A geographical path to integration? Exploring the interplay between regional context and labour market integration among refugees in Sweden

Abstract

Migrant integration is an issue at the forefront of political debates in many immigrant-receiving countries. Within academia, a rich body of neighbourhood effects literature examines the significance of the residential environment for the socioeconomic integration of international migrants. Another strand of research explores the associations between immigrants' initial region of residence and their subsequent socioeconomic integration. Existing research focuses on a single dimension of geographical context and on the neighbourhood scale. Using Swedish longitudinal register data, we estimate discrete-time event history models to assess how regional and neighbourhood contexts influence refugees' entry into employment. Our study includes all refugees who arrived in Sweden between 2000 and 2009, distinguishing between three categories of refugees: refugees with assigned housing, refugees with self-arranged housing and quota refugees. Our results reveal a clear pattern where the most advantageous regions for finding a first employment are those at the extremes of the population density distribution: the Stockholm region and small city/rural regions. Refugees residing in Malmö have the lowest probability of entering the labour market. Our study also reiterates existing concerns regarding the negative effects of ethnic segregation at the neighbourhood level on labour market participation.

Regional Differences in Educational Achievement among Swedish Grade 9 Students

“…Apart from the knowledge-centered national curriculum of compulsory education, two major reasons for this appear to be free school choice, which leads to increased school segregation (Hennerdal et al, 2020;Larsson, 2019), and high rates of low-skilled migrants from the 1990s onwards (Ekberg, 1999;Sanandaji, 2018). Moreover, economists such as Sanandaji (2018) and migration scholars like Vogiazides and Mondani (2020) have argued that the socioeconomic and sociocultural integration of migrants in Sweden has failed, especially in the city of Malmö, leading to an increased fiscal burden and high unemployment and crime rates (Sanandaji, 2018).…”

Refugee Integration in Canada, Europe, and the United States: Perspectives from Research

“…Thus, coethnic clustering reduced the employment prospects of refugee women searching for work in the five years after their arrival while, at the same time, coethnic concentrations improved the earnings of all refugees who are currently working (Edin, Fredricksson, and Åslund 2003; Piil Damm 2009). As a final example, Vogiazides and Mondani (2020) examined Swedish refugees’ transitions into first employment and the effects of residential context. Using registry data to construct longitudinal data on refugees who arrived in Sweden between 2000 and 2009 aged between 18 and 59, they found Stockholm offered more positive labor market opportunities than Malmo, a city that has experienced rising unemployment and overall poor economic prospects.…”

Spatializing immigrant integration outcomes

“…It is more difficult for people living in disadvantaged regions—regardless of nationality—to have the same access to opportunities for socio‐economic advancement. If measures of immigrant integration focus primarily on the state and on cities, these spatial differences will not be adequately identified (Vogiazides & Mondani, 2020). The second is that existing large‐scale data sets provide the means for a spatialized investigation of immigrant integration outcomes.…”

“…Connor (2020) has extended this argument further, showing that what he calls ‘reception context’, that is, the sociospatial characteristics of the counties, states and regions where immigrants settled, was highly influential for the integration outcomes of Irish immigrants and their descendants. Focusing on the experiences of refugees in Sweden, Vogiazides and Mondani (2020) insist on the significance of investigating regional immigrant integration outcomes. They argue that the regional context is particularly important for understanding labour market integration, and they use regions as the main unit of analysis in combination with more localised neighbourhood data.…”