Who is best at getting refugees into the workforce — Norway, Sweden or Denmark?
Norway, Sweden and Denmark all have extensive integration programs for refugees.
All three basically want the same thing: to help refugees enter the labor market so that they can become financially independent.
Nevertheless, there are differences when it comes to what the countries want to achieve with integration, what measures they use and what kind of policies they pursue.
For these reasons, it makes sense to compare them — simply to find out what works best.
Researchers at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) have now done just that.
Scandinavian champion
All three countries have experienced a significant increase in the number of refugees seeking asylum over the past decade. The number increased dramatically after the 2015 refugee crisis, when refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa and the Middle East due to the war in Syria.
A number of them then traveled the long way north, to Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
“What we do know is that the refugee crises will not disappear anytime soon. That’s why we need to know how the refugees are doing in the countries that receive them,” says Vilde Hernes, from the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR) at OsloMet.
Hernes is one of the researchers who worked on the new report.
She pointed out that the researchers only looked at labor market integration and not at the social or political aspects of integration.
So who wins the Scandinavian labor market integration championship?
Norway, Sweden and Denmark
In short, more refugees have found work in Norway. This applies to both men and women and applies especially to the first years after they come to Norway.
Sweden is a little behind, and there the refugees reach the same employment levels as in Norway after a few more years.
Denmark comes out worst and has both lower labor force participation and education, both in the short and long term.
In addition, it appears that Norway has higher employment among women than both Sweden and Denmark. Denmark comes out worst here.
Best for those with lower education
“Norway is quite good with refugees who have less education,” Hernes said.
This means that refugees with little or no schooling have an easier time entering the labor market in Norway than in the other two countries.
Sweden, on the other hand, is very good at getting people with higher education into the labor market.
Maybe the Swedes are better at checking and approving educational credentials, wonders Hernes.
She believes that Norway can learn something from Sweden when it comes to refugees who come to Norway with an education. This is especially the case for people from Ukraine, where newcomers often have good educations — often from universities.
The result is that Sweden can boast of better results in the longer term for refugees with high school or university education from the country of origin.
“Here they actually beat Norway,” Hernes said.
“But Denmark is worse in this area than both Sweden and Norway,” she added.
Kadem from Iraq
Wail Kadem is one of the refugees who came to Norway from Iraq — and with an education. He has read the report and says it accurately describes his experiences in Norway.
“This report reflects what happened in my life,” he said.
Kadem is very familiar with the descriptions 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.
Went to work straight away
“When I first came to Norway as a refugee from Iraq, it went very quickly,” he said.
“I learned the language very quickly and I finished the induction program after four to five months,” he said.
Kadem is a trained lawyer in Iraq with a bachelor’s degree and wanted to start a master’s degree in Norway.
“I sent in an application to have my education approved by NOKUT (Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education) and at the same time started looking for a job. I got a position as an assistant store manager, which would enable me to work while studying,” he said.
At the same time, he sent his educational documents to NOKUT, which is the Norwegian agency that must approve the education people bring from abroad to Norway.
Paper from Iraq is not good enough
“A year after I sent my first application, I was rejected,” he said.
Kadem said that NOKUT wrote to him that they had not assessed the professional nature of his training, but that papers from Iraq were not good enough.
“I sent complaints back and forth for many years, right up until 2019,” Kadem said.
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 sent in an application to have his education approved in Sweden.
The surprise was that Sweden approved his application after only four months.
“This must be my new homeland,” he thought.
“After spending several years being rejected in Norway, I got a yes from Sweden straight away,” he said.
The Swedes also gave Kadem advice on how to go about completing their legal education.
Replaced law with political science
But Kadem was still living in Norway and he finally gave up on getting his education approved here.
“Even if I talked to NOKUT and said I had my education approved in Sweden, it didn’t matter,” he said.
In 2019, he resigned from his position as store manager and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. It was then that he received an offer to become a supervisor at the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Agency, NAV, where he still works today.
Now Kadem will take a master’s degree in political science.
– My experience was that Sweden was perfect for people like me who have an education from their home country, he says.
Can be difficult to get in touch with
This is Kadem’s own story about his experiences with Norway and NOKUT. Sciencenorway.no has asked NOKUT if it is common not to evaluate papers that are judged to be poor or insufficient.
NOKUT does not comment on individual cases, but replied that the agency does not make professional assessments of the content of the education in its general approval system for foreign higher education. What they do is make a comparison of the education systems, and evaluate the foreign education against the Norwegian education system.
In some cases, they cannot approve foreign higher education based on what would be normal case management.
“There are several reasons for this. For example, in cases where people have fled their country, they may not want NOKUT to contact the educational institution or the education authorities in their home country to verify the authenticity of the educational documents. Or they may not have access to the documents” , wrote Helén Sophie Haugen, NOKUT’s head of foreign education, to sciencenorway.no.
“In the case of Iraq, NOKUT has determined that the credibility of Iraqi education documents is too low for Iraqi educations to be approved after document-based case processing. In such cases, NOKUT offers an interview-based approval system, the UVD scheme, as an alternative to document-based approval.”
Different ways to integrate
Vilde Hernes from OsloMet says that Norway, Sweden and Denmark have quite different focuses when it comes to integration.
– For example, Denmark has focused on measures to get people out of the workforce, which corresponds to what you can call unpaid work training, she says.
This means that the refugees work as interns without pay.
“In Norway, we have increased the focus on educating refugees in recent years, especially those with low previous education,” Hernes said.
Sweden, for its part, has been keen to approve education from the country of origin and to help more people enter the workforce. They then rely on subsidized work, which means that for a period the state pays the new employee’s salary, not the employer.
The report from OsloMet covers refugees who came to Norway, Sweden and Denmark between 2008 and 2019, a total of 280,000 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 that there is one area where Norway has a long way to go.
“Even if Norway comes out well, there are still big differences between women and men,” Hernes said.
For example, only 10 to 20 percent of women achieve the average income in Norway after ten years in Norway.
“This changes the picture somewhat,” Hernes said.
Translated by Nancy Bazilchuk
Reference:
Vilde Hernes and others: Nordic integration and settlement policies for refugees: A comparative analysis of labor market integration outcomes. TemaNord2022.
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Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no
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