Research notes · Migration

Do people who flee do as well in a new labour market as people who choose to move?

What the authors found

Brell, Dustmann and Preston survey refugee labour-market outcomes across high-income countries and find refugees do persistently worse than economic migrants on employment and wages. The explanation is selection: economic migrants choose destinations partly for their job prospects and arrive with matching skills, while refugees are selected by the circumstances they fled. Gaps narrow over a decade or two, more clearly in employment rates than in wages.

What our data adds

This platform cannot distinguish refugees from other migrants, and the reason is worth recording. The World Bank's two refugee series — population by country of asylum and by country of origin — are still listed in its indicator catalogue but the data endpoint reports them archived, so they returned nothing when this dataset was built. The net migration table shows the outline of displacement anyway: Ukraine at plus 1,702,358 and Syria at plus 421,693 are both return flows after mass departure, and Sudan appears at plus 291,469.

What this cannot show

Without a refugee series there is no way to separate the populations the paper is comparing, which makes this the clearest gap in the people dataset. UNHCR publishes the authoritative figures directly and would need its own connector; that is recorded in the source register rather than approximated from something else. Reading net migration as displacement is unsafe in any case — it nets returns against departures and includes labour migration in the same number.

The data behind it

Related notes

• If you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?
• When seven million people arrive at once, who gains and who loses?
• If firms cannot hire foreign workers for low-skill jobs, do they hire local ones instead?

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