Refugees from Turkey had the strongest fall, of 3.7 percentage points, followed by those from Somalia and Chile with declines of 2.3 and 2.0 percentage points respectively. Furthermore, we can observe that refugees who have resided in Norway for less than 10 years had a somewhat stronger fall in the employment rate compared to those with a longer residence, while the highest educated among the refugees had the weakest decrease.
The differences in the employment rate among the other nationalities have not changed much. Refugees from Sri Lanka had the highest rate, 72.1 per cent. Then we have the groups from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Myanmar and Chile with rates between 67 and 68 per cent. Except for those from Myanmar all these groups have been residing for a long time in Norway.
As before, we find the lowest employment rates among the two largest refugee groups, from Syria and Somalia, with 33 and 38.4 per cent respectively. The former have the shortest duration of residence in Norway (on average) among refugees, while the latter have a longer duration of residence.
The report also illuminates the group that was registered as unemployed at the end of March 2020, a short time after the corona close-down in parts of the labour market that caused many lay-offs. Men were somewhat overrepresented within this group, especially among refugees, (64 per cent). The education level among the unemployed refugees did not differ much from that of the refugee group in total, but there was a weak overrepresentation of the group with only a compulsory education. This pattern was also observed among the other unemployed in March 2020, but they had a smaller share of persons with a high education than the refugees.
The registered unemployed in March 2020 – both for refuges and for the others - were clearly overrepresented within the industries that were most hit by the corona lock down. The refugees with the shortest and longest time of residence in Norway were least hit by the lay-offs in March 2020. Refugees with less than 4 years of residence are in general marginally represented on the labour market, while those with the longest time of residence constitute an established group on the labour market and thus have longer tenures. In addition, a smaller share of them work within the most corona exposed industries.
Within the group of unemployed in March 2020, we compare the employment rate before (November 2019) and after (November 2020) that point of time. We can observe that no groups were back at the same level of employment as in November 2019. The non-immigrant group was closest to that level, with 79.8 per cent employed (vs. 84.6), while the refugees had some larger disparity, 58.2 per cent (vs. 66.5). The other immigrant group had an even larger disparity, 68.4 per cent (vs. 77.6).
28 per cent of the refugees were still registered as unemployed in November 2020 versus 11.7 per cent in the non-immigrant group. The corresponding rate in the other immigrant group was 21 per cent.