Germany’s Refugees Are Starting to Pay Off
Highly skilled people are more likely to flee conflict zones. Receiving countries just need to use their skills better.
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Photographer: Joerg Koch/Getty Images
The tidal wave of asylum seekers that hit Europe in 2015 is often stereotyped as an invasion of poorly qualified migrants destined to be charity cases in the receiving countries. Recent research shows it’s not true. Germany, which welcomed the immigrants and almost immediately regretted it, is likely to end up profiting from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to let them in, especially if it keeps taking steps to ease these immigrants’ path to employment.
For a paper published earlier this year, Cevat Giray Aksoy from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Panu Poutvaara from the ifo Institute at the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research surveyed immigrants from the refugee crisis about their reasons for leaving their home countries. Their sample was constructed to mirror the geographic and demographic patterns of migration across the Mediterranean during the crisis, as recorded by the International Migration Organization. They discovered that 77% of respondents – those from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Syria – fled war and persecution, while the rest, mostly from Algeria, Morocco and several African countries, came for economic reasons.