19 "the most favorable treatment" accorded to any non‐nationals of a foreign country in the same circumstances, with regard to the right to engage in wage‐earning employment, and refugees must be allowed to start businesses and practice liberal professions equally with other non‐nationals. However, a recent study by the World Bank’s KNOMAD initiative of practices in 20 countries (including Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States) hosting 70% of the world’s refugees found that “remarkable diversity in legal provisions and constraints on refugees’ right to work. A restrictive approach to the right to work prevails, and most states are reluctant to ease these restrictions. The majority of refugees work in the informal sector, but under much less satisfactory and more exploitative conditions compared with nationals” (Zetter & Ruaudel 2016). <mark>Assessing the effect of refugees on labor markets in the host country must recognize this reality.</mark> <mark>Moreover, the vast majority of studies on the impact of migration on host country labor markets relate to economic migrants, and refugees differ in a number of respects from economic migrants. Refugee flows tend to be more concentrated than those of economic migrants in time and space, and are less linked to labor market opportunities. In advanced countries, economic immigration may be more high‐skilled than refugees, and, as already indicated, tends to be more circular. However, as refugees find jobs and become integrated into the labor market of host countries, their economic effects tend to become more similar to those of economic migrants.</mark> As is generally the case of low‐skilled economic migrants, refugees, even when they arrive in large numbers, are unlikely to have a significant impact on the wages of native low‐skilled workers or on their job prospects in an advanced country<sup>24</sup> . Even though it takes longer for them to find jobs, like economic migrants, refugees can stimulate the return to capital and contribute to higher real wages among natives, especially those of the vast majority of natives with whom they do not compete directly.

Many refugees are unskilled<sup>25</sup> and the fear that large inflows of unskilled migrants from the South will take jobs away from unskilled natives in the North is widespread. The literature on migration deals with this issue extensively, and it examines episodes of large inflows of economic migrants as well as of refugees. Consider the effect of the inflow of large numbers of predominantly unskilled migrants on the native skilled and unskilled workers. As discussed in the previous section, the inflow of migrants tends to expand final demand and to stimulate investment, raising the demand for all workers through those channels. Skilled natives, who are complementary to the unskilled immigrants, will tend to end up better off in the new steady state because of increased investment and because they have more

> 24 This conclusion does not necessarily apply in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, which have received far larger numbers of refugees relative to their population, the refugees speak Arabic, and they compete directly with native low‐skilled laborers. (Dadush, 2015)

> 25 Germany’s Federal Service for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) released a study “Asylum applicants: social structure, qualifications and employability” in 2015. According to the study, 18% asylum seekers in Germany has a university degree, while 20 percent have attended a high school, approximately one‐third a secondary school and 22 percent a primary school. Seven percent of ‐ ‐ ‐ migrants have no formal education at all. <u>https://www.rt.com/news/343753 germany refugees males‐statistics/</u>