The Economic Impact Of Europe's Refugees Essay

Introduction. Europee‘s refugees crisis. Economic impact of Europee‘s refugees crisis. Short-term economic impacts. Long-Term Impacts. Conclusion. References. Figure 1 Worldwide Refugees population from 1960-2017(data source UNHCRFigure 2 Major source countries of refugees in 2016 (data source UNHCRFigure 3 Top destination countries of refugees in 2016 (data source UNHCRFigure 4 Employment rates of refugees, year after arrival in % 2016 (Germany, Sweden male, Sweden female and Denmark).

Countries of origin of these refugees are mainly Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia due to the instable situation of those countries.

Therefore, as the number of refugees has increased considerably, finding solutions for their successful integration has become an urgent and challenging task for European member states.

This event has supposed one of the greatest humanitarian crisis of the modern history and one of the biggest European challenge. As a solution taken by European member states was the implementation of agreed system, called „Dublin system“ which was considered unfair and criticized for many countries, therefore, later one this system was suspended (Djajić 2014: 83–95).

Refugee crisis, without doubt, has supposed a great challenge, mainly economic, for Europe due to the large amount and rapid inflows fleeing into Europe.

Although, the consequences differ a lot from country to country, and from period to period, European member states had to face with important increase of their public expenditure which in most of the cases, these costs were greater than the benefits at least in the begging.

Relevance of the topic: Refugee crisis is considered the greatest humanitarian crisis which Europe has faced during the modern history due to the amount and rapid inflows. Consequently, Europe had to find the best possible solution in short term with great monetary sacrifice.

First of all, it‘s necessary to distinguish between those two concepts, „refugee“ and „migrant“ as are totally different concepts and most of the studies do not differenciate them.

A refugee is a person who migrate to different country than the one that resides in search of refuge or residence in order to escape from the lack of protection and presecution for reson of religion, race, nationality, etc. (Ivanov et al. 2018: 214–223)

On the other hand, an „economic“ migrant choose to leave the country to seek better living standards (Pappas et al. 2017: 31–41). Therefore, the main difference of these concepts is the motivation of movement.

In 2015, European Union received over 1.2 million of forced migrants which is the largest number since World War II. Most of the refugees were from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq who entered through land and sea to Greece and Italy. From the enter points, the further destination were mainly Germany, Austria and Sweden (Bozorgmehr et al. 2018).

This large number of refugees has brought an intensive political debate and caused changes in the migration policies, as well as, changing the perception of some countries which were very open to become even opposite to immigration (Valdaru et al. 2017).

The following graph shows the worldwide refugees population from 1960 until 2017 in order to be able to see that drastically increase clearer and from more statistically perspective.

Figure 1: Worldwide Refugees population from 1960 2017(data source: UNHCR)

As we can see from the above graph, there were some ups and downs of the number of refugees during the period selected; however, as it was mentioned previously, since 2015 the number of refugees has been the largest since World War II.

This massive refugees’ movement has created a global crisis as countries around the world work together to support and assist these asylum seekers (K. Bovard 2017: 26). This episode has created many debates and disagreements as this humanitarian issue had to be managed quickly and carefully.