The Location of Hosted Asylum Seekers in OECD Regions and Cities

Abstract

This document provides a comparative assessment on the location of hosted asylum seekers in 18 European countries at the level of TL3 regions and in six countries at the municipal level. The assessment is based on an ad-hoc data collection from national statistical offices and governmental agencies in charge of monitoring the hosting of asylum seekers. The analysis aims to maximize data comparability across countries by focusing on those asylum seekers who are hosted in the reception system. Results show that, on average, asylum seekers are less concentrated in urban areas than the resident population. This result is robust at different geographical scales, namely at the scale of small administrative regions (OECD TL3), at that of functional urban areas—a comparable definition of cities applied to OECD countries—and at the municipal level. In the subset of countries where information was available, the share of asylum seekers in rural areas has on average increased between 2011 and 2015. The dispersal measures implemented in several of the countries considered might have played a role in this respect.

The effect of asylum seeker reception centers on nearby house prices: Evidence from The Netherlands

“…In 2011, the number of asylum applications was 309,040 and this number grew to 1.26 million in 2016. Countries are required to provide material reception 2 to asylum seekers, but countries can themselves decide on the location of shelter (European Migration Network, 2014;Proietti and Veneri, 2019). The inflow of asylum seekers in a specific place can potentially affect several aspects of that area, including the labor market and the provision of services or the housing market (Gheasi and Nijkamp, 2017).…”

Inclusive Settlement of Young Asylum Seekers in a Rural Region: The Role of Informal Support and Mentoring

“…Firstly, a wide distribution of asylum seekers not only to big cities but also to rural areas, and secondly, the need to redistribute the cost of integration through different tiers of government. Proietti and Veneri [1] claim that the percentage of asylum seekers in rural areas has increased since 2011 in many European countries.…”

“…In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of asylum seekers in various European countries, as well as in other parts of the world [1]. In fact, in the last decade, there have been 16.2 million asylum applications worldwide.…”

Abbreviations and acronyms

“…Preliminary observations on the location of asylum seekers gathered by the OECD in 2017 identify that the number of asylum seekers hosted in accommodation facilities by the national government is higher in the regions of Grand-Est and Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes than in Île-de-France, illustrating the efforts of the government to spread reception pressure from the capital region to other parts of the country (see 4.1.4) (Proietti and Veneri, 2017). At the regional level, Île-de-France is the biggest third region in terms of the number of hosted asylum seekers in the accommodation system, from preliminary observations gathered in 2017 (Proietti and Veneri, 2017). In France, there is a relatively high concentration of asylum seekers in urban areas (See Figure 1).…”