The Determinants of Economic Integration of Immigrants in the Nordic Countries
In this chapter, we analyse the determinants of integration of foreign-born persons and second-generation immigrants (i.e. individuals with foreign-born parent/s) in four Nordic countries: Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. We investigate both objective
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oduction The Nordic countries became an important destination area for immigrants from MENA region and Southern Europe in the late 1960s, when the recruitment system through Gastarbeiter/Guestworker system was initiated. This channel of foreign labour recruitment halted in the 1970s due to the oil crisis and subsequent period of stagflation in Northern and H. Kelm (*) Department of Public Management and Social Sciences, University of Economics in Katowice, Katowice, Poland e-mail: [email protected] A. Lasek Cracow University of Economics, Kraków, Poland e-mail: [email protected] J. Brzozowski Department of European Studies, Cracow University of Economics, Kraków, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 S. Uusiautti and N. Yeasmin (eds.), Human Migration in the Arctic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6561-4_8
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Western Europe. However, the immigrants continued to flow into Nordic countries due to family reunion principle: foreign-born residents started inviting close family members (Ekberg, 1994). Due to the relatively generous welfare system, these family members started to arrive also on a massive scale. Then in the 1990s, the Nordic countries opened their doors to humanitarian migration from the Balkans, but also the Middle East (including, especially, Afghanistan). The 2000s period was marked by a gradual opening of the labour markets due to the EU enlargement—most of the Nordic countries, including also non-EU members such as Norway, have encouraged labour migration from CEE countries, aiming to reduce shortages on the national labour markets. Then finally in the wake of the refugee and migration crisis in Europe (2011–current), the Nordic countries once again embraced liberal stance, opening doors for humanitarian migration (Castles, De Haas, & Miller, 2013). Therefore, the Nordic region is an extremely interesting playground for academic investigation on economic integration of immigrants, as for the last 5 decades these countries have combined labour low-skilled and highly skilled migration with humanitarian one. Obviously, there is an extremely rich literature on this topic, dealing not only with the prospects of earnings/wage assimilation (Gustafsson & Zheng, 2006; Longva & Raaum, 2003), welfare dependency (Kornstad & Skjerpen, 2018), occupational mobility (Ekberg, 1994; Hermansen, 2012) and entrepreneurial activities (Vinogradov & Isaksen, 2008; Vinogradov & Kolvereid, 2007). Yet, the research on the socio-economic integration of immigrants in the Nordic region suffers from a surprising limitation. Most of the studies deal with the selected immigrant groups only—for instance Turks in Finland (Wahlbeck, 2007) or Poles in Iceland (Skaptadóttir, 2011)—or on selected destinations. In this regard, there is an abundance of research on Denmark (Arendt, Nielsen, & Jakobsen, 2016; Brodmann & Polavieja, 2011; Foged & Peri, 2016), Norway (Dustmann & Frattini, 2014; Hayfron, 1998; Hermansen, 2012; Kavli, 2015) and Sweden (Andersson & Hammarstedt, 2015;
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