Migration and Integration in a Post-Pandemic World

There have been three eras of mass international migration: the forced migration of Africans to the Americas during the mercantilist era, the mass movement of free Europeans to the Americas and Oceania during the laissez-faire industrial era, and the global movement of people from varied origins to diverse destinations during the neoliberal post-industrial era. This chapter forecasts the likely course of migration in the 2020s through a review of the demographic, economic, climatic, and governmental circumstances prevailing across world regions. It foresees an acceleration of migration between developing and developed regions composed increasingly of people moving to evade threats at places of origin rather than to access opportunities at places of destination. The coming decade will require a better theoretical integration of refugee and migration studies, close attention to the tradeoffs between internal and international migration, and a greater effort to theorize how states will behave in adapting to the realities of migration in an era of climate change.

Within the debates on the role of time and change in migrant transnationalism research, the Covid-19 pandemic provides an extremely enriching perspective and fresh discussions on our understandings of transnationalism in international migration. Assuming a before–during–after perspective, in this chapter, our aim is to present, discuss and assess changes that may materialize in different dimensions of migrant transnationalism because of the pandemic. Our objective is to provide potential answers to, and reflections on, two questions: How did the Covid-19 pandemic change and transform the economic and social transnational engagements of migrants? And how are the transnational identifications of migrants affected by Covid-19 induced discrimination and stigmatization? This chapter highlights that the pandemic affected not only the everyday lives of migrants themselves, but also the social and economic connections they have with their families and friends in different contexts. The maintenance and, at times, even the intensification of these relationships highlight that, in times of crises, migrants and their social networks need and rely on each other even more so for their individual and collective resilience.

In 2015, Sweden changed course, from having one of Europe’s most open policies toward refugees to imposing sharp restrictions. This chapter explores this shift by focusing on the underlying economic policy paradigm. Swedish public debate and economic policy are framed by the idea that tax money is scarce and that the state should maintain a balanced budget. Higher spending on immigration is expected to come at the expense of the welfare state. Each immigrant is thought to impose a cost on society until they can find work; meanwhile employment levels are held back by the austere fiscal regime. The result is an increase in anti-immigration sentiments and calls for welfare chauvinism. Only those who have “paid in” to the system are deemed worthy of benefits in return. It is easy to see why opponents of immigration would adopt this zero-sum frame. It is harder to see why it would be used by immigration proponents. To explain this puzzle, the theory of policy paradigms is invoked. A paradigm that is more amenable to cosmopolitanism is explored in the frame of functional finance.

The Swedish policy known as Gymnasielagen, or the High School Law, allows for approximately 9000 refugees who arrived as unaccompanied minors, but had their asylum applications rejected, to receive permanent residency if employed within six months of completing their education. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult for most young refugees to obtain long-term employment that quickly. A proposed reform to introduce the High School Law, which would have improved their opportunities for employment, was rejected after highly publicized debate among the political parties. This chapter details how this reform was framed by Swedish political parties throughout 2020 and 2021, using parliamentary transcripts, supplemented by news media and social media material. Two additional instances of refugee reception to Sweden are used as contrasting cases: that of Afghan refugees following the return to power of the Taliban in 2021 and that of Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis combines impressionistic approaches to interpretive policy analysis with the ideational turn in institutionalism and governance research. The chapter highlights that, while a crisis is, by definition, unexpected, context-specific policy legacies and hegemonic problem definitions determine who is viewed as worthy of policy reforms addressing their needs.

The chapter looks at how specific union strategies have attempted to directly support groups of migrant workers in an increasingly fragmented labour market. After providing an overview of traditional union actions aimed at promoting migrants’ inclusion, the chapter focuses on the cases of France, Italy and Spain, which present innovative strategies at local and territorial levels and within the broader organisational structures. The aim is to show that whilst these forms of inclusion and support constitute an important response to changing conditions in the labour market and wider societies, there remain tensions in terms of the sustaining and democratising of such initiatives across time. This also reveals the political complexities of social inclusion and the manner in which it is enveloped in competing sets of trade unions’ approaches and agendas.

Sweden is an interesting case study of the challenges that migration can pose to industrial relations and trade unions. As a highly unionized country with strong labor market institutions, it has received large volumes of migrants in recent years. Yet Swedish unionization has dropped, especially among foreign-born workers. Migrants are normally hit hard by precarious employment conditions and unemployment, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. This divide between native and foreign-born workers, both in terms of labor market conditions and unionization, presents a challenge for Swedish trade unions. Especially for blue-collar unions. Growing anti-immigration sentiment, diminished support for the center-left parties and increased support for the radical right, exacerbates these challenges. This chapter provides an overview of these developments. One insight is that foreign background does not seem to significantly explain differences in unionization: workers who are comparable in terms of age, gender, sector, class, place of residence, and form of employment, have roughly the same likelihood of being union members, whether they are foreign-born or not. This implies that differences in unionization do not seem to have cultural explanations to any sizeable extent but are rather explained by labor market sorting. Furthermore Swedish trade unions use a default-inclusion strategy that organizes all workers through the same mechanisms and into the same structures. The organizing principle behind this strategy is class and profession/sector, rather than ethnicity. The reason why this strategy has not succeeded may be due to institutional and structural factors, including reduced employment protection and unemployment benefits, ethnical labor market sorting, and employment uncertainty.

In this chapter, I focus on lower educated and local language weak unemployed women immigrants in the Swedish labour market. Facing cultural and ethnic diversity, socio-economic poverty, and exclusion, this group does not respond to standardised labour integration programmes. Instead, creative new solutions are needed. One such solution may be work integrating social enterprises, often run as social cooperatives with democratic involvement and a hybrid business model related to both economic and social goals. Leaning on new institutional theories, the chapter highlights the Swedish welfare state, where the public sector caters to individuals’ employability but has not promoted work integrated social enterprises as a possible solution. Through interviews with seven such enterprises, I identify three phases in coping with institutional challenges and suggest that there are post-pandemic signs of a more resilient societal contract. This might open for a rebalancing of the roles of the public and private sectors in favour of new models for immigrant women-labour integration in the future.

This chapter examines sorting of workers from various immigrant groups in Sweden into sectors and jobs comparing these patterns to jobs held by natives in the same sectors. A specific focus is put on the skill composition of jobs and how this differs among migrants’ and natives’ job sorting. We use matched data on jobs, employers, and workers in Swedish hospitality, construction, and retail sectors to document patterns of country of origin-based segmentation. Results show that immigrants primarily enter routine jobs requiring a higher level of technical skills compared to natives who are more often found in non-routine jobs requiring interpersonal skills. In construction and retail, immigrants and natives work mostly in non-routine jobs. These stark patterns of job segregation suggests that education and training efforts among migrant workers should consider the acquisition of language and interpersonal skills in addition to formal training and education.

Ethnic discrimination is common in labor and housing markets. It leads to lower wages and higher unemployment for ethnic minorities, to segregation in the labor market, and to residential segregation. Several studies show that the Covid-19 pandemic increased the extent of ethnic discrimination. The prejudice against hiring migrants may have increased because people from countries where the epidemic started or from countries with a lower vaccination coverage were blamed for the spread. It may also have increased in the cases where the Covid-19 pandemic led to higher unemployment making it less costly for employers to discriminate.

Norway is characterised by small differences, where equality appears as a core value, forced by strong personal and institutional trust. However, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed that there is great variation between different ethnic groups. This chapter asks, what can explain the difference and what does it tell us about economic versus cultural integration? Theoretically, the chapter is inspired by Arvidson and Axelsson’s (2021) distinction between vertical and horizontal loyalty. The article is based on quantitative and qualitative interviews with young people aged 25–35 with an immigrant background who live in Oslo. In Norway, a fundamental assumption is that economic and cultural integration is interrelated. When comparing the vaccination rate (cultural integration) and having a job (economic integration), it is clear that these two dimensions are not equally distributed. The empirical analysis shows how labour migrants originating from Pakistan and Poland have different kind of loyalties. While some are loyal to the message given by the authorities, others were sceptical and, perhaps more importantly, they perceive that people from their country of origin have a different opinion than the majority population and the Norwegian authorities.

When immigrants are segregated, their integration can be hindered because they are cut off from social networks that contain valuable sources of cultural capital that could otherwise help them adapt to their new home. Therefore, the communities that immigrants live in can have important consequences for their integration. Some neighborhoods, as a function of demographic composition or urban design, encourage inter-ethnic interaction, while others inhibit it. In this chapter, I examine two neighborhoods known to house a group identified as vaccine hesitant—Somali immigrants in northern Stockholm—in order to provide insights into the compositional and built environment factors that may lead to this group’s deviation from the norm, signaling low levels of integration. I show that the group is quite residentially segregated and also argue that the community may be undergoing a transition into a ghetto, which would further impede integration.