We made it to Germany … and now? Interdependent risks of vulnerability for refugees in a high-income country

Abstract

Refugees are perceived as a category of people that are ‘vulnerable’ per se. However, once they have arrived in (high-income) hosting countries and are supported by a welfare state, vulnerability needs to be rethought, as they face new challenges and potential sources of inequality. In this paper, we have measured vulnerability as the probability of experiencing jointly three interdependent risks: social isolation, financial worries and poor health. For this purpose, we estimated a trivariate logit model to evaluate how individual and household characteristics are associated with vulnerability and also made inferences regarding the residual association between pairs of risks, conditionally to a set of selected covariates. Using the 2016 wave of the IAB-BAMFSOEP survey of refugees in Germany, we demonstrated the significant correlations between the risks experienced by refugees and assessed a ‘propagation effect’ that affects vulnerability when the three risks come together. Taking this result into account may be useful in preventing vulnerability among refugees when they are faced with even one of these risks