Professional intercultural communicative competence and labour market integration among highly-educated refugees in the Netherlands

1 Introduction

As a result of wars, persecution, and human rights violations, there are currently more than 70 million forcibly-displaced people worldwide (United Nations Refugee Agency 2019). In recent years, particularly the member states of the European Union (EU) have seen increasing numbers of newly-arrived refugees. In the mid-2010s, when conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa were driving more and more people to flee their home countries and seek refuge in the EU, many began talking about a “European refugee crisis” (e. g. Tomkiw 2015). In 2015, the influx of refugees reached a hitherto unprecedented scale: That year alone, the EU received over 1.2 million first-time asylum applications (Eurostat 2020). Most of these were made in Germany, followed by Hungary and Sweden (European Parliament 2015). Yet even in the Netherlands, the context of our study, over 43,000 people requested asylum status that year (van der Meer and Bax 2016) – a sizeable figure considering that, with only 17.4 million inhabitants, the country’s overall population is much smaller than that of many other EU member states (Statistics Netherlands 2020).

The integration of refugees has thus for some time now been an important topic on the political agendas of countries across the EU, who have supposedly been attempting to “strike a balance between their humanitarian responsibilities and their economic burdens” (Kogan 2016: 335).^[1] However, the main focus has been on the challenges posed by the arrival of refugees; and much less attention has been paid to the potentially tremendous benefits of their successful integration – benefits not only to the refugees themselves but also to their host societies. Many refugees in the EU are in fact highly-educated professionals: They used to work, for example, as lawyers, doctors, engineers or teachers in their home countries (Ganassin and Young 2020). Consequently, they could potentially participate in the labour market and make a significant contribution to the European economy, thereby ameliorating host societies’ struggles with problems such as ageing-related “demographic deficits” and workforce shortages among local populations (Critical Skills for Life and Work 2019).

Participation in the labour market is key to refugees’ successful integration in a new country: Being employed not only “leads to some level of economic self-sufficiency, but it also [constitutes] a critical element of building social connections with the broader community” (Hebbani and Khawaja 2019: 909). Labour market participation thus reduces refugees’ long-term financial dependency on the host society as well as facilitating their integration in other domains of life (Pajic et al. 2018). Little is known specifically about the employment trajectories of highly-educated refugees. However, recent research in the Netherlands and several other EU countries (Buimer et al. 2020) indicates that highly-educated refugees face the same challenges as refugees in general. In general, refugees’ integration into the host society’s workforce tends to be difficult, and despite differences in social context and labour market structures, refugees across EU member states face comparable challenges and barriers to finding employment (Martín et al. 2016). Many of these challenges are of an administrative nature, and they include legal constraints regarding employment before refugees are granted a residence permit, the time and effort involved in the recognition of foreign credentials, and further bureaucratic hurdles (Pajic et al. 2018). Other challenges relate to cultural differences and language skills (RISE 2013) as well as the lack of recognition in relevant social networks (Scheibelhofer and Täubig 2019). Moreover, refugees face substantial barriers as a result of racism and discrimination from members of the host society (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2017).^[2] Refugees therefore “do not start off from the same level playing field” as the rest of the population (Hebbani and Khawaja, 2019: 921). Consequently, they experience unemployment at a much higher rate (Vončina and Marin 2019); and if they do have work, they often “find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified” (Ganassin and Young 2020: 1). It takes a long time for this so-called ‘refugee gap’ to diminish: Konle-Seidl and Bolits (2016) found that after 15 years, refugees across EU countries had only reached a 70 % employment rate – and even after that time, many were still not fully integrated into the host societies’ labour markets.

It is widely assumed that in all intercultural contact situations, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) plays a crucial role (see e. g. Young and Sachdev 2011; Ganassin and Young 2020). Someone with ICC is “able to interact with people from another country and culture in a foreign language. They are able to negotiate a mode of communication and interaction which is satisfactory to themselves and the other” (Byram 1997: 71). While much ICC research has been conducted in different contexts around the globe, there is a paucity of studies investigating the role that ICC plays in refugees’ integration in their host societies – and especially with regard to their professional integration. The only notable exception is Ganassin and Young’s work (2020), which focuses on the UK context and has resulted from the same international collaborative project as the work we present here. This Erasmus+ project, called Critical Skills for Life and Work (CSLW), had as its overall aim to investigate highly-educated refugees’ ICC in order to help enhance their employability and social integration (for details, see the project website: cslw.eu). The participating project partners were Austria, the Netherlands, and the UK. Here, we focus on the data from the Netherlands.

Most refugees who came to this country in 2015 arrived from war-torn Syria (43 %; van der Meer and Bax 2016). Estimates suggest that about a fifth of the Syrians in the Netherlands hold a university degree, and it is assumed that many more are highly educated but were unable to obtain their diplomas because of the war (Sociaal Cultureel Planbureau 2018). Yet while municipalities throughout the Netherlands provide basic support for such refugees, and the newcomers receive instruction in the Dutch language, they are not given any systematic ICC training – and their long-term integration into the labour market is, for the most part, an individual responsibility (Huddleston et al. 2015). Refugees who arrive in the Netherlands with the intention of staying for a “lengthy period of time” are expected to complete a civic integration process, which entails learning about Dutch culture and the job market as well as acquiring the Dutch language (Government of the Netherlands n.d.). Refugees are officially considered to be integrated after passing the national integration exam (Ministry for Education Culture and Science n.d.). While loans are sometimes granted, under the Civic Integration Act (2013), refugees themselves have so far been responsible for the completion of their civic integration process – which means they have been responsible for choosing and financing an integration course (Rijksoverheid n.d.–a).^[3]

The research presented here constitutes the first known study of professional ICC among highly-educated refugees in the Netherlands. While the study is exploratory in nature, it expands our knowledge in an important way by focusing not only on highly-educated refugees who have already successfully achieved their integration into the host society’s labour market (as Ganassin and Young, 2020, did in the UK) but also considering those who are still in the process of forging new careers (which, to our knowledge, has never been done before). The research question we aim to answer is: Does refugees’ professional ICC play a role in how they tackle the challenges and barriers they face in their integration process in the host society’s labour market?

To provide the necessary theoretical background, we begin by outlining the key concepts that are part of ICC before explaining the methodology of this study. We then provide an analysis of professional ICC among both, refugees who have already successfully integrated into the Dutch workforce as well as those who are still in the process of achieving this. The discussion of the findings focuses on the role of professional ICC in this process, and – under the proviso that the findings are very tentative – the potential implications they can be seen to have for measures aiming to support refugees’ integration in the host society’s labour market. We discuss not only measures that focus on the promotion of professional ICC amongst the refugees themselves but also amongst those who frequently interact with them.

It is important to note that integration, by definition, entails that individuals maintain a “degree of cultural integrity [...] while at the same time seeking [...] to participate as an integral part of the larger society” – and integration is thus distinct from assimilation, which entails individuals’ participation in the larger society at the cost of having to relinquish their cultural integrity (Berry 2011: 2.6). The measures we discuss here are intended to promote integration, not assimilation.

2 Professional intercultural communicative competence

It is widely accepted that ICC can help individuals act in intercultural encounters, and over the last three decades, numerous models have been developed that focus on this (see e. g. Ladegaard 2018, for an overview). The most well-known of these models is the one by Michael Byram (1997, 2008; see also Byram et al. 2001), which focuses not merely on the linguistic side of communication but also on the cultural side – thus making it particularly pertinent in intercultural contexts (Matsuo 2014). Byram’s ICC model is known for being pedagogically useful in formal language learning settings (see e. g. Chen 2009; Young and Sachdev 2011) while challenging models of language learning in which learners are evaluated by native speaker norms (see e. g. Davies 1991; Phillipson 1992). Instead, it focusses on the importance of engaging, through a foreign language, with speakers who have other cultural values, assumptions, and beliefs. Byram (1997: 38) notes that what distinguishes an intercultural speaker from a native speaker is their ability to establish relationships with others who have different cultural backgrounds; the fact that they can “manage dysfunctions which arise in the course of interaction, drawing upon knowledge and skills”; and their capability to “establish a relationship between their own social identities and those of their interlocutor”.

According to Byram’s model, there are five factors, also known as savoirs, which play a key role in ICC. The first is attitudes (savoir être), which is defined as “curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own” (Byram 1997: 91). This entails the ability to see the world from the perspective of an outsider who holds different beliefs and values. The second factor is knowledge (savoir), which Byram (1997: 94) defines as the knowledge “of social groups and their products and practices in one’s own and in one’s interlocutor’s country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction”. This relates primarily to knowledge about how social groups and interaction processes function. The third factor, skills of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre), comprises the “ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents or events from one’s own” (Byram, 1997: 98). This highlights the importance of acquiring the skills needed for obtaining new knowledge and then integrating this with one’s existing knowledge. Skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire), the fourth factor, refers to the “ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices, and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction” (Byram 1997: 98). This demonstrates the truly interactive aspect of the model. Finally, factor five, critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engager), consists of “an ability to evaluate, critically and on the basis of explicit criteria, perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries” (Byram 1997: 101). Ideally, this will lead to the acceptance of new ideas and values. Individuals who develop ICC – that is, intercultural speakers – can thus “effectively and appropriately mediate between world of origin and world of encountered difference” (Young and Sachdev 2011: 83).

Like most models, Byram’s ICC model is not without criticism. For instance, some scholars berate the fact that it does not focus purely on linguistic aspects of communication, arguing that teaching “is best done through dialogue because culture is discourse” (Matsuo 2014: 19). Most researchers, however, value the inclusion of the cultural side of this model – especially because “teachers in different classrooms in different parts of the world still ignore the importance of teaching culture as part of language study” (Gonen and Saglam 2012: 29). Byram’s model thus remains widely-used in foreign language didactics (see e. g. Abdullah and Tandiana 2019; Tran and Seepho 2016; Von Münchow 2015). While other models also include cultural components, the ICC model was deemed most suitable for the CSLW project – and consequently, this study – because it is co-orientational and considers “the ability of interlocutors to reach mutual understanding and a shared level of worldview as fundamental” (CSLW 2021, emphasis added; see also Spitzberg and Changnon 2009).

In the CSLW project, the concept of the intercultural speaker was extended to professional contexts, with a particular focus on highly-educated refugees, and the term professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) was introduced. Corresponding to Byram’s five aforementioned factors, PICC refers to “key intercultural communicative skills, knowledge, attitudes, behaviours, and critical cultural awareness related to the process of successfully entering the professional sphere after a period of forced displacement” (CSLW 2019: 6). For anyone in professional employment, clear and effective communication with colleagues, clients, customers, and/or others is crucial. Since successful communication is based on “an ability to interact with others and to collectively reach understandings” (CSLW 2019: 6), highly-educated refugees thus require at least a certain amount of PICC to be able to navigate communicative encounters that involve cultural differences. Mere knowledge of the host society’s language, however fluent, is not enough – interlocutors also need to be able “to listen and show that they have understood, to clarify meanings, to repair breakdowns and so on” (CSLW 2019: 6).

3 Methodology

The research presented here therefore investigated PICC among highly-educated refugees in the Netherlands with regard to the five aforementioned key factors, considering not only advanced integrators (AIs) – that is, highly-educated refugees who have already successfully transitioned back into the workforce, but also early integrators (EIs) – that is, those still enrolled in Dutch courses and still in the process of transitioning back into the labour market. Data collection took place in 2018.

4 Results

5 Discussion

There are certainly limitations to the work presented here. For instance, the refugees’ reflections may well have been be affected by their situation at the time of data collection: Arguably, it is easier to consider the importance of (P)ICC in forging one’s integration into the labour market when one is narrating one’s experiences and development from a position of success. Moreover, there are problems inherent in the study of (P)ICC because it is not possible to investigate the pertinent factors on scales ranging from ‘not at all developed’ to ‘fully developed’ – instead, all we could do was undertake an exploratory comparison of the EIs and the AIs, thereby establishing differences. The non-representative nature of the participant sample as a result of the sampling method, the small sample size, and the gender imbalance among the AI participants constitute further notable drawbacks. Moreover, evidently it would have been ideal to have a participant sample comprising (at least approximately equal) numbers of EIs and AIs. As it is, the former group is much larger than the latter, which poses problems for the comparison. Consequently, we cannot make any claims regarding the generalisation of this study’s findings to all highly-educated refugees in the Netherlands, and we fully acknowledge that any conclusions we can draw are merely tentative. Further research with greater, random, and gender-balanced samples is necessary to confirm our findings. Nevertheless, this first exploratory, comparative study of EIs and AIs in the Netherlands provides meaningful insights.

The overall trend revealed by the findings is that the AIs’ PICC was comparatively more advanced than that of the EIs. The findings thus provide a tentative answer to our research question by suggesting that PICC might have played an important role in the AIs’ process of tackling the numerous challenges and barriers to their integration in the host society’s labour market. Evidently, correlation does not necessarily entail causation – but this interpretation of our findings is supported by the fact that previous research (see above) has revealed the important role of ICC in various other types of intercultural contexts. Further factors – such as the fact that the AIs had developed more advanced language skills, obtained Dutch degrees, and established networks in the Netherlands – will likely also have played a role. However, indirectly, all these factors would also have contributed to the participants’ PICC. Overall, the findings of our study thus indicate that developing higher PICC may be beneficial for highly-educated refugees’ integration in the host society’s labour market.

A closer look at the data reveals that there is one factor that constitutes an exception to the overall trend: The AIs were more advanced than the EIs in terms of attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, and skills of discovery and interaction – however, the data from the EIs include more evidence of critical cultural awareness than the data from the AIs. A possible reason for this exception is that, because the EIs were still relatively new to the Netherlands, they still struggled more with Dutch bureaucracy and (working) culture, while the AIs had simply had more time and opportunity to get used to it and were therefore possibly less critical towards their home and host country. However, further research would be necessary to verify this.

Notably, the data suggest that the EIs’ development of PICC was not at the same stage for all factors, and that there were differences between the participants within the factors as well. This is illustrated, for example, by the EIs’ skills of interpreting and relating: The male EIs showed no evidence of this (yet); while the female EIs demonstrated evidence of their development of ICC in general, rather than PICC in particular. Moreover, the female EIs’ discussion of shaking hands with men demonstrates that they had divergent perspectives on this, with some presenting themselves at different stages of developing ICC with regard to their skills of interpreting and relating – but with others feeling pressure to assimilate by relinquishing their cultural integrity in order to fully participate in the host society. The data can thus be seen to highlight a necessity for (P)ICC training not only amongst refugees themselves but also amongst members of the host society who interact with refugees (for more detail, see below). Moreover, this aspect of our findings indicates the necessity for further research especially with regard to different gender groups among refugees. There are gender differences in the labour market both in Syria and in the Netherlands (Wold Economic Forum 2021), which is exemplified for instance by less full-time work and less economic participation among women (Rijksoverheid n.d.–c). It is thus unsurprising that women experience the integration into the host society’s labour market differently. More research is needed to establish whether this pattern is systematic – and whether it also applies to AIs.

Many of the challenges and barriers to finding employment that both EIs and AIs in our study discussed overlap with those described by the UK-based participants of Ganassin and Young (2020; as noted above, their publication focuses solely on AIs). Struggles with bureaucracy, insufficient language skills, and lacking networks were among the topics discussed by participants in both studies. Moreover, our findings support those of Ganassin and Young in another way: They indicate the necessity to further develop the (P)ICC model to fully accommodate the intercultural encounters of refugees – because, as elaborated in the introduction, their circumstances and experiences are rather different from those of other migrants and individuals simply sojourning abroad. The traditional ICC model does not take account of this, but Byram (2009) himself acknowledges that the list of factors included in his model is not exhaustive. Ganassin and Young (2020) thus propose a further factor to be considered when examining (P)ICC among refugees, namely resilience – that is, “the capacity of individuals to cope successfully with significant change, adversity or risk” (Lee and Cranford 2008: 213). As Luthar (2006: 741) notes, resilience is not a permanent trait but a developmental process in which “new strengths and vulnerabilities emerge with changing life circumstances.” The findings of our study indicate that expanding the (P)ICC model by including resilience in addition to the other five factors would indeed be beneficial. In our research, as indicated in part by the results presented above, the AIs showed similar signs of resilience as those in Ganassin and Young’s (2020) study: They maintained a positive outlook even in the face of difficulties, and they seemed determined to view obstacles as challenges to be tackled. Arguably, refugees by and large are resilient, as evinced by the journeys they have undertaken. Yet, our research suggests that the AIs’ resilience was far advanced, while the EIs were still in the process of developing even more resilience. (This cannot be compared to Ganassin and Young’s work since they focused solely on AIs.) The parallelism of this pattern to the EIs and AIs overall development of (P)ICC, as discovered in our study, lends support to the notion that the incorporation of resilience into the overall model would be appropriate.

As acknowledged above, further research is necessary to ascertain whether our findings generalise to highly-educated refugees in the Netherlands at large. Yet if this were indeed the case, our findings would have important implications for promoting the integration of these newcomers into the Dutch labour market. The findings suggest that developing higher PICC (including resilience) is beneficial for highly-educated refugees’ integration in the host society’s labour market since it helps them tackle the numerous challenges and barriers they encounter in this process. Should this hold true, it would imply the possibility of ameliorating highly-educated refugees’ employment trajectories and facilitating their labour market participation by actively promoting their development of PICC. It would therefore make sense to integrate PICC training into the curricula of the integration courses and the language schools in which refugees receive their Dutch classes. Moreover, it would consequently be useful to provide PICC awareness training to agency professionals and employment consultants whose work entails helping refugees find their way back into the working world. Both, the explicit teaching of PICC to highly-educated refugees themselves and the increased awareness of the importance of PICC among professionals who are supposed to help them, could ease and expedite the refugees’ process of forging new careers in the host society. To this end, as part of the CSLW project, a PICC training toolkit was developed to support educators and other professionals who work with highly-educated refugees. This toolkit was co-constructed by refugees themselves and is therefore firmly grounded in their needs – and it is freely available online (CSLW 2019).

We acknowledge that the teaching of (P)ICC to refugees is not an uncontroversial endeavour. Del Percio, for instance, warns that:

“intercultural communication also acts as a powerful resource that is mobilized to express control over or discipline not only the workers [i. e. social workers, those at employment agencies, etc.], who are the executors of this infrastructure of migration, and the migrants, whose trajectories and life projects are determined by the receiving institutions, but also the general population, which is asked to accept or tolerate the forms of precarity that are frequently associated with these migrants” (2016: 98).

It is certainly crucial not to promote this kind of “docilizing governmentality” (Del Percio 2016: 89). Yet, upon reading Del Percio’s work, the question arises whether it really is an issue of whether (P)ICC is taught, or whether it may be a matter of how and to what end it is taught.^[7]

We agree with Lønsmann (2020) that it is key not to perpetuate a situation of “responsibilisation” in which employability and integration in the labour market are deemed the individual responsibility of each refugee, while structural factors are downplayed. A wide range of additional measures is required to ensure that refugees do eventually start off from the same level playing field as the rest of the population – ranging from the removal of unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to the combating of systemic racism and discrimination in the host society (as discussed in the introduction). Moreover, if PICC training is provided to refugees themselves and to professional who help them, then it should really also be provided to refugees’ co-workers. Arguably, it would also be beneficial if members of the host society in general acquired at least a certain amount of ICC to facilitate the integration of newcomers – because, as noted above, at least some refugees are made to feel as though integration is not sufficient, and they are put under pressure to assimilate. ICC training among members of the host society could constitute a beneficial measure to start tackling this.

While much more remains to be done, we thus argue that both the explicit teaching of PICC to refugees themselves, and the increased awareness of the importance of PICC among professionals who are supposed to help them, can potentially constitute sensible first steps towards assisting and promoting refugees’ labour market integration. Evidently, this can only work if the teaching and awareness-raising of PICC skills is implemented in the right manner, with the aim of genuinely helping refugees, and with the prospect of strategies to eventually bring about larger structural changes.