Refugees' Employment Integration in Sweden: Cultural Distance and Labor Market Performance

Abstract

This paper is the first to specifically focus on the integration of refugee immigrants into the Swedish labor market. Using highly detailed register data on blue collar workers it is shown that refugees' employment lags that of natives basically for their whole life time in Sweden. Time in Sweden reduces drastically the unemployment days, though from very high initial levels. Refugees from culturally distant Iran/Iraq and Horn of Africa experience considerably more days in unemployment than refugees from the less distant Eastern Europe and Latin America. The differences are large during the first 20 years in Sweden but some convergence occurs thereafter. Following a business cycle upturn this paper finds that the reduction of refugees' unemployment is half of that of natives'. Since refugees arrive at different ages, high numbers of unemployment days are recorded also for relatively old refugees with the highest number for those above 30.