledge of German or money for tuition fees, their integration is inevitably slowed.
A university in Berlin launched in 2015 has ambitious goals to make it possible for refugees to receive a university degree free of charge, without long waits and bureaucratic hurdles. If the plan succeeds, it would be unique in the world. Kiron University has a thousand freshmen studying economics, engineering, computer science, architecture and intercultural studies. Behind Kiron are social entrepreneurs, refugees, students and professors. In addition to an approximately fifty-member core team and more than 200 volunteers, a number of institutions and persons, mainly university founders and directors, are active at Kiron in an advisory capacity (Stampfl).
However, Kiron is not an officially recognized university and does not award degrees. The large number of donations and applications that Kiron has received since its foundation suggest that immediate alternatives to German brick-and-mortar universities are sorely needed. In its first semester alone, Kiron received 5,000 applications, 80 percent of them from Syrian refugees (Stampfl). The institution currently enrolls 2,300 refugees. This remains a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 50,000 refugees interested in pursuing a degree (Stampfl).
Due to Germany’s traditionally bureaucratic background, it is unnecessarily difficult for refugees to gain access to education and for those with qualifications obtained abroad, to get proper recognition in the labor market. However, it is also important to note that while this is a big reason for the overrepresentation of refugees in low-skill occupations, their generally lower educational attainment when compared to the German population as a whole is also significant.
To be concluded...
