There are three types of work permits in Belgium. Type A is delivered to liberal professions. Type B is delivered to employees and workers. Type C is delivered to asylum seekers.
What's the point of delivering work permits to asylum seekers?
To answer the question, we should look back to the past. A few years ago, asylum seekers were not allowed to work in Belgium. An average procedure of establishing whether the asylum seeker is entitled to the refugee status took a few years. In the meantime, those people received social aid in the form of ~700€ per person, often accompanied by social housing and various material and monetary grants.
With the number of asylum applications floating between 20.000 and 40.000 each year, this generosity weighted heavily on the state budget which had to financially support well over 100.000 asylum seekers at any given time.
The process of granting these people a work permit was carefully crafted to satisfy different political players. Employers were gaining from the wave of the low-cost workforce coming to the market. NGOs were satisfied with the increased integration of the asylum seekers that followed the opening of the job market to them. Trade unions could not raise their voice due to the conflict of interests between the local workforce and the human rights activists within the trade unions themselves.
However, the biggest winner was the state. The delivery of the type C work permit was linked to the request to discover the real name, the birth date and the country of origin of the asylum seeker. In the real life, this forced the asylum seekers to show their passports to the country officials. It already allowed to filter those searched for by Interpol and people with a criminal past.
The type C work permit gave right to a 1-year residence permit. The condition to the renewal of the residence and work permits was declared to be a valid work contract by the end of the year.
Further on, the government introduced a program of voluntary return. It offered a few thousand € per family if they declared their will to return to their home country.
Naturally, the program targeted those asylum seekers who failed to the type C work permit requirements. That is, either those who did not discover their identities by fear of criminal prosecution or those who failed to find a job within a year after receiving the type C work permit.