The tension between choice and need in the housing of newcomers: A theoretical framework and an application on Scandinavian settlement policies

Abstract

The settlement and housing of refugees is high on the agenda in most European countries. This article develops a theoretical perspective on the housing provision of newly arrived migrants and applies it on the national discourses on settlement policies in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The theoretical discussion focuses on the ambivalence between choice and need in housing policy, and between promoting demos and ethnos in integration policy. The empirical analysis takes its departure in these tensions and investigates the national discourses in terms of three potential arguments for restricting autonomy in the housing market precisely for newly arrived migrants: the legal status, resource and neighbourhood arguments. This frame of analysis makes it possible to interpret and understand the surprisingly strong differences in settlement policies between the three countries. We argue that our theoretical approach and analytical framework should be relevant for understanding national political discourses on settlement policy more generally.Ethnic housing segregation and exclusion represents a challenge to the welfare state, and sometimes even a serious threat to urban social order and political cohesion. Although the importance of housing provision in the reception of refugees and other new-coming immigrants is generally acknowledged, national and local settlement policies differ considerably between

Navigating Precarious Terrains: Reconceptualizing Refugee-Youth Settlement

“…63 These barriers to financial security are further compounded by decreasing housing affordability in many major cities in settlement countries. 64 Beyond the country of settlement, people with refugee backgrounds are also negotiating a dynamic transnational sphere, including rapidly transforming homeland and diasporic politics and shifting relations, locations, and situations of friends and family. While this has always been the case for refugee settlers to some extent, the growing sophistication of, and access to, information and communication technologies and the increasing affordability of air travel has embedded these transnational forces into daily life in ways that were unimaginable during the last century.…”

Cross-national convergence in times of crisis? Integration policies before, during and after the refugee crisis

“…This study will not analyse the historical development of Scandinavian integration policies (several comparative studies have done so thoroughly; e.g., see Borevi and Bengtsson 2015;Brochmann et al 2012), instead, it concentrates on changes in immigrant integration policies from 2015 until June 2017. Table 1 shows that although the Scandinavian countries have experienced large differences in the absolute numbers of asylum seekers, all countries experienced a substantial increase of asylum seekers, ranging from 160 to 200%, when comparing asylum applications in 2015 with those in 2013, followed by a drop in 2016.…”

Trading Refugees: The Governance of Refugee Settlement in a Decentralized Welfare State

“…Other studies of Scandinavian refugee settlement policies have focused differences in local responses to state ambitions in liberal Sweden and restrictive Denmark (Myrberg 2017). Borevi and Bengtsson (2015) show how the three Scandinavian countries have arrived at three different solutions to the tension between the individual's legitimate right to choose where to live and the state's legitimate concern about integration: in Sweden the individual refugee is the predominant choice agent; in Denmark it is the state; in Norway it is the municipalities (see also Hernes 2017;Hernes et al 2019).…”