Immigration: Facts and Analysis

focus Migration is an information service that offers up-to-date figures, data and analysis on immigration, migration, asylum and integration issues. The service consists of three core products: country profiles, policy briefs and the “Migration und Bevölkerung” newsletter (in German only).

Country profiles (ISSN 1864-6220) offer comprehensive insight into immigration issues in various countries in Europe and other regions of the world.
Policy briefs (ISSN 1864-5704) provide a more in-depth look at issues such as labour migration from the perspective of both sending and receiving countries, integration, the development aspects of migration and EU policies.
The newsletter (ISSN 1435-7194, in German only) reports on current political discussions and new regulations as well as the latest findings in the field of migration and integration research.

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focus Migration Introduces New Features

Since 2005, focus Migration has been a source for up-to-date facts and analyses on migration and integration issues. Now our readers can make use of the following new features on our website:

Thanks to an integrated database, readers can now search for information on a particular issue or country which has appeared in one of our three products since 2005.
Readers can now browse the newsletter archive (in German only), which contains all articles that have appeared in that publication since April 2005.
Readers can now view HTML versions of our country profiles and policy briefs, in addition to the easily downloadable and printable PDF version.
Finally, readers are now able to subscribe to all of our products. By subscribing to our information service, you will receive the PDF version of our products as they appear.

Latest Publications

Deutschland/Kosovo: Rückübernahmeabkommen (German only)

Further Publications

EU Labour Migration since Enlargement

Trends, Impacts and Policies
Edited by Béla Galgóczi, Janine Leschke and Andrew Watt, European Trade Union Institute, Belgium

One of the most important consequences of EU enlargement in May 2004 was to extend the principle of the free movement of labour to the citizens of the central and eastern European new member states. In this book a team of labour economists and migration experts sheds light on the dimensions, characteristics and impacts of cross-border labour migration in selected sending (Hungary, Latvia and Poland) and receiving (Austria, Germany, Sweden and the UK) countries.
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Migrants in the Job Centre: Qualitative findings on migrants' experiences with Public Employment Support Services in Germany

HWWI- Research Paper 3-16
Jan Schneider, Michael Fischer, Vesela Kovacheva
The inclusion of migrants into the labour market is considered a key issue in
order to achieve better overall integration. However, compared to the German
population, unemployment rates are around twice as high among foreigners. One
important knob to improve access to the labour market lies in publicly funded
counselling and services, a field which has undergone fundamental policy reforms
in recent years.
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Labour market entry of migrants in Germany – Does cultural diversity matter?

HWWI Research Paper 3-10
Anette Haas, Andreas Damelang

This paper provides an analysis of the labour market entry of migrant youth in Germany after completion of an apprenticeship. We are particularly interested in the impact of local cultural diversity on a successful career start. Focusing on the cohort of people completing apprenticeships in 2000, we distinguish between Turks, citizens of former Yugoslavia, EU15 migrants and other migrants compared with Germans as the reference group. A multinomial probit model reveals that Turkish apprentices and those from the other migrant groups have a significantly lower probability of transition into the primary labour market, whereas EU15 migrants do not differ from Germans in this respect. In addition to controlling for individual and firm characteristics as well as occupation, we explicitly include regional characteristics. Our results show that if there is a high level of cultural diversity, young migrants will find employment more easily. In contrast to other studies which emphasize the impact of friends and family ties, we conclude that networks and information flows which are not restricted to an individual’s own ethnic group increase the likelihood of finding a job.

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