Iraq needs additional jobs to support youth: Danish official
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq and the Kurdistan Region are in need of a more active job market to support the youth that feel disadvantaged and provide them with opportunities to strengthen their communities, a Danish regional official told Rudaw last week.
“There is definitely a lot of challenges here, but at the same time there are a lot of opportunities and there is no doubt that Iraq needs jobs. They need the young people to come back and contribute,” Peter Krogh Sorensen, Regional Migration Attache at the Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration, told Rudaw in an interview.
Sorensen was explaining a Danish government program that seeks to support asylum seekers who had their cases rejected by European governments to come back and resettle in their host communities. The program covers the Kurdistan Region’s provinces of Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaimani as well as federal Iraq’s Nineveh, Baghdad, and Anbar, and is implemented in cooperation with Rwanga Foundation.
“When they come to Europe, they were probably better prepared than some of them are prepared now when they are coming home. You can say that this culture shock coming home can be much more difficult for them to actually adapt than when they went to Europe,” he said, stressing the need to support the returned to reintegrate into society “instead of being a burden for Iraq.”
Sorensen further emphasized that value that refugees with rejected asylum applications can provide back home by stressing the skillset that they usually pick up on their journeys, such as different languages and the ability to deal with a vast range of problems.
He also stressed that Iraq’s security situation has developed to a level that it can be considered safe to live in.
“Now Iraq is a very well-functioning country in many regards, and the situation has changed so that the main part of asylum seekers do not need to be in Europe in order to live safely, so that is part of it and part of the reason why they are being told now to basically go home,” he said.
According to Sorensen, the project provides “potentially several hundreds” of people with services and was a proposal by Rwanga Foundation that was accepted by the Danish government, so Denmark “is providing funding for Rwanga to carry out all those things that have been approved within the contract that has been signed.”
Tens of thousands of mostly young people leave Iraq and the Kurdistan Region for Europe annually in search of a better life, using people’s smuggling routes. A number of these migrants die in freezing temperatures on the border and others drown in the sea.
“There is definitely a lot of challenges here, but at the same time there are a lot of opportunities and there is no doubt that Iraq needs jobs. They need the young people to come back and contribute,” Peter Krogh Sorensen, Regional Migration Attache at the Danish Ministry of Immigration and Integration, told Rudaw in an interview.
Sorensen was explaining a Danish government program that seeks to support asylum seekers who had their cases rejected by European governments to come back and resettle in their host communities. The program covers the Kurdistan Region’s provinces of Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaimani as well as federal Iraq’s Nineveh, Baghdad, and Anbar, and is implemented in cooperation with Rwanga Foundation.
“When they come to Europe, they were probably better prepared than some of them are prepared now when they are coming home. You can say that this culture shock coming home can be much more difficult for them to actually adapt than when they went to Europe,” he said, stressing the need to support the returned to reintegrate into society “instead of being a burden for Iraq.”
Sorensen further emphasized that value that refugees with rejected asylum applications can provide back home by stressing the skillset that they usually pick up on their journeys, such as different languages and the ability to deal with a vast range of problems.
He also stressed that Iraq’s security situation has developed to a level that it can be considered safe to live in.
“Now Iraq is a very well-functioning country in many regards, and the situation has changed so that the main part of asylum seekers do not need to be in Europe in order to live safely, so that is part of it and part of the reason why they are being told now to basically go home,” he said.
According to Sorensen, the project provides “potentially several hundreds” of people with services and was a proposal by Rwanga Foundation that was accepted by the Danish government, so Denmark “is providing funding for Rwanga to carry out all those things that have been approved within the contract that has been signed.”
Tens of thousands of mostly young people leave Iraq and the Kurdistan Region for Europe annually in search of a better life, using people’s smuggling routes. A number of these migrants die in freezing temperatures on the border and others drown in the sea.