Never at Home: Immigrant Integration in Denmark and Sweden

• In Event: Political Economy, Knowledge and Inequalities

Abstract

Immigrant integration has become a critical issue in Western societies as countries grapple with growing ethnic and religious minority groups from the global south. Since the 1970s, more people have permanently migrated to new continents than ever before in history. According to the United Nations, 258 million people of the world’s population moved and settled internationally by 2019. Most people resettle in countries near their own home countries in the global south, but North America and Western Europe have seen significant increases in migrants in the 21st century due to wars, natural disasters, and better economic opportunities. Although, Denmark and Sweden did not receive the largest number of migrants in Europe in terms of raw numbers, 20-30 percent of people in both countries have an immigrant background and migrated to the countries for humanitarian reasons. Integrating this new arrivals and their descendants has become extremely important in Europe as countries try to deal with socio-economic inequalities in their societies.

Every country integrates new arrivals in different ways. Some countries have extensive integration policies that require rigorous language and cultural knowledge exams before the new arrival can gain permanent residency and/or citizenship in a host country. While other countries adapt liberal integration models that require no language exams or cultural knowledge tests. Integration in most recent years; however, has developed to mean not only language and cultural knowledge, but, also the ability of new arrivals and their descendants to earn salaries similar to that of the native population. Thus, integration policies have become a method to get new arrivals on a path towards earning a strong income with the hopes that the immigrant, the society, and the state will benefit from their migration in the future.

Particularly, social welfare states such as Denmark and Sweden that rely heavily on a large tax base and thus a large working population, have created policies that attempt to strengthen the economic situation of new arrivals. Denmark and Sweden have developed different policies (restrictive and liberal) and these policies target non-Western immigrants who are statistically the poorest in the countries. The goal of this project is to understand why Denmark and Sweden have different policies but are getting the same outcomes with their non-Western immigrants. This research project examines the effectiveness of integration policies in Denmark and Sweden and the impact the policies have had on migrants. The methods used to discuss integration policies in the countries are both qualitative and quantitative and exemplify a successful use of a mixed-method research tool.

Author

• Crystal H. Brown, Worcester Polytechnic Institute