Refugees' Employment Integration in Sweden: Cultural Distance and Labor Market Performance

Abstract

This paper is the first to specifically focus on the integration of refugee immigrants into the Swedish labor market. Using highly detailed register data on blue collar workers it is shown that refugees' employment lags that of natives basically for their whole life time in Sweden. Time in Sweden reduces drastically the unemployment days, though from very high initial levels. Refugees from culturally distant Iran/Iraq and Horn of Africa experience considerably more days in unemployment than refugees from the less distant Eastern Europe and Latin America. The differences are large during the first 20 years in Sweden but some convergence occurs thereafter. Following a business cycle upturn this paper finds that the reduction of refugees' unemployment is half of that of natives'. Since refugees arrive at different ages, high numbers of unemployment days are recorded also for relatively old refugees with the highest number for those above 30.

Nordic Economic Policy Review

“…Our results add to a body of empirical evidence indicating that humanitarian immigrants in Europe tend to be underrepresented in employment and/or overrepresented among claimants in social insurance programs Sarvimäki, , 2017Lundborg, 2013;Damas de Matos and Liebig, 2014;Schultz-Nielsen, 2017;Åslund et al, 2017). Recent studies using crosssectional EU labor force survey (EU-LFS) data from 2008 (Damas de Matos and Liebig, 2014; and 2014 (Dumont et al, 2016) document low employment rates among refugees in most destination countries.…”

Cultural distance and emotional problems among immigrant and refugee youth in Canada: Findings from the New Canadian Child and Youth Study (NCCYS)

“…Conversely, the better the fit between home and adopted country cultures, the better the chance of success (Caldwell-Harris & Ayç iç egi, 2006;Dressler, Balieiro, Ribeiro, & Dos Santos, 2007;Harvey & Moeller, 2009;Lundborg, 2013;Sagiv & Schwartz, 2000;Schiefer, Mollering, & Daniel, 2012;Sortheix & Lonnqvist, 2014a,b;Triandis, 2000;Wachs, 2000).…”

“…Fig. 1 links CD to poverty because research suggests that high CD is related to unemployment (Lundborg, 2013) as well as compromised job performance (Harvey & Moeller, 2009). It may well be the case that finding and keeping work is a more acute problem for immigrants from culturally distant, than from culturally proximate countries of origin.…”

Patterned Inequalities and the Inequality Regime of a Swedish Housing Company

“…Depending on origin, immigrants can be disadvantaged to a greater or lesser extent in the Swedish labor market. Immigrants from the other Nordic countries earn almost as much as native Swedes, while immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America lag behind both natives and many European immigrants (Le Grand & Szulkin, 2002;Lundborg, 2013).…”