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Working Together: Skills and Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children in Sweden

image of Working Together: Skills and Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children in Sweden

This review is the first in a new series on the skills and labour market integration of immigrants and their children. With 16% of its population born abroad, Sweden has one of the larger immigrant populations among the European OECD countries. Estimates suggest that about half of the foreign-born population originally came to Sweden as refugees or as the family of refugees and Sweden has been the OECD country that has had by far the largest inflows of asylum seekers relative to its population. In all OECD countries, humanitarian migrants and their families face greater challenges to integrate into the labour market than other groups. It is thus not surprising that immigrant versus native-born differences are larger than elsewhere, which also must be seen in the context of high skills and labour market participation among the native-born. For both genders, employment disparities are particularly pronounced among the low-educated, among whom immigrants are heavily overrepresented. These immigrants face particular challenges related to the paucity of low-skilled jobs in Sweden, and policy needs to acknowledge that their integration pathway tends to be a long one. Against this backdrop, Sweden has highly developed and longstanding integration policies that mainly aim at upskilling immigrants while temporarily lowering the cost of hiring, while other tools that work more strongly with the social partners and the civil society are less well developed and need strengthening.

English

Migration in Sweden and the context of integration policy

Sweden has a long history of providing a home for migrants and offering shelter to those seeking international protection. As a result the country has a large immigrant population and advanced integration policies. Sustained output growth, robust productivity, and a sound fiscal position have ensured that Sweden is in a strong position to accommodate new immigrants. And Sweden invests heavily in integrating immigrants knowing that, in the context of an ageing population, if well integrated in society and on the labour market, immigrants can help alleviate the ageing-related challenges the country expects in the coming years. This chapter provides the context for the report outlining i) the labour market context, and the strengths and challenges this presents, ii) the integration context, and the characteristics and composition of Sweden’s foreign-born population that influence their integration outcomes, and finally iii) the recent developments in integration policy within this context.

English

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