Refugees and migrants searching for safe havens and opportunities benefit their host nations’ economies within five years of arrival, suggests an analysis of 30 years of data from 15 countries in Western Europe.
The study finds that soon after a spike in migration, the overall strength and sustainability of the country’s economy improves and unemployment rates drop. Its conclusions contradict the idea that refugees place an excessive financial burden on a country by sucking up public resources. The study was published1 in Science Advances on 20 June.
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Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington DC, says the analysis is a departure from some previous work because it focuses on big-picture impacts, rather than specific elements in an economy — such as the effect that immigrants have on local wages. “An analogy is that Peet’s coffee shop [a US chain] might have a negative effect on Starbucks, but the competition might be better for the economy overall,” Clemens says.
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