Andrea Schmidt (p)

Bohdana Kurylo

This paper is the contribution to the project awarded by the International Visegrad Fund under the title: Situation of Ukrainian refugees in Central Europe and the Balkans - lessons learned and policy recommenadtions. It focuses on the case of HUngary and follows a comparative approach. In 2022, Hungarian refugee policy was faced with a new dimension. The migrant threat that started in 2015, which criticised the refugee policies of Western European countries, both socially and in government, and which made refugees look like foreigners, posed a new challenge to the population and the institutional background.
The aim of this paper to analyse the obstacles and institutional models that the Hungarian government and the citizens have had to face, and to analyse the problem of how to overcome the stereotype of the migrant as a foreigner who poses many dangers. On the one hand, the lecture deals with the analysis of the institutional background and the handling of the migrant issue and its pitfalls, while on the other hand, it also seeks to answer the question of what tasks and challenges were posed by the first refugees from Ukraine, what actors were involved in the handling of the crisis, what legal, institutional and financial background ensured the handling of the refugee issue, and how all this could be reconciled with the populist government's communication and its changes. Focusing on the Hungarian example, the presentation will also look at Central Europe.

Marcin Stonawski (p), Jan Brzozowski (p)

Andrea Schmidt

This study focuses on the unprecedented exodus of Venezuelans in recent years, prompted by economic deterioration, a collapsing health system, and political instability (Mazuera-Arias et al., 2020). By August 2023, the global population of Venezuelan migrants and refugees had reached 7.71 million, with 6.56 million settling in Latin America and the Caribbean (R4V, 2023). The aim of this paper is to explore coping strategies among Venezuelan migrants in Peru - one of the top destinations for the population exodus from Venezuela, with a migrant population of 1.5 million people. By analyzing coping in this context, we aim to contribute to the evaluation of the possibility of a global migration crisis, caused by the outflow from Venezuela, destabilizing the entire migration system in Latin America in the case that positive adaptation strategies cannot be implemented in this region.

In the analysis, we use data from our own survey conducted among Venezuelans and their Peruvian neighbors in Peru in 2023. The results provide evidence on the coping strategies of Venezuelan migrants. Venezuelans residing in Peru predominantly choose engagement strategies over disengagement solutions in dealing with both problem- and emotion-based challenges. We also find that among Peruvian neighbors of Venezuelan migrants, there is a moderate level of xenophobia, with much higher levels in the economic dimension. This is mostly related to competition in the labor market between migrant and native populations.

Understanding the interplay between the coping strategies of migrants and the attitudes of the native population is crucial for developing successful migration policies that reduce the possibility of the next global migration crisis. Our article contributes to this area.

Bohdana Kurylo (p), Tijana Prokic-Breuer, Stan Vermeulen, Cecile Magnée

Marcin Stonawski

With the increasing rates of immigration, the issue of integration of migrant children in terms of their performance and spillover effects for natives becomes of great importance. This paper examines the impact of migrant peers on the performance of native students in the context of the Dutch education system. We exploit cohort-to-cohort and within-students across-subject variation in the percentage of migrant peers in the primary and secondary schools, respectively. The preliminary findings indicate that the exposure to a larger share of the 1st generation non-Western migrant peers slightly decreases the performance of natives. The effect is more pronounced in urban than non-urban schools. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect is more considerable for girls and students of low-educated parents; there is no difference between students from top and bottom income quantile. We do not find the effects of 2nd generation non-Western and Western migrant peers on the performance of natives.