Who is best at getting refugees into jobs – Norway, Sweden or Denmark?
Both Norway, Sweden and Denmark have extensive integration programs for refugees who come.
All three want basically the same thing: to help refugees in the labor market so that they become financially independent.
Nevertheless, there are differences, both when it comes to which countries want integration, which measures they use and what kind of policy they pursue.
Therefore, it is relevant to compare them – simply to find out what works best.
Researchers at OsloMet have now done that.
The Scandinavian champion
All three countries have experienced significant immigration of refugees in recent years. Especially after the refugee crisis in 2015, when refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa and the Middle East due to the war in Syria.
Several of them then travel the long way to Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
– What we know is that refugee crises do not go away anytime soon. Therefore, we should know how the refugees are doing in the countries that receive them, says Vilde Hernes from the Urban and Regional Research Institute NIBR at OsloMet.
Hernes is one of the researchers behind the new report.
She clarifies that they have only focused on integration in the labor market and not on the social or political parts of integration.
So who is the Scandinavian champion of labor market integration?
Norway, Sweden and Denmark
In short, several refugees work in Norway. This applies to both men and women and especially in the first years in Norway.
Swedish refugees are on their heels and achieve the same after a few more years.
Denmark comes out worst and has both lower labor participation and education, in the short and long term.
In addition, it appears that Norway has higher employment among women and both Sweden and Denmark. Here Denmark comes out worst by far.
Best at low education
– Norway is quite good at it with low education, asserts Hernes.
This means that refugees who have no or little schooling will find it easier to enter the labor market in Norway and in the other countries.
Sweden, on the other hand, is very good at getting people with higher education into the labor market.
– The Swedes are perhaps better at checking and approving education? ask Hernes.
She believes that Norway can learn something from Sweden for the group of refugees who come to Norway with education. Especially when it comes to people from Ukraine, people come with good educations – often from universities.
The result is that Sweden can boast better results in the long term for refugees with previous higher or university education.
– Then they beat the actual Norway, says Hernes.
– Denmark is doing worse here than both Sweden and Norway.
Kadem from Iraq
Wail Kadem is one of the refugees who came to Norway from Iraq – with education. He has read the report and has this to say about it:
– This report reflects what happened in my life, he says.
Kadem knows himself well in the description of how Norway and Sweden accept refugees with education.
He believes, like Hernes, that Norway has a lot to learn from Sweden when it comes to approving education from abroad.
Get to work quickly
– When I first came to Norway as a refugee from Iraq, it went very quickly, he says.
– I learned the language very quickly, and I finished the introductory program after four to five months.
Kadem was trained as a lawyer in Iraq with a bachelor’s degree and wanted to start a master’s degree in Norway.
– I sent an application to get training approval from NOKUT and at the same time started looking for a job. I got a position as assistant store manager, which I could have alongside my studies, he says.
At the same time, he sent his education papers to NOKUT – National Agency for Quality in Education. They are the ones who approve the education people bring with them from abroad to Norway.
Not good enough papers
– One year after I sent the first application, I was refused, he says.
NOKUT then wrote, according to Kadem, that they had not made any professional assessment of his education, but that they thought the papers from Iraq were not good enough.
– I sent complaints back and forth for many years, right up until 2019, Kadem says.
During this time he went from being an assistant store manager to becoming a store manager in the same store.
When he got nowhere with NOKUT in Norway, Kadem just sent a good application to get his education approved in Sweden.
Then he was surprised. It was approved after just four months.
– This must be my new homeland, he thought.
– After spending several years being rejected in Norway, I got yes from Sweden right away.
The Swedes also gave Kadem advice on how to proceed to complete his training as a lawyer.
Replaced law with political science
But Kadem has to live in Norway anyway, and he has to join in getting the education approved here.
– Even though I talked to NOKUT and saw that I had received training approval in Sweden, it didn’t matter, he says.
In 2019, he held the position of store manager and took a bachelor’s degree in political science. That’s when he got an offer to become a supervisor at Nav, and he still works there.
Now it will be a master’s in political science for Kadem.
– My experience was that Sweden was in the middle of nowhere for people like me who have education from my home country, he says.
It is not always possible to contact the university in the home country
This is Kadem’s own account of the meeting with Norway and NOKUT. Forskning.no has asked NOKUT whether it is common practice not to assess papers they think are too bad.
NOKUT does not have the opportunity to comment on individual cases, but answers, among other things, that they do not professional assessments of the content of the education in the general approval scheme for foreign higher education. But they make a comparison of education systems, and evaluate the foreign education against the Norwegian education system.
In some cases, they cannot know better training based on ordinary case management.
“This has several reasons, for example in cases where persons who are on the run do not want NOKUT to contact the place of learning or the education authority in the home country to verify that the education documents are genuine, or do not have access to the documents”, writes NOKUT’s director for foreign education Helén Sophie Haugen for forskning.no.
“When it comes to Iraq, NOKUT has assessed that the credibility of Iraqi educational documents is too low for Iraqi educational programs to be approved after document-based case processing. In such matters, NOKUT offers an interview-based approval scheme, the UVD scheme, as an alternative to document-based approval.»
Such ways of integrating
According to Vilde Hernes from OsloMet, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have quite different focuses on integration:
– In Denmark, for example, they have been preoccupied with measures to get people into work, and frankly what is called unpaid work training, she says.
This means that the refugee works as an intern without pay.
– Whereas in Norway there has been an increased focus on educating refugees in recent years, especially those with little previous education, says Hernes.
Sweden, for its part, has been concerned with approving education from the country of origin and helping more people in the job. Then they have used what is called subsidized work, which means that the state pays the salary for a period, not the employer.
The report from OsloMet includes refugees who came to Norway, Sweden and Denmark between 2008 and 2019. Altogether, this involves 280,00 adult refugees.
Few women with jobs and good income
In summary, Norway comes out well in the comparison with Sweden and Denmark.
Nevertheless, Hernes believes it is something that drags it all down.
– Even if Norway comes out well, there are still big differences between women and men, Hernes points out.
For example, only 10 to 20 percent of women after one year in Norway have achieved the average income in Norway.
– This makes the picture slightly different, says Hernes.
Reference:
Vilde Hernes and others: Nordic integration and settlement policy for refugees: A comparative analysis of labor market integration outcomes. Theme North 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/temanord2022-534