The Process of Labor Market Integration of Male Syrian Nationals

Abstract This paper addresses the question of how the typical labor market careers of male refugees holding a Syrian nationality status look and how these are associated with individual and contextual characteristics. Referring to information from the administrative dataset Sample of Integrated Welfare Benefit Biographies , refugees’ monthly labor market activities are tracked for around three years after having joined Germany’s basic provision scheme Grundsicherung für Arbeitssuchende . Using clustering techniques, the resulting individual career sequences are grouped into a typology of four: ‘Alternating (in)activities in welfare’, ‘job seeking to full labor market entry’, ‘job seeking to partial labor market entry’, and ‘residual’. The results of multinomial regressions indicate associations between the likelihood of taking a more or less advantageous career and certain characteristics, such as the county’s unemployment rate or whether a person holds a degree.