Research on the labour market and asylum seekers - CEAR

Andaira, through Tangente, together with the organisation Dinamia, is starting a new project for the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR), with the aim of analysing the supply of local labour markets for the socio-labour insertion of people seeking and benefiting from international protection.

The aim of the research is to study the labour market of asylum seekers and beneficiaries of asylum and the impact and social return on investment (SROI) of the asylum programme “promotion of socio-labour integration and networking”.

What do we expect from this study?

The expected results are as follows:

• Collection and analysis of professional and skills profiles of applicants and beneficiaries of international protection disaggregated by age, sex, educational level and nationality.
• Study of the applied labour market, focused on the group of people seeking and benefiting from international protection, for each of the facilitated territories. Including future emerging sectors.
• Hiring of the group in the last 5 years by province, type of contract, sector and duration by sex and nationality.
• Unemployment rate for the last 5 years broken down by level of education, nationality, sex, age and province.
• Number of asylum seekers who have lost a job as a result of a refusal of asylum in Spain, disaggregated by sex.
• Self-employment - disaggregated by gender, nationality, age, province; types of companies incorporated and sectors.
• Proposals of job niches and opportunities, based on current demands and upcoming future trends, integrating information from the employment services in the different CEAR offices.
• Proposals for job prospecting and training strategies for each of the territories identified in the terms of reference.

Brief X-ray of asylum seekers in Spain

Asylum applications in Spain have steadily increased in recent years. In absolute terms, the largest increase occurred in 2017, with 30,120 applications, double the number of the previous year. However, this trend started in 2015, when the number of applications tripled, with a year-on-year variation of 163%. Even so, the number of concessions has decreased

According to data provided by Eurostat, the largest number of protection requests come from Venezuelan citizens (one third of the total), due to the convulsive situation currently being experienced in the country. In second place are the requests from people from Syria, which, after a significant decrease in 2017, have increased again in 2017, reaching 4,225 (although it does not exceed the peak recorded in 2015, the year of greatest severity of the conflict and which generated the most displacements).

In terms of gender, while in 2013, 78.51 PT3QTP3T of the requests were made by men, currently they do not reach 601 PT3QTP3T (a decrease of more than 20 percentage points). In contrast, the weight of applications made by women has doubled, from 21.9% to 42.3%. Meanwhile, applicants for protection are in the 18-34 age group (51.1%).

With regard to decisions, apart from the implications of the low percentage of positive decisions, another aspect to highlight is the high number of pending decisions (currently over 42,000), which increases the legal insecurity and uncertainty of a significant number of people who are in Spanish territory awaiting their future.