Monitor for secondary migration

In this monitor we study refugees that have been domiciled in a municipality and how they either remain in their first municipality of residence or move to another municipality. There is changes from year to year in what groups who remains and in out-migration and from these changes we try to say something about where in the country they were domiciled, where they move to, what year they were domiciled and so on.

A pattern with increasingly less migration has taken place among the refugees. Every cohort moves a little less than the previous one. The most noticeable decline took place between the 2001- and 2003-cohort. It is especially migration in the first year after settlement that has declined. During this time, refugees are actually less likely to move than the rest of the population. In the subsequent years the migration increases again. The higher migration level coincides in time with refugees ending the introduction program and migration no longer gives a loss of rights.

The cohort from 2006 is the last cohort with five years of residence. Of the 5 100 refugees who were domiciled in 2006, 76 per cent were still living in their first municipality of residence five years later, as of 1 January 2011. This is the highest share in any cohort of refugees who are registered (figures date back to the 1995 cohort). This is four percentage points more than the last record from the 2005 cohort.

It has been great variations in both total number of domiciled per year and which countries most refugees came from in period 2001-2010. The largest groups are from the four countries Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Eritrea. Refugees from Iraq were the largest group in the beginning of this period but the number has fallen to 2010. From 2003 to 2008 it was domiciled most from Somalia, except from 2005 when it was a top from Russia. In the two last cohorts from 2009 and 2010, the largest group came from Eritrea.

Oslo is the county with the greatest in-migration of refugees. The tendency with less secondary migration has nevertheless given fewer refugees to Oslo, especially in the year of domicile.

Even though the correlation between size of municipality and share that is still living in their first municipality of residence has been clear in most cohorts, the pattern was not as clear for the 2006 cohort as earlier. Anyway, there is a visible relationship, where a higher share moves from the smallest municipalities and the largest municipalities retain the highest share of refugees. At the same time it seems that when few refugees are settled in a municipality they are more likely they to retain all of them. For the 2006 cohort, the difference between the largest municipalities (100 000+) and the smallest (below 2 000) were 39 percentage points.

There are differences among the refugees and between the refugees and the population as a whole when looking at sex and age. Women in the 2006 cohort have only had a slight increase in share of still living in their first municipality of residence compared to the previous cohorts, while men from the same cohort moved less than any other cohort. When looking at the age variable the difference between refugees and the rest of the population is explained by the youngest between 0-17 and the eldest aged 35 and older.

The falling trend of secondary migration reappears also in movements to and from districts in Oslo. In the previous report, with figures from 2004 and 2005, were 58 per cent still living in the district were they were domiciled five years later. The figures from this report, with those domiciled in 2005 and 2006, the share has risen to 63 per cent. The secondary migration is nevertheless more common between districts in Oslo than between municipalities.