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By analysing the childcaring experiences of female skilled workers from South Korea (hereafter, Korea) in Germany, this paper maintains that the challenges in labour market participation for highly skilled women, and especially those with children, should be understood in the context of their encounters with similar and different care and employment regimes between their home and host countries. On the theoretical level, this research confirms the argument that the migration of highly skilled workers should be contextualized not from a neoclassical perspective in which the maximization of economic profits takes priority, but from an institutional point of view in which social and cultural norms, practices, and policies in both the home and host societies are taken into consideration. Specifically, through a series of in-depth interviews conducted with skilled female migrants from Korea, this paper highlights the significance of taking the function of similar and different caring and employment regimes into account in explaining the challenges faced by highly skilled migrant women in labour market participation. On the empirical level, this paper sheds light on the migration experiences of skilled women from Asia as well as the (dis)integration processes of newcomers from third-national countries in Germany, with a focus on female migrants from Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we assess the impact of international migration and the induced homecare service labor supply shock on fertility decisions and the labor supply of native females in Germany. Specifically, we consider the individual data of native women from the German Socio-Economic Panel and merge them with data on the share of female immigrants and other regional labor market characteristics. We provide evidence that areas with a high share of female immigrants are more likely to provide a larger amount of services related to household care and lower prices for such services. By controlling for unobserved individual characteristics, we find that an increase at the local level in the share of female immigrants positively affects the probability of having a child, induces women to work longer hours (intensive margin of labor supply) and reduces the number of hours they spend performing family duties (intensive margin of home production). The negative change in household working hours supports the validity of our results. These effects become stronger for (medium-) skilled women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the new asylum laws implemented in Germany from 2015 to 2020 and places them in the wider context of the bordering process developed in Europe to control migrants' mobility since the year 2011. 'Asylum packages' and the Integration Act combine a restriction of asylum rights with measures to quickly channel refugees into the German labor market. Focusing on a specific regulation that aims at integrated rejected asylum-seekers through vocational training programs—the Ausbildungsduldung —this article highlights the contradictions from the attempts to meet the German economic needs and the efforts to enforce migration control. Moreover, this work highlights how the moral economy of deservingness, which underpins the practices of confinement and selection of the migrant population, influences the new laws. Ultimately, the asylum realm is deprived of being the source of the right to stay, whose conditionality became anchored to the needs of the German economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, German immigration law required all refugees receiving social welfare benefits to undergo language and civic knowledge tests as a pathway to the labour markets. The German integration regime, which was grounded in social imaginaries, legislative initiatives and supranational agreements, produced bureaucratic and ideological challenges following the "long summer of migration". Syrian asylum seekers entering Germany navigated shifts in the social imaginary and legal changes that both narrowed the definitions of a "good refugee" and expanded the benefits given to a select group of asylum seekers and refugees. I apply ethnographic fieldwork beginning on the Turkish border with Syria in 2015 and later fieldwork across Germany to analyse shifting social landscapes. The prerequisites of integration made long-term residency permits and citizenship contingent on "good integration". The public recognition of "good" or "deserving" refugees was thus conditional on the fulfilment of a universal criteria of achievement in social competences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]