Caitlin Katsiaficas

This policy paper explores the potential benefits of expanding mobility opportunities for third-country national youth to EU Member States and presents different options for making this possible. It also presents the potential trade-offs when it comes to programme goals and design and highlights key considerations for those looking to develop and launch new youth mobility schemes.

Employment is a vital strategy for refugees from Ukraine seeking to rebuild their lives abroad or sustain themselves until it is safe to return. To this end, the first-ever activation of the EU Temporary Protection Directive provides for immediate access to the EU labour market. However, this is not the only innovation that has emerged since the seismic events of spring 2022, and represents but the first step in facilitating the employment of refugees from Ukraine.

Civil society organisations, private sector actors, and individual volunteers are all playing an active role in helping newcomers to find employment. For their part, many national, regional, and local governments from across Europe have responded with creative approaches. This briefing note details government approaches to boosting employment adopted or adapted in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It focuses on receiving countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which have received a large share of Ukrainian refugees, but, in many cases, have limited recent experience with receiving humanitarian migrants.

New displacement in 2022 pushed the number of people forcibly displaced globally to more than 108 million – more than the populations of Italy and Spain combined. Many forced migrants find themselves in ‘protracted displacement’ situations, where they experience long-term vulnerability, dependency, and legal insecurity, lacking or denied opportunities to rebuild their lives. The EU-funded Transnational Figurations of Displacement (TRAFIG) research project investigated why people fall into protracted displacement situations and what coping strategies they use, with a focus on networks and mobility. Over the course of three years, the TRAFIG team engaged with more than 3,100 people, including displaced persons, policymakers, and practitioners in 11 countries across East Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. This included a survey of 1,900 displaced persons: Congolese persons displaced within the DRC and people who moved from their countries of origin to Ethiopia, Greece, Italy, Jordan, and Pakistan.

TRAFIG research findings underscored the importance of networks for displaced persons looking to secure a sustainable future and for policymakers and practitioners looking to support them, including when it comes to their integration. This paper highlights the role of local networking in settling in and shares how humanitarian, development, and integration actors can take these findings on board in the search for more sustainable solutions to global displacement.