Immigration and Integration Policy and Labour Market Attainment Among Immigrants to Scandinavia

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.