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Determinants of recent immigrants’ location choices: quasi-experimental evidence

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Abstract

This paper exploits a Danish spatial dispersal policy on refugees, which can be regarded as a natural experiment to investigate the influence of regional factors on recent immigrants’ location choices. The main push factors are lack of co-nationals and immigrants. Additional push factors are lack of rental, including social, housing and lack of institutions for qualifying education, which explain why recent immigrants are attracted to large cities. Finally, placed refugees tend to leave locations with relatively high regional unemployment, and there is indirect evidence of welfare seeking.

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Notes

  1. Until June 2002, Denmark gave asylum to Convention refugees, i.e. persons who were defined as refugees according to the Geneva Convention from 1951, and to foreigners who were not defined as refugees according to the Geneva Convention, but who for similar reasons as stated in the Convention or other weighty reasons should not be required to return to the home country (de facto refugees; Coleman and Wadensjö 1999, 249).

  2. To facilitate local refugee reception, the Council made an effort only to place one or two different nationalities in small municipalities, whereas larger municipalities would be assigned more nationality groups of refugees.

  3. This is backed by statistics from the Council, which show that in 1993, 33% of refugees and 26% of the Danish population lived in the capital or its suburbs, while 71% of non-western immigrants lived there. Fifty six percent of refugees and 59% of the Danish population lived in towns outside the capital as opposed to only 24% of non-western immigrants. The remaining shares lived in rural districts (Danish Refugee Council 1993).

  4. On average, a refugee lived in temporary housing 6–7 months after dispersal to a county, but the duration depended on the local housing market situation. Only 0–4% had not found permanent housing within the introductory period of 18 months (Annual reports of the Danish Refugee Council 1986–1996 and internal administrative statistics of the Danish Refugee Council 1992–1997).

  5. The Kaplan–Meier empirical hazard rate for a given month after assignment is calculated as the proportion of refugees at risk of moving out of the municipality of assignment in a given month who actually move. Refugees at risk of moving in a given month are refugees who are observed still to live in the municipality of assignment.

  6. The large drop in the percentage of refugees who initially lived in the Greater Copenhagen area occurred already in 1985 because of the dramatic increase in the number of new refugees in 1985, which made it increasingly difficult for the Danish Refugee Council to find housing for new refugees in the Greater Copenhagen area.

  7. In Figs. 2 and 3, the five municipalities on the island Bornholm are depicted as one large municipality because in 2003, they were merged into one municipality.

  8. The full set of estimation results is available on request.

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Acknowledgement

I thank the National Centre for Register Research, the Ministry for Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs and the Institute of Local Government Studies for support to access administrative register data from Statistics Denmark. In addition, I thank Bente Bondebjerg and Morten Iversen, Danish Refugee Council, for valuable information about the Danish Dispersal Policy 1986–1998 and Michael Rosholm, Peter Fredriksson and three anonymous referees for helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aarhus School of Business, Department of Economics, University of Aarhus, Prismet, Silkeborgvej 2, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Anna Piil Damm

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  1. Anna Piil Damm
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Correspondence to Anna Piil Damm.

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Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann

Appendix

Appendix

Table 6 Number of residence permits granted to refugees in Denmark by citizenship and year
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Table 7 Number of individuals in the refugee sample by country of origin and year of first immigration
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Table 8 Variable definitions and primary data sources
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Table 9 Summary statistics: mean and standard deviations of initial values
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Fig. 6
figure 6

Estimated hazard function for relocation out of the municipality of assignment

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Fig. 7
figure 7

Estimated survivor function for residence in the municipality of assignment

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Damm, A.P. Determinants of recent immigrants’ location choices: quasi-experimental evidence. J Popul Econ 22, 145–174 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-007-0148-5

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