Marcel Fratzscher: "Integrate refugees into the labor market sooner"
– You have developed various scenarios for the integration of refugees. In each of them, immigration turns out to be beneficial if considered in the long term. What assumptions are you basing this on?
– The majority of refugees who will remain in the country are very young people with very low qualifications. In our scenarios, which we are developing at DIW Berlin, we start from very cautious assumptions, including that more than four million refugees may arrive in Germany in the next five years. But the fact is that we still know too little about the refugees who have already arrived and will yet arrive.
– How will migration change the labor market?
– Undoubtedly, in the short term, this entire flow of refugees will require large financial costs and organizational efforts from Germany. Financially, we can certainly cope, but organizationally, many municipalities are facing challenging tasks and need support. Nevertheless, we should not see only these short-term problems. After all, in the long term, the German economy needs labor resources, and demographic change in the coming years and decades will make this problem even more acute.
Therefore, refugees are, above all, a chance for our country to maintain competitiveness in the long term and ensure our material well-being. If people work – and this applies to both those already living in Germany and refugees – they will contribute to our economy and thus secure our future.
– So what is to be done?
– The successful integration of refugees depends, above all, on how well and quickly they are integrated into the labor market. Many refugees are young and lack the necessary vocational training or relevant qualifications. Therefore, we must view our current spending on refugees who will remain in Germany as a kind of investment in the future. Just as taxes spent on kindergartens and schools are investments in our children's future that will only pay off in ten or twenty years. The more we invest in the integration of refugees today, the greater the return we will get in the long term.