Integration Policies, Practices and Experiences – Austria Country Report

This report deals with different aspects of integration of asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection in Austria. A series of interviews with these groups (conducted in 2018) reveals that their primary concerns relate to the two integration dimensions of labour market participation and language acquisition. Following a period of legal limbo during the asylum procedure, recognized refugees and holders of subsidiary protection were primarily concerned about their precarious socio-economic situation and about matching and further developing existing skills in order to find employment. Experts active in the field of asylum who were interviewed for this project criticized the federal government’s narrow and often instrumentalist approach to cultural and religious aspects of integration and pointed towards flaws of measures addressing structural integration. The most important problem however relates to the fact that the federal level generally only supports integration measures for beneficiaries of international protection and not for asylum seekers.