Letters in Health and Biological SciencesLetters in Health and Biological SciencesLetters in Health and Biological SciencesLetters in Health and Biological Sciences2475-6245Ommega Online PublishersNew Jersey, USA87210.15436/2475-6245.16.004Research ArticleDeterminants of Employment Among Well-Educated Refugees Before and After the 2007 U.S. Economic RecessionDeterminants of Employment Among Well-Educated Refugees Before and After the 2007 U.S. Economic RecessionHikmetJamil 1Department of Family Medicine College of Human Medicine Michigan State University East Lansing Michigan USA 2International Society of Iraqi Scientists Michigan USA 3Beamount Hospitals Cancer Section Michigan USA 4Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences Uppsala University Uppsala Sweden Editor* E-mail: hikmet.jamil@hc.msu.edu
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
20161606201611LHBS-16-RA-87215042016100620162016Creative Commons Attribution LicenseThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. nbsp emsp emsp Little is known about how the overall employment conditions in a country impact the likelihood of employment of newly arrived refugees In the current study we compare employment and determinants of employment of highly educated Middle Eastern refugees to Michigan that arrived before and after the 2007 recession We also look at self-reported barriers to employment Results show that the general downturn of the economy made it substantially more difficult to secure employment even for well-educated refugees Thus before the economic downturn 22 9 of refugees were unemployed as compared to 55 1 once the recession had set in p lt 0 01 There were also substantially more self-reported barriers to employment after the economic downturn The study points to the importance of understanding both individual characteristics and the general employment conditions in the new host country when studying variation in refugee employment success 10