Integration: What Works and What Doesn’t Work?

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    Integration: What Works and What Doesn’t Work?

    This is episode six of our course Six Impossible Ideas (after Brexit). For this series, we’ve teamed up with six researchers from the London School of Economics, each offering a compelling take on one seemingly impossible idea.

    What is a seemingly impossible idea, you ask? We’ve challenged each of our lecturers to propose an idea about migration that appears self-evident to them but is missing, misunderstood, or misinterpreted in public conversation.

    To receive the full series right to your inbox, sign up for this course on our website


    Part 6/6 from Six Impossible Ideas (after Brexit)

    The integration of refugees and migrants is a policy priority for every European government right now. However, according to Dominik Hangartner, political scientist at LSE Government, we know surprisingly little about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to integration.

    Dominik’s impossible idea is that we should seek empirical answers to these questions and turn them into more effective policies. In this episode, he answers three such questions. We’ve turned them into 2-minute explainers, but should you want to read the original research, we’ve linked to that, too.

    European attitudes to asylum-seekers

    Costs of a slow asylum process

    How does citizenship affect integration?

    Recommended Reading

    For more on Dominik’s research, here are the papers corresponding to each video:

    How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers

    When lives are put on hold: Lengthy asylum processes decrease employment among refugees?

    Catalyst or Crown: Does Naturalization Promote the Long-Term Social Integration of Immigrants?

    Dominik Hangartner

    Dominik is Associate Professor at the London School of Economics and Faculty Co-Director of the Migration Policy Lab at the University of Zurich. He completed pre-doctoral fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, going on to earn his PhD from the University of Bern. Dominik has written extensively on attitudes towards immigrants and migration policies. You can find more links to his work on his personal website.

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    You should also sign up for our newest course, A Migrant’s View, here. It’s a bit different than our other courses, focussing on both research about so-called “origin countries” (where migrants and refugees come from) and stories of arrival, waiting, and return. By signing up for our newsletter on our site, you’ll be the first to know which courses we’ll be releasing next (trust us, there will be more).