Measuring Vulnerability of Refugees in High Income Countries: Evidence from Germany

Daria Mendola , Università degli Studi di Palermo, Department of Psychology, Educational Science and Human Movement (SPPEFF)
Anna Maria Parroco, University of Palermo

In recent years, a growing number of refugees arrived to Europe and several countries are struggling in processing the high number of applications for international protection. Germany is the 5th in the worldwide ranking of hosting countries for refugees (UNHCR, 2018) and is the first in Europe. While there are several academic and institutional studies on the quality of life and the vulnerability of refugees in medium-low income countries (namely Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq) very few studies are available on the vulnerability of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe. Noteworthy the UN's Vulnerability Assessment Framework hardly fits in high income countries where the notion of vulnerability goes beyond that of basic needs. In this paper we operationalize vulnerability as the joint probability of experiencing interdependent risks, namely those of social isolation, economic deprivation and bad. Using the first wave (2016) of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey, that considers people who entered Germany between 2013 and 2016 and applied for asylum, we estimated a trivariate generalized logit model to evaluate how individual and household characteristics are associated to the probability of experiencing each risk and make inference also on the association between pairs of risks, conditionally to a set of selected covariates. Preliminary results show that being entitled of any form of international protection, being employed, living in a private accommodation and having social interactions with Germans are effective in reducing the exposure to risks. Health covariates are always significant and increase the risk of both social isolation and perceived economic difficulties.

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 Presented in Session 65. Crisis-Driven Migration and Its Consequences