TY  - JOUR
A1  - Khalil, Samir
A1  - Kohler, Ulrich
A1  - Tjaden, Jasper Dag
T1  - Is There a Rural Penalty in Language Acquisition? Evidence From Germany's Refugee Allocation Policy
JF  - Frontiers in Sociology
N2  - Emerging evidence has highlighted the important role of local contexts for integration trajectories of asylum seekers and refugees. Germany's policy of randomly allocating asylum seekers across Germany may advantage some and disadvantage others in terms of opportunities for equal participation in society. This study explores the question whether asylum seekers that have been allocated to rural areas experience disadvantages in terms of language acquisition compared to those allocated to urban areas. We derive testable assumptions using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which are then tested using large-N survey data (IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee survey). We find that living in a rural area has no negative total effect on language skills. Further the findings suggest that the “null effect” is the result of two processes which offset each other: while asylum seekers in rural areas have slightly lower access for formal, federally organized language courses, they have more regular exposure to German speakers.
KW  - refugees
KW  - allocation policies
KW  - rural
KW  - language acquisition
KW  - intergroup contacts
KW  - language courses
KW  - integration
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2022.841775
SN  - 2297-7775
VL  - 7
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
PB  - Frontiers
CY  - Lausanne, Schweiz
ER  - 
TY  - RPRT
A1  - Graeber, Daniel
A1  - Schikora, Felicitas
T1  - Hate is too great a burden to bear
BT  - Hate crimes and the mental health of refugees
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. Keywords: Mental health, hate crime, migration, refugees, human capital.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 31 
KW  - mental health
KW  - hate crime
KW  - migration
KW  - refugees
KW  - human capital
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-507972
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 31
ER  -