Abstract
Between 2015 and 2030 welfare states throughout Europe (including Belgium) will face the long-term implications of the babyboom and subsequent babybust in the latter part of the 20th century: the large cohorts of the 1950s and 1960s will gradually enter retirement, while the small cohorts born since the mid 1970s are not sufficiently large to offset the shrinking labour force. The 2001 report of the United Nations on replacement migration estimated that a significant increase of migration (compared to levels of the mid 1990s) would be required to maintain the size of the working age population in Europe. In contrast to expectations and despite wide scepticism regarding to the UN migration prospects, immigration has substantially increased throughout Europe since the early 2000s, exceeding the migration volumes of the 1950s and 1960s by a considerable margin. However, throughout Europe the employment levels of migrant populations are significantly lower than is the case among natives, fuelling scepticism in the public debate with respect to replacement migration. Although the overrepresentation of second and later generation migrants in unemployment has been documented repeatedly, as well as the overrepresentation of first generation migrants in social assistance, only a limited body of work has hitherto been able to access existing register data to address the uptake and impact of active labour market programmes (ALMP's) and (labour force) integration policies on labour market outcomes for first and second generation migrants.
This project uses a novel data infrastructure that was developed in a preceding VIONA-project (Flemish Government) which aimed to link longitudinal register data from integration offices, employment offices and social security organisations in order to reconstruct and analyse labour market trajectories of both the resident population with a migration background (second and later generation migrants) and new migrants entering the country in the period 2005-2016 (first generation migrants), including asylum seekers. Given this highly innovative research infrastructure – in tandem with the fact that different migration profiles can be considered - this project will contribute to the scarce literature on the effectiveness of different integration and employment policies to labour market integration of individuals with a migration background, while additionally shedding light on the variation in the effectiveness of such policies for different migrant groups as the barriers that second and later generation migrants, first generation migrants (e.g. family formation and reunification) and asylum seekers face in entering the labour market are different. The project aims to continue the collaboration with the various regional stakeholders involved in the construction of the data-infrastructure and envisages the valorisation of the research findings in collaboration with local and regional actors in the field of labour market and integration policies.
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