Reception and Integration of Refugees in Austria: Conditions and Challenges

RESPOND Policy Brief [2020/8]

Authors: Dr. Ursula Reeger, Ivan Josipovic - Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences,

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Though Austria has been an immigration country for a long period of time, the arrival of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan around the year 2015 has resulted in heavy public and political discussions and a panoply of new legal restrictions when it comes to their reception and structural as well as socio-cultural integration. The restrictions set at the national level are echoed by varying strategies on the local level by provincial governments, NGOs, civil society actors and the refugees themselves. This leads to varying conditions of reception and integration across the country.

 This policy brief aims at describing the legal conditions of reception and integration in Austria one the one hand and elaborate on experiences, practices and strategies of stakeholders and refugees who were interviewed during the RESPOND project on the other. This offers the opportunity to contrast conditions set on different levels of governance with actual experiences and strategies to deal with these conditions.

 To begin with, it needs to be acknowledged that the situation regarding the arrival of refugees around the year 2015 was an exceptional one. Together with Germany and Sweden, Austria was one of the major receiving countries of refugees in 2015 and 2016. In these two years, 130,625 persons filed an asylum application and about 81,400 in total received a positive decision on their asylum application between 2015 and today. The field of asylum poses a myriad of simultaneous challenges in the realms of reception and integration, a fact that has been reinforced by the outstanding situation in the year 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Though not within the scope of the RESPOND research one needs at least to point at the problems that “social distancing” and an ever tighter situation on the labour market poses for refugees who arrived during the last five years.

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