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Recruiting refugees to reduce labour shortages in health care professions
No full textBackground
Many high-income countries are grappling with severe labour shortages in the healthcare sector. Refugees and recent migrants present a potential pool for staff recruitment due to their higher unemployment rates, younger age, and lower average educational attainment compared to the host society's labour force. Despite this, refugees and recent migrants, often possessing limited language skills in the destination country, are frequently excluded from traditional recruitment campaigns conducted solely in the host country’s language. Even those with intermediate language skills may feel excluded, as destination-country language advertisements are perceived as targeting only native speakers. This study experimentally assesses the effectiveness of a recruitment campaign for nursing positions in a German care facility, specifically targeting Arabic and Ukrainian speakers through Facebook advertisements.
Methods
We employ an experimental design (AB test) approximating a randomized controlled trial, utilizing Facebook as the delivery platform. We compare job advertisements for nursing positions in the native languages of Arabic and Ukrainian speakers (treatment) with the same advertisements displayed in German (control) for the same target group in the context of a real recruitment campaign for nursing jobs in Berlin, Germany. Our evaluation includes comparing link click rates, visits to the recruitment website, initiated applications, and completed applications, along with the unit cost of these indicators. We assess statistical significance in group differences using the Chi-squared test.
Results
We find that recruitment efforts in the origin language were 5.6 times (Arabic speakers) and 1.9 times (Ukrainian speakers) more effective in initiating nursing job applications compared to the standard model of German-only advertisements among recent migrants and refugees. Overall, targeting refugees and recent migrants was 2.4 (Ukrainians) and 10.8 (Arabic) times cheaper than targeting the reference group of German speakers indicating higher interest among these groups.
Conclusions
The results underscore the substantial benefits for employers in utilizing targeted recruitment via social media aimed at foreign-language communities within the country. This strategy, which is low-cost and low effort compared to recruiting abroad or investing in digitalization, has the potential for broad applicability in numerous high-income countries with sizable migrant communities. Increased employment rates among underemployed refugee and migrant communities, in turn, contribute to reducing poverty, social exclusion, public expenditure, and foster greater acceptance of newcomers within the receiving society
Article 1 E 1951 Convention
No full textThis chapter elaborates on the function of Article 1 E of the 1951 Convention, which was originally aimed at German refugees. It refers to a special group of people who qualify for refugee status but enjoy the rights of national citizens despite their lack of formal citizenship. The article's object and purpose revolve around excluding persons from refugee protection who do not need any international protection since they have the status of national citizens. Additionally, access to refugee status is excluded ipso facto because the individual may resort to effective protection similar to that of citizenship upon being admitted to the country of sojourn. The chapter explains how Article 1 E is an integral part of the balanced system of international refugee protection prescribed by the Convention
Article 34 1951 Convention
No full textThis chapter tackles the features and historical development of the 1951 Convention's Article 34. It explains the function of the provision, which primarily focuses on requesting Contracting States to facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees. Moreover, the provision forms the legal bases for local integration and naturalization as some of the traditional durable solutions to refugeehood. The soft obligation imposed by Article 34 primarily focuses on the long-term solution by naturalization. The chapter then elaborates on the balance between local integration, naturalization, and voluntary return after it was disrupted due to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989
Social media data and migration research
No full textIn 2022, there were 4.62 billion social media users worldwide. Social media generates a wealth of data which migration scholars have recently started to explore in pursuit of a variety of methodological and thematic research questions. Scholars use social media data to estimate migration stocks, forecast migration flows, or recruit migrants for targeted online surveys. Social media has also been used to understand how migrants get information about their planned journeys and destination countries, how they organize and mobilize online, how migration issues are politicized online, and how migrants integrate culturally into destination countries by sharing common interests. While social media data drives innovative research, it also poses severe challenges regarding data privacy, data protection, and methodological questions relating to external validity. In this chapter, I briefly introduce various strands of migration research using social media data and discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and opportunities
Diversifying Modern Austrian History
No full textJews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austria for centuries untold, yet often continue to be construed as the essential “other.” This essay explores a selection of sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent historical experiences amongst these two broad population groups, focusing specifically on demographic diversity, community-building, discrimination and persecution, and the post-war situation. The ultimate aim is to illuminate paradigmatically through the Austrian case study the complex multicultural mosaic of historical Central Europe, the understanding of which, so our contention, sheds a critical light on the often divisive present-day debates concerning immigration and diversity in Austria and Central Europe more broadly. It furthermore opens up a hitherto understudied field of historical research, namely the entangled history of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe
Hanna Kozińska-Witt, Politycy czy klakierzy? Żydzi w krakowskiej radzie miejskiej w XIX wieku [Politicians or Claqueurs? Jews in the Cracow City Council in the 19th Century]. Studia nad Cywilizacją Żydowską w Polsce 3 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2019), 248 pp.; Marek Tuszewicki, A Frog Under the Tongue. Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021), 360 pp.
No full textAndrea Dara Cooper, Gendering Modern Jewish Thought (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2021), 270 pp.
No full textWar, international spillovers, and adolescents
No full textUsing novel longitudinal data, this paper studies the short- and medium-term effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 on social trust of adolescents in Germany. Comparing adolescents who responded to our survey shortly before the start of the war with those who responded shortly after the conflict began and applying difference-in-differences (DiD) models over time, we find a significant decline in the outcome after the war started. These findings provide new evidence on how armed conflicts influence social trust and well-being among young people in a country not directly involved in the war
Design and in vivo implementation of metabolic modules for synthetic carbon fixation
No full textClimate change, driven by increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), presents a significant societal challenge for the 21st century. Biotechnological approaches for microbial production of commodity chemicals and fuels offer possible solutions to re-fix CO2 from the atmosphere, thereby mitigating carbon emissions and contributing to a sustainable carbon-economy in the future. Biological CO2 fixation is also at the heart of agricultural productivity, where photosynthesis and the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle present promising biotechnological targets for crop improvement.
Synthetic biology allows testing metabolic solutions not known to exist in nature, which may exceed their natural counterparts in terms of efficiency. In this thesis, I explore the design of such new-to-nature metabolic pathways for biological CO2 utilization and their implementation in living cells (in vivo).
In the first chapter, I describe the development of a metabolic pathway that enables intracellular conversion of CO2 to formate, giving access to highly efficient carbon fixation routes. In nature, CO2-reduction remains restricted to anaerobic organisms and low redox potentials. Here, we introduce the “CORE cycle”, a synthetic metabolic pathway that converts CO2 to formate under fully aerobic conditions and ambient CO2 levels, using only NADPH as a reductant. We leverage this synthetic, ATP-energized pathway to overcome the thermodynamic and kinetic barriers associated with CO2-reduction. Applying rational metabolic engineering and adaptive evolution, this work demonstrates that Escherichia coli can utilize ambient CO2 as the sole source of one-carbon units and serine, achieving a first step towards novel modes of synthetic autotrophy. We further apply computational modeling to showcase the potential of the CORE cycle as a photorespiratory bypass for enhancing photosynthesis.
In the second chapter, I describe the development of the “LCM module”, a novel metabolic route for CO2-incorporating conversion of acetyl-CoA to pyruvate. This route relies on the newly uncovered, promiscuous activity of an adenosylcobalamin (B12)-dependent enzyme, which we significantly optimize through targeted hypermutation and in vivo selection strategies. The LCM module provides a shorter and more efficient pathway for acetyl-CoA assimilation compared to natural routes, offering novel opportunities for synthetic CO2 fixation.
Overall, through theoretical pathway analysis, enzyme bioprospecting, and modular metabolic engineering in E. coli, this thesis expands the solution space for biological CO2 fixation