As many as half of the refugees from Ukraine that are now settled in one of the European Union Member States say that the main reason why they chose to seek asylum in that particular country has been affected by the work opportunities that country would offer them. This has been informed by a news report in Schengen Visa.
A recent report published by the EU Agency for Asylum (EUAA) together with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the profiles, experiences, and aspirations of Ukrainian refugees who were forcibly displaced from their homes, also shows that another 47 per cent of these people have chosen the EU country where they settled due to friends and family members living there.
“Other reasons included reception conditions in terms of benefits and support (23 per cent) and the language spoken in that country (20 per cent),” the report reads, among others. However, the report also points out that there is a difference between those who are already in their destination country and those who still haven’t reached their destination country.
While for the first group, the main indicators for settling in an EU country have been family and friends followed by work opportunities, for the second group who still haven’t reached their destination country, the main reason for aiming to settle in that country are work opportunities.According to the report, the findings suggest that refugees who encounter difficulties in being employed in the country where they have settled have higher chances of leaving that country for another none where they consider they might have more employment opportunities.
“At first, I thought about going to the Netherlands, but at the last minute, I decided to try my luck in Denmark. This is an agrarian country, and by education and work experience, I am an economist of agricultural production, we lived in a village, had our own farm, my hands are used to work, and my head is not stupid,” one of the respondents who took part in the survey said. The report also points out that many of the respondents said that they would return home as soon as it was safe to do so.
Regarding the routes they used to enter the EU from Ukraine, the majority of refugees entered from Poland, as many as 55 per cent of them, whereas another 17 per cent entered from Romania, eight per cent from Slovakia and another eight per cent from Hungary.
However, not everyone who entered these countries stayed there. The results of the survey show that only around four in ten of those that entered Poland stayed there, while a quarter of them left for Lithuania, and 22 per cent of them went to the Czech Republic. In Romania, on the other hand, only one-third of those who arrived stayed there, while 18 per cent went to Bulgaria, 11 per cent to the Czech Republic and nine per cent to Greece.
The report has concluded that Europe has emerged as a safe place for Ukrainian families, and the swift activation of the Temporary Protection Directive has enabled the EU countries to provide uniform protection to around 4.6 million displaced people in Europe.
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