Migration and integration

Around the mid-1990s, the conditions of life for non-Western immigrants became a recurrent topic in the public debate, and the Rockwool Foundation realised that research founded knowledge about the situation of non-Western immigrants was not available.

Consequently, the Board of the Foundation asked the Unit to look into this topic, and since the mid-1990s the Unit has undertaken research into the conditions of life of non-Western immigrants, with the main stress being laid on their integration into the labour market. This research has subsequently resulted in several further separate projects and the publication of a long series of books.

Around the turn of the millennium, the Foundation became aware of the need for an extension of the research to include other countries as well, and in 2001 a Danish-German comparative study was launched in which the researchers – on the basis of exactly matched data – compared the integration into the labour market and the conditions of life of five large groups of non-Western immigrants in these two countries.

The results of the project, which was carried out in cooperation with researchers from the international leading Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn (IZA), headed by Professor Klaus F. Zimmermann, were published in October 2004. The study provided a number of findings on how the two different welfare states influence non-Western immigrants’ participation in the labour market.