A number of recent studies have analysed the labour potential of refugees. Long (2015) shows that integrating refugees to the labour market through removing refugee-specific barriers of entry is beneficial for the refugees (avoiding deskilling and aid-dependency) as well as for the host country (filling labour shortages). Many scholars have also stated that migration of any sort is more often than not undertaken by entrepreneurial people (Lazear, Legrain, Lazcko at the Global Economic Symposium 2015, Kiel). Furthermore, if given the opportunity then refugees use this go-getter attitude to come up with innovative ideas to try to make their own living with self-employment, such as shown by Betts (2014) in the example of camps in Uganda. Legislation, however, that would allow the people who have fled their home countries due to persecution to take up self-employment, is rare.
The main idea that this paper supports is that instead of ‘warehousing’ the incoming refugees and seeing them as a burden for the society, we should be looking into their potential for the labour market and how the policies regulating the situation could be of help. (Betts 2014; Long 2015) The main hypothesis is that many of those that come to Europe for humanitarian reasons have valuable ‘human capital’ (Zimmermann 2014), it is just hidden behind bureaucratic hurdles, and therefore not known nor utilised by the local employers.
The analysis is based on a newly created data set about the skill levels of the asylum seekers gathered in Kiel, Germany. As there is a clear lack of resources in the administrations to gather official statistics in Germany, and in many cases the asylum seekers do not have any official proof of their qualifications, then information on their self-perceived skillsets was collected. Through analysing the pool of skills presented by the asylum seekers, and the shortages in the local workforce, this exploratory study found that the current humanitarian flow of people could be treated as an influx of human capital.
The responses clearly show that the majority of asylum seekers examined fell under the category of ‘Craft and Related Trades Workers’ (group 7) of the International Standard Classification of Occupations, which has been identified as a shortage area on the German labour market. In many cases, no university background was indicated, whilst self-perception of skill level was rated high. As language skills are too low to find regular employment, but the skills and motivation to work exist, then self-employment would be the only way how to avoid the deskilling and aid-dependency of the refugees.
