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Between 1750 and 1960 Europe used to be the world’s prime source of migration. Since 1960 though, most of the EU member states have transitioned from countries of emigration to destination countries of immigrants (Munz, 2007). Postcolonial migration was the first migrant wave towards Europe. Labor migration followed, directed mainly to the North-Western European countries, the economies of which were rapidly growing. The end of the Cold War triggered large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees towards the traditional migrant destinations but also the Southern European countries. Several elements distinguished the immigration experiences of the European member states such as their geographical location, their socio-economic development and their historical background (Doomernik & Bruquetas-Callejo, 2016).
Social inclusion is one of the key priorities of the Europe 2020 strategy (European Commission, 2010). In this framework, a comprehensive approach towards the implementation of an effective immigrants’ labor market integration in the European Union is considered crucial. The targets of the Europe 2020 strategy include 75% of people aged 20-64 to be in work and at least 20 million fewer people to be in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion. However, there is still an employment gap among EU citizens and non-EU citizens which was estimated in 14.80 percentage points for 2017 (Eurostat, 2018). Moreover, the unemployment rate of immigrants in the EU28 in 2018 is estimated at 15.2% contrary to the 7.3% of the EU citizens.
The European Union has adopted the EU Action Plan on the Integration of Third-Country Nationals which specifically refers to the importance of successful labor market integration: “timely and full labor market integration can also help to meet the growing needs for specific skills in the EU as well as to enhance the sustainability of the welfare systems against the background of an aging population and workforce” (European Commission, 2016, par. 4.1.3). However, 26.412.000 immigrants out of the 322.609.000, which is the estimated population from 15 to 74 years old of non-EU nationals in the EU-28 in 2018, are unemployed. Furthermore, the migration crisis that followed the Syrian civil war has pushed new migration flows towards the European Union since 2014 through the Mediterranean Sea and land routes and particularly through Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. The arrivals are estimated according to UNHCR data in 1.958.126 immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. These migration inflows though happened after the Eurozone debt crisis had affected deeply the European labor markets (Lane, 2012). The unemployment rate in the EU-28 in 2013 reached 12,4% for EU nationals and 22,3% for immigrants while in some member states like Greece, it amounted to 27,5%. As a result, the field of immigrants’ integration in the European societies and specifically the perceptions over this new migrant influx became polarizing.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an evaluation on the effectiveness of the labor market integration policies using the PROMETHEE method, which is a multi-criteria decision analysis method, comparing the gaps between the native and the immigrant population in the Zaragoza indicators for employment, as well as the immigrants’ employment indicators among the EU 28 member states. For the purpose of this paper, the use of the word “immigrants” receives its EU context as third-country nationals, establishing their usual residence in the territory of a Member State for different purposes, including humanitarian ones. Specifically, the criterion of citizenship is used to distinguish between immigrants and natives in each member state of the EU-28. The rest of the paper is divided in seven sections. First, a short overview of the importance of integration, the challenges and the appropriate policies to face the challenges of the integration process are presented. Next, the indicators for measuring the integration outcomes are described. A brief introduction into the PROMETHEE method and our case study follows. The results and their sensitivity are analyzed in the last sections and the conclusion wraps up the analysis.