Managing Refugee Protection Crises: Policy Lessons from Economics and Political Science

However, they also tend to support the acceptance of refugees deserving of asylum (according to the Refugee Convention) and are willing to accept more 2 Please note that we mainly use the terms “asylum seekers” and “refugees” to refer to forced migrants who have arrived in 4 asylum seekers as long as the allocation is ‘fair’ and proportional to the country’s capacity. [...] The challenge in incorporating lifecycle dynamics into the estimates of the fiscal impact of immigration is that much of the costs and benefits will take place in the future. [...] Each point in the figure refers to the net present value of the fiscal impact of an additional immigrant arriving in Finland as a function of age at arrival (x-axis) and future labor market performance (marker style).6 The top series correspond to a scenario where the immigrant immediately starts to follow the average profile of natives. [...] The difference between these scenarios and bottom scenarios – roughly €75,000 for immigrants arriving in their mid-20s – illustrates the importance of the integration of the children of immigrants to the host country’s labor markets. [...] They exploit the quasi-random placement of refugees to Swiss states (cantons) and the existence of a sharp language border dividing German and French-speaking areas and examine the size of the economic gains from proficiency of the host country’s language.