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This paper's main purpose is to evaluate immigrants’ demand for social assistance and services and identify the key barriers to social and labor market inclusion of immigrants in the European Union.

An online primary survey of experts from NGOs and public organizations working on immigrant integration in the member states of the European Union was carried out. The data is analyzed using simple comparative statistical methods; the robustness of the results is tested by means of logit and ordered logit statistical models.

The authors find that the general public in Europe has rather negative attitudes towards immigrants. Although the business community views immigrants somewhat less negatively, barriers to immigrant labor market inclusion identified include language and human capital gaps, a lack of recognition of foreign qualifications, discrimination, non‐transparent labor markets and institutional barriers such as legal restrictions for foreign citizens. Exclusion from higher education, housing and the services of the financial sector aggravate these barriers. Changes in the areas of salaried employment, education, social insurance, mobility and attitudes are seen as desired by members of ethnic minorities. The current economic downturn is believed to have increased the importance of active inclusion policies, especially in the areas of employment and education. These results appear to be robust with respect to a number of characteristics of respondents and their organizations.

The authors’ findings are not limited to the sample studied, which is supported by their robustness analysis. However an extended opinion survey of the ethnic minority population is required to more accurately examine the problems faced by diverse groups of immigrants across EU member states.

The findings of the study call for more effective diversity management and integration strategies to ensure non‐discrimination and better integration of ethnic minorities into the labor markets of member states.

There are few studies using primary survey data that have identified a wide range of barriers and challenges to economic integration faced by ethnic minorities in an enlarged European Union. The cross‐national opinion survey uniquely reflects views and suggestions of practitioners and immigrant minorities themselves.

The main purpose of the chapter is to explain the impact of labour market security on migration-related decisions, especially in terms of push-pull factors theory. There are different ways to understand work-related security; the chapter discusses the importance of job security, employment security and income security from labour migration perspective. The article presents the existing body of literature on theoretical concepts as well as on some methodological facets of the measurements of the level of particular aspects of work-related security. Special attention is paid to labour migrants in terms of their working conditions in both sending and receiving countries. An overview of previous migration studies proves that the issue of migrants’ labour market security was not the subject of any in-depth analyses. There are, however, many examples of research showing that, under certain conditions, migration decisions are influenced by, among others, the generosity of a welfare state, stability of job and the desire to achieve the so-called normal life. In the case of migrants from third countries (e.g. from Ukraine), income security is of particular importance alongside remuneration.

The purpose of this study is to examine the empirical links between social housing policy and location choices of immigrants in France.

The study characterizes the main individual and contextual determinants of the probability of immigrants to live in a HLM (habitations à loyer modéré), which is the main public housing policy in France. The authors use individual information coming from large (one‐fourth) extracts of the French population censuses conducted by INSEE (Paris) in 1982, 1990, and 1999.

In general, migrants live more frequently in social housing than French natives, other observables being equal. In particular, this frequency is higher for migrants from Turkey, Morocco, Southeast Asia, Algeria, Tunisia and Sub‐Saharan Africa (in decreasing order). Moreover, migrants of all origins live less often in a HLM when the city has plenty of social housing and when the fraction of natives is high.

The dataset can only measure statistical association between location choices of immigrants and the supply of social housing units at the local level, in the absence of panel data and instrumental variables. Interpretation in terms of causality is thus not permitted.

The dataset used is especially valuable for studying location choices of immigrants, since it allows significant samples of immigrants, according to their country of origin, these groups being generally too small in (French) surveys.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of empirical research on welfare magnetism and to assess the size and scope of the welfare magnet effect on the non-EU migrants in selected immigration countries of the European Union.

A conditional logistic regression model with interactions is used to estimate the strength of the welfare magnet effect, while controlling for demographic characteristics of the migrants and country-specific economic indicators. Data, used for estimation, comes from the Immigrant Citizen Survey, which provides a large, representative sample of first-generation (i.e. non-EU born) migrants. Various measures of welfare generosity are tested to assure the robustness of the results.

The coefficients suggest that the welfare magnet effect is present and significant in some immigrant groups, although it can have a negative impact on location decisions in other cases. Similar results are obtained for wage and unemployment indicators.

Results corroborate the welfare magnet hypothesis, which states that more generous welfare states should expect greater clustering of negatively-selected (i.e. lower educated) migrants. One potential limitation comes from the sample size, which does not allow for more general conclusions.

Heterogeneous effects of basic economic indicators in different demographic groups show that aggregate immigrant flows, used widely in the literature, can provide biased estimates of welfare magnet effect.

This paper adds to the available literature by using representative, recently collected data and employing a more complete list of controls in a quantitative analysis of migration decisions.

We study the correlates of immigrant location and migration choices to address the following questions: What location-specific, economic, and demographic factors are associated with these choices? Does the influence of these factors differ by immigrant characteristics? What are the factors associated with the observed increase in immigrant geographic dispersion during the 1990s? Our analysis suggests that: (1) There is significant heterogeneity in the correlates of immigrant location and migration choices; associations vary by immigrant birthplace, age, gender, education, and duration of residence in the United States. (2) Economic factors are, for the most part, weakly associated with immigrant location decisions. (3) Immigrants appear to be more attracted to states with large (growing) populations; less attracted to states with a high proportion of other foreign-born persons; more attracted to states with high unionization, and less attracted to states with high crime. (4) The association between location-specific characteristics and immigrant location choices changed between 1990 and 2000 for some immigrant groups and this explains most of the increase in geographic dispersion during the 1990s. In contrast, changes in location attributes and changes in immigrant composition explain relatively little of the increase in dispersion.

Economic theory predicts that unemployment benefits may increase expected income and reduce its volatility, thereby attracting immigrants to countries which implement such programs. This article aims to explore whether and how changes in countries’ unemployment benefit spending (UBS) affect immigration.

Data are collected for 19 European countries over the period 1993‐2008. The relationship between immigration flows and UBS is first tested using the OLS technique. Instrumental variable (IV) and generalised method of moments (GMM) are then used to address reverse causality.

While the OLS estimates suggest the existence of a moderate within‐country welfare magnet effect for the inflows of non‐EU immigrants, the IV approach reveals that the impact is substantially smaller and statistically insignificant when GMM techniques are implemented.

Since information on the immigrants’ country of origin is not available, it is not possible to exclude that for immigrants coming from certain areas, unemployment benefits constitute a strong incentive to immigrate. This hypothesis awaits further research, once detailed data is available.

This paper complements previous literature on immigration and welfare by exploring the endogenous nature of welfare spending. The empirical results provide insights into the interaction between immigration and welfare policies.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize existing evidence on welfare dependence among immigrants in Denmark and to produce new evidence with focus on the most recent years.

The paper combines a broad descriptive/analytical approach with multivariate estimation on the impact on welfare dependence from individual background factors.

The main finding is the importance of aggregate low unemployment for immigrants to assimilate out of welfare dependence. Fairly small effects are reported from policy changes intending to influence the economic incentives between welfare programs and jobs.

While panel data as used in the paper have a great potential, still a number of policy changes are not identified at the individual level. In further work it would be relevant to broaden the coverage including also some small policy programs and to extend the analysis to cover the period including the financial crisis years.

The paper has a potential to influence public attitudes in this area and to inform further public policy regarding benefit programs.

The main new result is the finding, at a disaggregate level, of how changes in immigration policy and cyclical changes interact, influencing the assimilation into or out of dependence on cash benefit programs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the European transnational migration of poverty in a regional context, specifically focusing on homelessness among the migrant poor in Norway and Sweden. Gathering insight from individuals who routinely assist with social care, this research seeks to find out if the liberal provision of welfare and supportive services attracts poor migrants to this region from other parts of Europe.

Qualitative in-depth interviews with individuals who provide social care assistance to homeless migrants in Oslo and Stockholm.

The influx of people experiencing homelessness in these areas is comprised mainly of two distinct sub-populations. One group migrated in search of employment opportunities but struggled with tenuous working and living arrangements. A second more transient group appeared to be motivated by perceptions of Scandinavian benevolence and charity. Both groups lacked familiarity with the social welfare system but were generally uninhibited by cultural differences between their destination and country of origin.

The intent of this study is not to generalize to a broader population but to develop an in-depth exploration of homelessness and migration from the perspective of social care workers. Purposive sampling is used to gather insights from key informants that work closely with homeless migrants; however the findings can be limited by the unique experiences of each individual.

In the public discourse on homelessness it is a mistake to group all homeless migrants together. Additionally it is important to distinguish between the needs of migrants and non-migrants, as these two homeless populations generally do not struggle with the same issues.

With a better understanding of this issue, governments will be able to provide more adequate assistance and develop more effective initiatives to combat and prevent homelessness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of immigration from European Neighborhood (EN) and new member states to the EU core countries over the period 2000-2010. Apart from income differentials, unemployment rates and other standard variables hypothesized to determine immigration, the paper focusses attention on welfare-chasing as well as measures to enforce immigration policy. Using a variant of the gravity model, the paper investigates whether tests of these hypotheses are robust with respect to spatial misspecification.

The determinants of migration from the European Neighborhood and new member states to the EU core countries is estimated using a spatial variant of the gravity model. The methodology is used for both multilateral and spatial flows. Gravity model estimations are presented for immigration into the EU core destinations using standard, non-spatial econometrics, as well as spatial econometrics for single and double-spatial dynamics.

Immigration to EU core countries varies directly with the change in social spending per head in the destination. This result stands out in all the models, both OLS and spatial. Immigrants are attracted by economic inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient. However, in this case it is the level that matters rather than its change. No evidence is found that the threat of apprehension at the destination deters migrants from the European Neighborhood and other countries.

The authors assume multilateralism is spatial. This means that everything else given, destinations are closer substitutes the nearer they are, and that immigration shocks are likely to be more correlated among origins the closer they are. This implicit assumption is restrictive because multilateralism is just spatial.

While immigration to EU core countries varies directly with the change in (not level of) social spending per head. If a given country becomes more benevolent it attracts more immigration. The results suggest that if during 2000-2010 social spending per capita grew by 1 percent, the immigration rate increased by between 1 and 2 percentage points relative to the number of foreign-born in 2000. This is a large demographic effect.

Uniquely, this paper does not assume immigration flows are independent and stresses their spatial and multilateral nature. A series of new non-spatial and spatial (single and double-spatial lag) models are used to empirically test hypotheses about the determinants of immigration to the EU core countries.