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On the 24th of November the commission published its guidelines for Integration and Inclusion for 2021-2027 with the title Action plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021-2027 . The plan are no more than guidelines for the member states as how they can achieve better inclusion and integration for ethnic groups like EU citizen, migrants from 3d countries or/and Roma, LGBTQ+ persons.
The Action Plan is the new plan that follows the one that was issued for the period 2016-2020. Although I would have expected a report where the results of the previous action plan, were presented, I will suffice with some graphics that show the situation of the migrants in EU.
Above a quarter of migrants are highly educated. They offer resources, ambition and motivation but they often are not able to put their skills to use. Almost 40% are overqualified for the job they do. We cannot afford to waste this potential. At the same time, almost a fifth of migrants have only primary school education and need further support.
This statement says something on how the migrants are being used from the European companies. Just as cheap workforce where they disregarding their skills since they haven’t study in their system or they don’t speak the local language in a level that the companies find adequate. But at the end the ones that they are loosing are the same ones who do not recognize the potential of their workers. But still this is a reason for people not to be well integrated. The Following graphs from the same report shows the key facts and figures on integration and inclusion (EU-27, 2019)
Education is not for all it seems that the number of young immigrants dropping school in EU is nearly 3 times bigger than the number of young natives. The number by itself its not helpful to change this tendency if we do not the reasons, the why’s.DO they drop school in order to work and add to the family income or are they other reasons?
Nearly 40% of the migrant working force has a low level of education in comparison with about 20% of the native work force. 40% low level education and 40% overqualified, which probably means that only a 20% of the immigrants gets a job that could be a normal paid or good paid job. Maybe this is a n expalanation for the graph on the left.
Education is a key factor to get a better job, regardless if this is a vocational one, an informal or formal. You get your qualifications through your education process and this way you can hope for a better future. Immigrants that are coming to EU they look either to educate themselves or if this is not possible to provide the means so that their children will be better educated. But not always the plan succeeds.
We saw in the above graph that too many young migrants drop school early. Their future life can’t be much better than they parents present life, in terms of work.
Over 35% of the migrant population is unemployed in EU. It would be interesting to see the qualitative information about this 35%. Who are they, why are they unemployed, what are they missing? The necessary education or the right country origin? Cause the first we can cure it but the latter is very difficult to “cure” it.
Women is a special category with many problems in our world. Migrant Women have more hurdles to overcome. Some of them cultural since there is a big number of migrants that are coming from countries or regions where the role of women is only the role of mother and wife. There we have to try more as migrants to overcome also our stereotypes.
As the next graph shows how the lack of education but also the bigger unemployment in migrants can lead to greater risk of poverty, rate of overcrowding and housing costs overburden. All the numbers are double for the migrants in comparison with the natives.
EU wants to help by providing guidelines and funds but as we will see below, not all EU members see migrants as a positive force
But these are not the only problems that migrant have to face during their staying in EU. In the same report we see that :
Young migrants (18-24) born outside the EU were much more likely (21%) than natives (12.5%) to be ‘neither in employment nor in education and training’, especially migrant girls and young women (25.9%).
Migrants are more likely to face unmet medical needs related to various factors such as: lack of access or limited health insurance (in some countries) depending on residence status, lack of knowledge on how to access services, financial resources, concentration of migrants in some disadvantaged areas with lower access to quality health services, language barriers and lack of adaptation of national systems to the specific needs of migrants.
While the proportion of migrants in the population of rural areas is relatively low (2.9%), they tend to fare worse on most indicators of integration not only compared to natives but also with respect to migrants living in cities and towns.As there is generally a shortage of basic services in many rural areas, migrants may also lack the specific support services that they need.
Overall the numbers are disappointing. Integration and inclusion cannot be achieved by having a great number of migrants in social exclusion. As we said many times Integration is a bidirectional process between the migrants and the hosting society. The hosting society by helping and “uplifting” migrants can only benefit from them. The examples are too many, most recent and also in the news that dominate our lives, the corona virus, one of the companies who are producing the vaccine is a German company led by a pair of Turkish descendant migrants.
From the other hand trying to become better should be the aim of every migrant. EU is setting guidelines and funds, we need to use them. Find information, find the programs that can help you to get more skills and have a better future.
The main problem of the Action plan is exactly what the Politico.eu is saying in its interesting article :
“But while the new plan intends to be more expansive, it does not go any further in seeking to impose policies on EU countries and remains largely a set of non-binding recommendations. “
This non binding policy could be the end of the action plan..
