Luisa Hammer; Kamal Kassam; Yuliya Kosyakova; Katia Gallegos-Torres; Lukas Olbrich; Theresa Koch; Simon Wagner

IAB Nürnberg

On December 8, 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime unexpectedly collapsed, abruptly altering the political landscape in Syria and reshaping the perceived return prospects for millions of Syrians living abroad. We exploit this unanticipated regime change as a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of homeland developments on refugees’ settlement and return intentions. Drawing on novel data from the newly launched International Mobility Panel of Migrants in Germany (IMPa), whose fieldwork began just days before Assad’s fall, we show that the regime collapse significantly affected the expressed settlement intentions of Syrians in Germany. Respondents interviewed after December 8 were less likely to express permanent settlement intentions in Germany, more likely to report emigration considerations, and more likely to express uncertainty about their future in Germany. However, we find no effect on concrete short-term emigration plans, suggesting that increased return aspirations reflect forward-looking intentions rather than immediate behavioral change. Further analyses show that legal security in Germany acts as a push factor facilitating emigration intentions, while social and emotional integration into the host country is associated with a stronger preference to remain.

Yuliya Kosyakova¹; Andreas Ette²; Silvia Schwanhäuser¹

¹ Institut für Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung (IAB); ² Federal Institute for Population Research

This study provides crucial insights into how military conflict intensities in refugees’ home regions influence their intentions to settle abroad. Utilizing the context of Ukrainian refugees in Germany following the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, and leveraging natural variations in conflict intensity, we uncover significant and nuanced impacts of both short-term and long-term conflict dynamics on refugees’ intentions to stay abroad. We find that particularly short-term conflict intensities significantly elevate the likelihood of refugees choosing to settle permanently in Germany. These recent violent events serve as potent deterrents against return migration by amplifying perceptions of insecurity and instability associated with their home regions. This relationship is robust to various model specifications. Extending the model to account for uncertainty about the outcome and duration of the war in Ukraine, implies that the conflict intensity particularly reduces the uncertainty of the decision to stay in Germany instead of returning to Ukraine. In other words, the more intense the conflict situation, the more certain the refugee is to stay in Germany. Our analysis further identifies variability in sensitivity to conflict with males, those with children left behind, and those whose motivations for leaving extend beyond immediate safety concerns—such as economic reasons—are particularly influenced by these military conflict intensities.

Michael Zaslavsky¹; Aliakbar Akbaritabar²

¹ University of Wisconsin-Madison; ² Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

Current migration theories offer little insight into the potentially negative aspects of scholarly migration as a form of high-skilled migration, with high-skilled migration being largely viewed in a positive light. Yet scholarly migration is not always a tale of freedom, choice, and innovation, as the labels “researchers at risk”, “scientists in exile”, or “refugee academics” demonstrate. We document the problematic aspects of scholarly migration by investigating the case of Ukrainian and Ukraine-based researchers and the effects of the conflict since 2014. We draw on two large-scale, rich bibliometric datasets, Scopus and OpenAlex, which allow us to identify both internal and international scholarly migration at the subnational level from 2009 to 2022. Results suggest that after 2014 there was significant internal and international outmigration from Eastern Ukrainian regions, with well over 50 per 1,000 scholars leaving the Eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk to both internal and international destinations in the first three years after the start of the conflict. These results highlight the importance of monitoring how science systems change during armed conflict, and complicate current treatments of scholarly migration in the literature as solely driven by economic intentions and exercising one’s freedom to move.

Alexander Patzina¹; Matthias Collischon²; Felix Rahberger³

¹ Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg; ² Institut für Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung (IAB); ³ Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg

Less than a decade after the 2015 refugee crisis, Europe experienced again an unprecedented influx of refugees, this time driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent displacement of several million Ukrainians. Against this background, we investigate how refugee migration to Germany influences social trust, which is crucial for social integration and the functioning of societies. To conceptualize how changes in refugee shares in German districts affect social trust, we draw on notions from contact and threat theory. Furthermore, we differentiate between different refugee groups (i.e., refugees from Ukraine and from Africa and Middle East) to enhance our theoretical understanding on the role of cultural proximity and economic competition for social integration. Empirically, we use data from 2017 to 2023 of the Panel Study Labor Market and Social Security that enable us to exploit regional and temporal variation in refugee shares at the district-level. By exploring within-person/within-district/within-year changes in the outcome variable, accounting for unobserved time-invariant differences between individuals and districts, and controlling for national trends in the outcome variables over time, our results suggest: (1) An increasing refugee share on the district-level decreases social trust. (2) Refugees from Middle East and Africa mostly drive this negative effect. (3) The economic downturn and individual level unemployment intensify negative effects of refugee shares on social trust. Consequently, we conclude that the ethnic proximity and a shared value system between the host society and the refugees’ origins determine perceived symbolic threats that influence social trust among the host society.