Employment Integration of Resettled Refugees, Asylum Claimants, and Family Reunion Migrants in Sweden

The employment integration of immigrants and in particular refugees in Swedish society has been the subject of many debates and constitutes one of the major political challenges faced in the last two decades. Like in many European countries, refugees are more likely to be unemployed, have temporary jobs and lower income. Most studies of immigrant economic integration have been undertaken at the national level, taking into account place of birth, but not by admission status. This study focuses on the employment integration by admission status by looking at the outcomes for resettled refugees, asylum claimants (asylum-seekers who may subsequently obtain a residence permit), and immigrants who arrive via family reunion migration. Using logistic regression methods we estimate the probability of having a job after controlling for a set of personal and immigrant intake characteristics as well as contextual factors. The results of the analysis indicate that family reunion immigrants have a faster employment attachment than asylum claimants which in turn have faster employment integration than resettled refugees in the Swedish labour market. The understanding of the results of the analysis is that selection processes (self-selection as well as selection through policy mechanisms) and networks are important factors explaining the employment integration of immigrants...
Rules and regulations surrounding the labour market could either augment or hinder the integration of immigrants in the host society. According to the MIPEX indicator115, Sweden scored highest of all European countries and Canada on all six studied indicators116including the labour market access indicator for immigrants and ethnic minorities. However, other studies have shown that labour market regulations (as well as the dispersal policy employed in Sweden during the period 1985-1991) had negative effects on the labour market integration of immigrants (Bevelander  et al.  1997; Edin et al. 2000). Regulations with regard to housing also affect the immigrant’s interaction with the labour market. Bevelander  et al. (2008), studying Swedish register data for 2006, find that asylum seekers who lived with family and friends during the asylum seeking period had higher odds of being employed than asylum seekers who had to live in housing arranged by the Migration Board. This may be because the arranged housing was often in areas with lower labour market prospects where accommodation was easier to find. When interviewed, the asylum-seekers themselves expressed a preference for living with family or friends over state-sponsored housing.Read more