The New Way In: A Migrant Perspective

Sweden has long been regarded as something of a role model on integration policy. The organisation Migration Policy Group has since 2007 annually released an index on integration policy in 31 European and North American countries, the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX). Sweden has topped the index since the start in 2007.  According to the researchers behind the index, “immigrants to Sweden will find that rare combination of a country experienced with immigration and open to their economic potential” otherwise only found in countries like Canada and Portugal (Huddleston et al. 2011, 190).The Swedish integration policy has, however, not managed to prevent significant differences between native and foreign-born Swedes on the labour market. When it comes to labour market integration, Sweden is far from a role model (Weisbrock 2011). In 2006, only an estimated 57.4 per cent of males from Iraq who had come to Sweden in the years 1990-1995 had a job, and only 48.3 per cent of the women (Hedberg and Malmberg 2010, 44-45). The degree of migrant integration appears to depend to a large extent on when migrants arrive in Sweden; integration happens more quickly for those who immigrate during economic booms than for those who arrive in times of high unemployment (Hedberg and Malmberg 2010). It is still too early to say how the range of integration policies introduced when the so-called “establishment reform” was adopted in 2010 will impact on new migrants’ prospects for integration. Through this reform, asylum seekers and their families are given access to considerable “establishment measures” such as language courses, complementary vocational training, and internships. Notably, these measures are not extended to labour migrants...Read more