Employability among refugees and how it is affected by public integration programmes

When immigrants settle in a new country and start looking for a job, often labour market research conceives of the outcome in binary terms as either success or failure. Nevertheless, finding a job in a new country often consists in many smaller or larger steps towards reaching this goal. Theoretically, we may conceive of this process inspired by Bourdieu as a gradual adaptation of the immigrants’ stock of various types of capital to navigate a new labour market field successfully. The aim of this paper is to analyse the link between public Danish integration interventions targeting newly arrived immigrants and these individuals’ potential progress in employability—as well as the link between employability and employment. The analyses exploit six waves of survey data collected from 2017 through 2019 measuring newly arrived immigrants’ potential progress in employability on a quarterly basis. Our analyses find language skills and immigrants’ qualifications and goal-directedness to be amenable to public job-oriented and skills-upgrading interventions. We also find that caseworker evaluations of immigrant qualifications and goal-directedness correlates significantly with employment. Moreover, progress in the immigrants’ own job faith and goal-directedness—an employability factor that in our analyses is unamenable to public employment interventions—also correlates significantly with employment.