The European Union's ambition to create a harmonized reception system for asylum seekers differs from the realities on the ground. We address how differences in national reception conditions stimulate the secondary migration that challenges the creation of an effective common migration regulation in Europe. We base our analysis on the Dublin Regulation (DR) and the secondary movement of Eritrean asylum seekers from Italy to Norway. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with civil servants, NGO representatives, and Eritrean migrants in Milan and Rome, and Norwegian civil servants. Recently developed models of migration destination selection were used to analyse the interaction between individual aspirations and structural constraints. We found that the Eritrean informants remained highly motivated to apply in a second country but were to some extent held back by the DR. Supranational regulations were challenged by the migrants' actions and by national differences in reception and welfare standards. Both the migrants' aspirations to move on and the challenges to a harmonized regional regulation of migration increased during times of economic crisis.
During the 1990s and more so after the turn of the century, the authorities and the public in Scandinavia have become increasingly concerned about the pressure on welfare inflicted by the immigration of people with low skill levels from countries in the South. A large proportion of these newcomers have proven difficult to integrate in the Scandinavian labour market, which is characterised by high demands for skills and a compressed wage structure that makes lowskilled labour comparatively expensive. The universalistic welfare approach, implying a generous inclusion of legal newcomers from day one, in combination with the highly regulated and knowledge-intensive labour market has made the three states, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, particularly exposed to disincentive challenges as concerns the absorption of immigrants in gainful work. This article discusses the current development in the immigration/welfare nexus in the Scandinavian region.Is immigration bad for the welfare state? This simplistic and overarching question has been increasingly raised in public and scholarly debates during the last two decades. Gary Freeman was in many ways before his time when he in his much-cited article from 1986 posed a fundamental contradiction between inclusive welfare policies and comprehensive international migration. His main argument was that immigration has a tendency to erode the normative consensus on which generous welfare systems depend. "When the welfare state is seen as something for 'them' paid by 'us', its days as a consensual solution to societal problems are numbered" (Freeman 1986: 62).It took some years until new academic voices followed up on this basic relation between welfare and immigration, but as we now enter the second decade of the 21st century, the juxtaposition has developed into a core issue in migration research.The Nordic region is famous for its welfare model. It represents a particular type of welfare state characterised by universal access, generous benefits, a high degree of public involvement and comparatively high levels of redistribution. The combination of economic success and high levels of social justice has drawn considerable interest, even admiration, to the Nordic welfare states from the international research community.In international migration research, however, the Nordic countries appear as peripheral and in no way as one model. On the contrary, the Scandinavian countries can appear as quite opposite.Sweden has been fairly well known for its multiculturalism and relatively liberal stance towards refugees. Denmark, on the contrary, has made itself known at the international scene as representative of a particularly draconian version of immigration and integration policies, which some will claim border on the illiberal. In the international literature, Norway is probably the least talked about Scandinavian case, a silence that is enhanced by its position outside of the EU.Policywise, it appears to be positioned somewhere between the liberally minded Sweden and the restrictionist Den...
The neighboring countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway represent three very similar societies that differ markedly with respect to naturalization policy. While the general trend of a civic turn has brought about some of Europe's strictest residence and citizenship requirements in Denmark, it has left the liberal Swedish policy largely untouched and the Norwegian somewhere in between the other two. How might such divergence in otherwise very similar societies be explained? This article investigates the role different conceptions of nationhood has played. It is argued that different conceptions of nationhood has mattered, but that the national differences has less to do with the normative content of nationhood than with how politicians tend to conceive of the integration process that newcomers must commit to in order to develop a strong sense of national belonging.
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