Chapter 5 YEMEN. A ten-year-old Somali refugee arrives on a bus at the port of Aden, ready to board the boat that will take him home. Yemen hosts the world’s second largest Somali refugee population, some 253,000 people, and refugee movements from Somalia to Yemen have been taking place since the 1980s, triggered by violence, the civil war, fear of persecution, drought and a lack of livelihood opportunities. In 2019, more than 3,600 Somali refugees have returned home from Yemen. © U N H C R / M A R I E -J O Ë L L E J E A N - C H A R L E S Data from a 2014 European Labour Force Survey65 shows that approximately 50 per cent of refugees in Europe had jobs. More recent data for Germany show that while only some 40 per cent of the working-age refugee population were employed by the third quarter of 2019, the integration of refugees in the labour market is progressing faster than expected compared to previous arrivals of refugees,66 according to the Institute for Labour Market and Occupational Research (IAB). as well as policy and legal changes over time. In particular, it can be difficult to distinguish between the naturalization of refugees and non-refugees. Therefore, the data are only indicative at best and provide an underestimate of the extent to which refugees are naturalized. In view of the current challenges with the availability of relevant statistics on naturalization, UNHCR continues to explore opportunities with governments to address these gaps. The International Recommendations on Refugee Statistics67 make several recommendations on appropriate indicators for measuring and quantifying local integration in a way that is comparable and consistent across different contexts. However, throughout the decade, the availability of data about refugees has remained very poor. Naturalization – the legal act or process by which a non-citizen in a country may acquire citizenship or nationality of that country – is therefore used as a proxy measure of local integration. However, even this proxy is limited by the uneven availability of data and poor coverage During the last decade, based on available statistics, nearly 322,400 refugees from 185 countries naturalized in 65 countries. The number of countries reporting at least one naturalized refugee has decreased from 31 in 2010 to 25 in 2019. However, the number of naturalized refugees in absolute terms has increased by almost five times from 11,600 in 2010 to 55,000 in 2019. This is due both to increases in the number of naturalizations as well as better reporting. For example, 79,000 Syrians naturalized in Turkey between 2017 and 2018,68 and in Canada reporting commenced in 2013 where the annual number of refugees who have naturalized has doubled from 14,800 in 2013 to 31,200 in 2019. Similarly, in the Netherlands reporting commenced recently and between 2017 and 2019, 26,800 refugees obtained Dutch nationality, 12,300 of them in 2019. 65 How are refugees faring on the labour market in Europe?, Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (European Commission), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2016: https://op.europa.eu/s/n6zq 66 https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/arbeitsmarktforscherzufrieden-integration-von-fluechtlingen-geht-ein-jahr-schnellerals-gedacht_id_11000535.html 67 See https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic-social/Standardsand-Methods/files/Principles_and_Recommendations/ International-Migration/2018_1746_EN_08-E.pdf 54 68 No data available for 2019. UNHCR > GLOBAL TRENDS 2019