Bringing locals and migrants together is healthy for society, study suggests

Projects which bring locals and migrants together greatly benefit social cohesion, but organisations which run them are often bogged down providing basic services which should be the government’s responsibility, a new report has found.

Spanning two years and eight partner countries including Malta, JRS Europe’s I Get You project looked at various community building initiatives and their effects on participants. Local researchers assessed 20 such initiatives, from intercultural evenings to drop-in centres, language lessons and prayer groups.

They found overwhelming evidence that the projects left both local volunteers and migrant participants better off.

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“Most of the volunteers we met described their experience as humbling and spoke of how they felt they had received more than they had given,” report writers noted, adding that migrants interviewed all said that the initiatives had “made them feel welcome and respected... without the fear of being judged on the basis of their appearance.”

Despite the benefits, the study found that many such local initiatives found it hard to offer truly intercultural progammes which forced...