Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
This paper comparatively analyzes strategies of German Jobcenters to bring native and immigrant job seekers into employment. The study also looks deeper into the effects of immigrant-specific attributes, such as heterogeneous German language skills.
We found that the likelihood of offers by Jobcenters largely depends on the amount of time since immigration. Recent immigrants have the lowest chance of reporting most of the studied measures of active labor market policies. Germany has witnessed successive waves of immigration since the World War II, in recent years especially from Eastern and Southern Europe in the context of the enlargement of the European Union EU as well as from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently Ukraine, due to wars and humanitarian crises.
For successful integration of immigrants in German society, finding decent employment is one of the most important steps, maybe the most important one. Yet, immigrants face a higher risk of becoming and staying unemployed than natives Integrationsbeauftragte , p. They are significantly overrepresented among the unemployed in Germany, with consequences such as a high poverty risk Bundesregierung , pp. The PES do much more than granting unemployment benefits; they also monitor job offers and deploy a wide range of active labor market policy ALMP measures.
For example, they can offer subsidized courses, which may, for financial reasons, be the only chance to access further education for some groups of clients, e. Arguably, the PES are even more important for job-seeking immigrants than they are for native job seekers.
