Working Together: Skills and Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children
in Sweden
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.