Whether refugees in need of protection should be granted long- or short-term residence permits in the host country upon arrival is a long-standing debate in the migration policy and scholarly literature. Rights-based models of inclusion advocate for secure and long-term residency status arguing that this will provide the foundations for successful inclusion. Responsibilities-based models on the other hand claim that migrants should only be granted such status if certain criteria, such as full-time employment, have been met, again under the belief that such a system will facilitate inclusion into the host society. Using a sudden policy change as a natural experiment combined with detailed Swedish registry data, we examine the effect permanent residency on three measures of labour market inclusion in the short-term. Our findings are twofold. On the one hand, we find that temporary residents that are subject to a relatively less-inclusive situation have higher incomes and less unemployment. However, at the same time, they are less likely to spend time in education than are those with permanent residency. First part title Permanent or Temporary Settlement? Second part title A Study on the Short-Term Effects of Temporary and Permanent Residence Permits on Labour Market Participation
Do asylum‐seekers respond to policy changes in their destination country, and to what extent? We approach this question by using high‐frequency data, and we focus on a sudden liberalization in Swedish policy toward Syrian asylum‐seekers, which implied permanent instead of temporary residence. We show a clear and fast, yet temporary, increase in Syrian asylum applications in Sweden after the policy change. Also, the policy caused a shift – not limited to the short term – in the share of individuals arriving without family, and consequently in the share applying for family reunification. Our study adds quasi‐experimental evidence to the literature on inter‐country asylum flows and migration policy.
This paper uses quasi-experimental evidence to understand how changes in asylum policy affect the number of asylum-seekers. We look specifically at a sudden, regulatory change in the Swedish reception of Syrian asylum-seekers. The change took place in September 2013 and implied that all Syrian asylum-seekers would be granted permanent instead of temporary residence permits. Using high-frequency data and an interrupted time-series set-up, we study the extent to which this change caused more Syrian citizens to apply for asylum in Sweden. The paper provides several new insights: Our estimates show a clear increase in the number of asylum applications in Sweden after the policy change. The increase had implications for the distribution of Syrian asylum-seekers in Europe, but only in the short term. Also, the change caused a shift in the share of adult men arriving without a household member, and consequently in the share of refugees applying for family reunification.
This study exploits close elections in Sweden to assess the causal relationship between seat majorities for mainstream political parties and refugee reception policy. The study focuses on the two dominant mainstream political blocs, in a centre-right and a centre-left coalition, during three waves of elections from 2002 to 2010. In doing so, the study makes a few contributions to current research: Firstly, besides addressing a current knowledge gap in the focus on mainstream parties and refugee reception policy, this study investigates the impact of seat majorities which potentially have a more influential position compared to individual parties. Secondly, the study relies on an empirical strategy which allows comparison of comparable cases. Lastly, the study focuses on mainstream parties at the local level of government within one institutional context and thus addresses the obstacle of case comparability within crosscountry studies. In conclusion, this study finds that the relationship between the mainstream political blocs and refugee reception policy is of an associative nature. In order to find significant estimates of seat majorities, the win margin for each bloc needs to be substantial. These results indicate that there is a unified political attitude over the mainstream blocs towards refugee reception and that other factors, and not political seat majorities, have contributed to the uneven distribution of refugees among municipalities in Sweden.
The dramatic event that the great migration in the summer of 2015 entailed changed the migration policies of various countries. Substantial amendments were hastily made in a policy field in which already tense state-local relations struggled to manage coordination, responsibilities, and funding. Sweden, recognized as a final host country of the massive flows of refugees and asylum-seekers, was no exception. In Sweden, autonomy in terms of local refugee reception was circumvented in 2016. Municipalities' remaining discretion is above all concentrated to one of the most crucial spheres of refugee reception: the outline of local housing policies. We argue that housing may be perceived as a tool of resilience that local governments may use to maintain far-reaching influence over the settlement of migrants with a refugee background by selecting restrictive or generous policy options. In this paper, we conduct a theoretically grounded analysis of local housing policy for refugees among Swedish municipalities. To capture the intrinsic dynamic, we propose a generic typology applying the dimension of either a liberal or a restrictive housing policy and relate it to theoretical notions of refugee policy as characterized by either a rights-based or a more restrictive approach. Our findings show that local governments in Sweden pursue a wide array of policy stances that appear to be correlated with factors originating from prior experiences of refugee reception, conditions in the labor and housing markets, and political circumstances. Based on this, we argue that local housing policy has offered municipalities a tool to exert a form of intentional, or unintentional, migration control despite national efforts to impose a more just system of refugee reception.
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