Forced Placement: Impact on Naturalization. Evidence from a Natural Experiment

• In Event: The Politics of Asylum Seekers and Refugees

Abstract

With the aim of directing refugee immigrants away from immigrant-dense areas in the large cities, many countries carry out dispersal policies that affect the location of refugees. The justification for such policies is often that residential concentration and segregation is believed to hamper the integration process of refugees into the host society. Does placement policies promote refugee integration? Despite their popularity, there is a lack of reliable evidence that isolate the causal effect of such policies. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by utilizing quasi-random variation in placement induced by a major reform that changed the Danish dispersal policy from a system of voluntary to forced placement. I estimate the effect of this policy change in a regression discontinuity design and show that forced placement refugees were about 14 percentage points less likely to naturalize in the long-term compared to refugees under voluntary placement. I show that this marked effect most likely runs through a social network mechanism where the least skilled, i.e. new refugees, benefit from the better skilled members of the same ethnic group.

Author

• Frederik Juhl Jørgensen, Aarhus Universitet