Abstract
Insufficient integration of immigrants into the labour market has been identified as a major problem in the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Integration depends, inter alia, on immigration and integration policy, and for most of the post-war period the policies of the three countries displayed strong similarities. However, in the early 2000s Denmark increasingly deviated from its two neighbours, introducing more restrictive immigration and stricter integration policies. Comparing both pre- and post-reform immigrants across Scandinavia, we assess the wider impact of this comprehensive policy reversal by tracking the evolution of employment and earnings gaps between 1993 and 2006. We use large data sets with individual-level register information allowing us to account for immigrant labour force composition and to examine sub-groups of immigrants. The results do not indicate that the Danish reforms had any clear-cut effect on either employment or earnings among non-Western immigrants. Moreover, integration in Norway and Sweden was not unequivocally worse despite the absence of similar reforms, raising questions regarding the aptness of the Danish reversal.
Highlights
Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in European migration patterns
The purpose of this paper is to provide such a broad assessment, examining employment and earnings among pre- and post-reform immigrants to Denmark and using Denmark’s Scandinavian ‘‘twins’’ Norway and Sweden as yardsticks when judging the success of the Danish policy reversal
It is for instance possible that the reforms could to lead to higher employment rates among immigrants, yet if this is the result of more immigrants taking up low-paying jobs, there could be a concomitant increase in the earnings gap
Summary
Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in European migration patterns (see e.g. Castles et al 2014, or Van Mol and de Valk 2016, for overviews). After 1990 concerns regarding low employment and high rates of welfare recipiency prompted some countries to reform their labour marketrelated integration policies, i.e. the programmes and benefits available to recent immigrants believed to impact their integration on the labour market. Two examples of the Danish makeover are the reforms in 2002 when Denmark tightened immigration policy disallowing family reunification for spouses below 24 years of age, and changed integration policy introducing reduced social assistance benefits for immigrants. This has been described as Denmark emphasising the stick, Sweden the carrot and Norway a combination of the two (Brochmann and Hagelund 2012). We use individual-level register data from 1993 to 2006, a period spanning the Danish reforms, and focus on natives and non-Western immigrants of working age (30–59)
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