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The OECD series Recruiting Immigrant Workers comprises country studies of labour migration policies. Each volume analyses whether migration policy is being used effectively and efficiently to help meet labour needs, without adverse effects on labour markets. It focuses mainly on regulated labour migration movements over which policy has immediate and direct oversight. This particular volume looks at the efficiency of European Union instruments for managing labour migration.

This review is the first in a new series on the skills and labour market integration of immigrants and their children. With 16% of its population born abroad, Sweden has one of the larger immigrant populations among the European OECD countries. Estimates suggest that about half of the foreign-born population originally came to Sweden as refugees or as the family of refugees and Sweden has been the OECD country that has had by far the largest inflows of asylum seekers relative to its population. In all OECD countries, humanitarian migrants and their families face greater challenges to integrate into the labour market than other groups. It is thus not surprising that immigrant versus native-born differences are larger than elsewhere, which also must be seen in the context of high skills and labour market participation among the native-born. For both genders, employment disparities are particularly pronounced among the low-educated, among whom immigrants are heavily overrepresented. These immigrants face particular challenges related to the paucity of low-skilled jobs in Sweden, and policy needs to acknowledge that their integration pathway tends to be a long one. Against this backdrop, Sweden has highly developed and longstanding integration policies that mainly aim at upskilling immigrants while temporarily lowering the cost of hiring, while other tools that work more strongly with the social partners and the civil society are less well developed and need strengthening.

Cette publication présente les effectifs et les caractéristiques des populations émigrées par pays d’origine avec une attention particulière portée sur les niveaux d’éducation et la situation sur le marché du travail. Elle offre aux pays d’origine un portrait détaillé de la taille et de la composition de leurs diasporas ainsi que de leur évolution depuis 2000. Elle est composée d’un chapitre de synthèse et de six chapitres régionaux : Asie et Océanie, Amérique latine et Caraïbes, pays de l’OCDE, pays européens hors OCDE et Asie centrale, Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord et Afrique subsaharienne. Les chapitres régionaux sont suivis d’une note régionale et des notes par pays.