RAPID: Baseline Survey of Asylum Seekers in Germany

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European governments are currently facing the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. In 2014, Europe registered approximately 567,000 new asylum claims, a figure which has since been surpassed by the total intake between January and July of 2015. Given that the crisis in the Middle East shows no signs of abating, these population flows can be expected to continue, placing significant pressure on European governments. This massive influx of asylum seekers has resulted in severe political fallout in many European countries. Although refugee integration has been a long-standing and pressing goal, scholars and policymakers have strong opinions but little evidence on how best to bring it out about. This research will collect new evidence and apply innovative techniques to assess which policies promote the successful social, political, and economic integration of refugees into host countries and which measures are likely to fail or backfire. Germany is the focus of the study since it is the European country that has received by far the largest number of recent refugees. Using a mobile messaging application (WhatsApp) and working with local governments and NGOs, a large panel of recently arrived asylum seekers in Germany will be created to provide timely understanding of how policy parameters impact refugee integration. The distinguishing feature of our project is that we will provide the research and policy community with two important tools. First, for researchers we will test and assess a new panel recruitment and retention approach via WhatsApp that can be used with a highly mobile population. Second, for policymakers we will provide systematic information about the current situation and perspectives of asylum seekers in Europe. Longer-term the study will inform policy discussion by providing systematic evidence on the impact of asylum procedures and programs for the subsequent integration of refugees. Additionally, taking advantage of what we learn from Germany, we will be able to apply this knowledge to the US case. Unfortunately, there is insufficient experimentation in the US to allow for policy guidance. We must therefore rely on findings from cases where experimentation is prevalent. Hopefully, the lessons gleaned from the analysis of the varied programs in Europe will be useful for American policy makers as they confront similar security and economic challenges with increasing numbers of refugees arriving on our shores.Systematically evaluating the impact of a plethora of asylum seeker and refugee integration policies provides important contributions to existing immigration research across a range of social science fields: 1) it expands the scope of advanced econometric and experimental methods to a new policy area in order to produce internally valid evidence on the impact of integration policies; and 2) it advances understanding of the impact of policy beyond that of economic success by incorporating political and social outcomes for these highly vulnerable populations. These two contributions can help build a basic understanding of the conditions favorable for the integration of asylum seekers and refugees, which is currently absent from both the academic and policy literature.