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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.

A Baseline Study on Migration Data Management in Azerbaijan has been published by the EU-funded MOBILAZE 2 project. The study was conducted by ICMPD and EU member states’ experts. The main objective of this study is to provide comprehensive insight into the current state and practices of migration data management in the Republic of Azerbaijan, with a particular focus on the existing procedures and tools available for data collection, analysis, and application. The particular gaps and needs observed in this regard are then laid out and recommendations for improvement are given. The MOBILAZE 2 project team would like to thank all participating Azerbaijani state institutions who gave their valuable insight and recommendations for this study. 

Complementary pathways provide an avenue for refugees to take up a job in another country, enabling them to use their skills to forge a sustainable future and helping to meet employer and labour market needs in countries of destination. Germany’s Western Balkans Regulation provides a model for the expansion of refugee labour mobility in Germany and other EU countries. Developed with an annual cap and a particular scope, such as a geographic focus on one or more third countries or on specific labour market sectors, an expansion of this approach would ease mobility requirements for people in need of protection who have secured a job offer. The possible expansion of the Regulation’s model to reach people in need of protection has the potential to introduce fresh ideas and positive change to EU migration and asylum policy more broadly.

Authors

Martin Wagner, Caitlin Katsiaficas & Gizem Güzelant (ICMPD)

This Policy Brief explains the digital products and services available which facilitate labour migration, as well as the current barriers to the use of modern technology. This paper also analyses existing policy measures as well as looks at recommendations on how digitalisation can be leveraged to enable labour migration.

Temporary protection for people fleeing Ukraine has an end date: March 2025 at the latest. To promote and support a discussion of post-temporary protection strategies at the EU level, ICMPD has published a second discussion paper exploring potential policy options, with a focus on those enabling temporary protection beneficiaries to remain in the EU. It highlights the aspirations of Ukrainians to remain or return, as identified in various surveys; calculates the potential impact of a status change on national asylum and immigration permit systems; looks at potential special statuses for this group; and identifies relevant lessons learned from Brexit. This paper builds on a March 2023 discussion paper, which also aimed to contribute food for thought on ways to exit from temporary protection, which was published under a joint ICMPD-IGC initiative on “Continuation of and exit strategies from temporary protection and similar arrangements.”

The intensity and pace of climate change is a source of concern worldwide. Weather-related events are taking an increasingly heavy and obvious toll, pressing policy-makers to act decisively to safeguard natural resources and to protect populations from harm.

Against this backdrop, it has become routine for the public discourse to associate climate change and its impacts with migration and mobility. In Europe and the global north in general, climate change is often perceived as precipitating a new stage of large-scale mobility from developing countries. The occurrence of floods, droughts and other natural disasters and the resulting population displacement, contributes to cement the assumption that climate change and mobility are two sides of the same coin.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is facing severe climate risks. In fact, scientific projections indicate that the region is warming up faster than the global average, exposing local populations to a series of threats directly and indirectly associated with climate change. However, the migration and mobility implications of this phenomenon have been contentious. Indeed, measuring climate mobility is fraught with challenges, from assessing people’s propensity to migrate to identifying obstacles to movement.

This study aims to consider the various perceptions and narratives surrounding climate mobility in three different countries: Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. Based on key stakeholder interviews, this work aims to provide policy-makers with pointers to understand how the public discussion on the climate mobility nexus is progressing in these countries. The research focuses on exposing people’s perceptions of climate impacts and how these perceptions shape decision-making mechanisms related to mobility. In doing so it aims to uncover the complex and singular realities that current reporting on climate mobility tends to mask.

The talent that refugees possess is often overlooked in policy and public discussions. Skills-based policies such as complementary labour pathways, which facilitate refugee labour mobility, can bring tangible benefits for refugees, receiving employers and economies, and countries of first asylum. This policy brief, based on desk research and interviews with dozens of stakeholders, shares policy options for expanding complementary labour pathways in the EU.

One year after the invasion, Russia’s emigration potential is nearly depleted. Neither new mobilisation nor increased combat will result in a new exodus of Russians from the country in the coming years. The countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus are faced with the challenge of properly regulating the influx of Russians in order to reap benefits without exacerbating social tensions in the hosting communities, which may require international actors to interfere. The EU member states will have to develop a more uniform strategy for accepting Russians from risk groups, as well as legal migration pathways for Russians who may benefit the EU labour market. This Policy Brief looks at the main patterns and key developments of migration from Russia after 24 February 2022.

Conducted as part of the EU-funded and ICMPD-implemented Migration Partnership Facility project “Making refugee talent visible and accessible to EU labour markets – tapping into the potential of skills-based complementary pathways,” this mapping looks globally at channels through which persons in need of protection can work and study in a third country. These schemes enable people in need of protection to utilise and develop their skills.

Historical and recent trends of emigration from the Western Balkan region, comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, have led to the formation of diverse diaspora groups across the world, with prominent representation in the Western European countries. Diaspora members often maintain close transnational socioeconomic ties with their countries of origin. These ties are most commonly reflected through the transfer of remittances at the individual or household level, but also increasingly through investment, entrepreneurship, or knowledge transfer etc., with the potential to create a greater impact on the socioeconomic development of the Western Balkan countries.

This report synthesises the overall findings of the ECONDIAS project and takes stock of the country-specific, and EU-level policy and institutional landscape on migration-development nexus, and identifies relevant stakeholders and practices to draw context-specific lessons on success and impeding factors for diaspora-led investment in countries of origin.