Professor Jackie Wahba gave a plenary talk on “The Determinants of Refugees’ Destinations: Where do refugees locate within the EU?”, at the Immigration in OECD Countries - 12th Annual International Conference on December 13, 2022 in Paris, organised by the OECD, CEPII and LISER. Link to the programme is available on the conference website.

Jackie presented her paper, which is joint work with Valentina Di Iasio and part of the QuantMig project, on the determinants of the destination choice of first time non-EU asylum applicants to the EU, between 2008-2020. The paper investigates the role played by policies related to employment rights, processing of asylum applications, attractiveness of the welfare system, economic factors and networks on the destination of asylum seeker within the EU. The findings show that the strongest pull factor for asylum seekers to a destination is social networks both in terms of previous asylum applicants as well as stock of previous migrants. The results also suggest that employment bans are not justified as a deterrence for asylum seekers given their modest association to asylum flows.

The deliverable is available on the QuantMig website.