Building Futures: Lived Experiences and Labour Prospects of Young Syrian Refugees in Greece

The protracted nature of the Syrian conflict has directed attention to policies designed to empower refugees to integrate socially and economically in host societies. Education and skills development for young people are at the heart of these efforts but their impact remains poorly understood. This paper proposes a new interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis to overcome this limitation. Insights from education, economics and sociology are explored for their relevance and utility in identifying and deconstructing young refugees’ past learning and training experiences, their acquisition of new skills, and their transition and integration into new learning and training situations. Empirically, the paper focusses on Greece, one of the main transit countries of forcibly displaced people into Europe, exploring the skills, aspirations, experiences and evaluations of young Syrian refugees aged 18-32 years old. The analysis draws on 500 face-to-face interviews conducted over the summer of 2017 across Greece. The case shows very acutely the challenges of managing immigration and organising integration of immigrants into a host society with a fragile economy. Comparisons with other host states, Lebanon and the UK, allow us to explore whether the currently observed limited impact of Syrian refugees on the labour market can be explained by their lack of required skills that would be suited to the opportunities that exist in host countries or by constraints and barriers they face when they get there. Policy implications are discussed for Greece and more broadly for Southern Europe that has been disproportionately been affected by the migrant crisis.