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Abstract

In 2015 the German government relaxed its restrictions for asylum seekers to enter the German labor market by reducing the waiting time from 15 months to 3 and improving integration supports. The state of research shows that asylum seekers and refugees are mainly employed through temporary agencies. The expectation of labor market researchers is that agency employment provides a steppingstone into regular employment, as refugees learn the language and become better integrated into working in Germany.

This research study shows how employment patterns diverge from the state of the literature to date, which depends on registered data from the job centers and employers. It argues that immigration controls and employment regulations interact to force asylum seekers (especially those whose employment permit has been revoked, and asylum application has returned negative) into informal employment, either intermittently or for the longer term. The research project is based on an ethnography of three main locations of job seeking and day-job markets where asylum seekers are recruited to informal jobs, day-market jobs and scrapyards operated mainly by persons with a migration or refugee background where most asylum seekers find informal work, and temporary agency-client workplaces, where asylum seekers are placed and share information on agencies.

The thesis investigates the strategies used by these asylum seekers to be recruited by the temporary work agencies into the formal sector and by migrant entrepreneurs into the informal sector respectively. My empirical evidence suggest that social ties are essential resources to enter both the formal and informal sectors of the German labor market, and even more essential for asylum seekers ‘’without prospects to remain’’ to remain active within the former, as they intend to turn around their labor market trajectory, improve their residence status and livelihood.