Choosing Refuge: Policy, Demographics, and Ukrainian Refugee Settlement Across Europe

What determines where refugees fleeing violent conflict choose to settle in safety? In most cases of forced migration, individuals remain internally displaced in their home country or flee to neighboring states. In contrast, Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Europe following Russia’s February 2022 invasion present a unique case. The activation of the European Union’s (EU) Temporary Protection Directive shortly after the start of the invasion allowed Ukrainians to settle in any EU or Schengen Area member state of their choosing and quickly obtain a settled Temporary Protected Status (TPS). In 2024, roughly 4.5 million Ukrainian refugees continue to hold a TPS, with hundreds of thousands having settled in other European countries. Remarkably, Ukrainian settlement patterns diverge from pre-2022 migration trends. While earlier Ukrainian migrants concentrated in Poland, Czechia, and Italy for work and study, refugees are now both more dispersed across Europe as well as heavily concentrated in Germany. We argue that national integration and crisis response policies shape settlement patterns in ways that economic factors and diaspora networks alone cannot explain. Ukrainian refugees are predominantly highly educated women fleeing with young children—a demographic profile that creates acute needs for quality education and childcare. These refugees strategically selected destinations like Germany, where policies have offered robust support for families, diverging from pre-2022 settlement patterns when working-age migrants concentrated in Poland given labor market access. We test the validity of our argument using mixed methods, including a quantitative analysis of settlement decisions among 12,023 Ukrainian refugees from a longitudinal survey, combined with interviews and focus groups of refugees in Germany and Poland. Our findings reveal how policy environments and public policy responses to migration flows shape settlement decisions, with implications for understanding migration patterns worldwide.