Is migration bad for welfare? : Reconfigurations of welfare, labour and citizenship in Sweden

• The aim of this chapter is to challenge an axiomatic assumption made in current public debates – namely, that the sustainability of the welfare state in an age of globalisation requires the imposition of limits on immigration. With a particular focus on Sweden and recent changes in Swedish welfare policy, the chapter shows how the current crisis of the Swedish welfare model has, in fact, haunted this model for decades. The argument presented is that the socially integrative capacities of the Swedish model had been compromised well beforethe start of the post-2015 refugee crisis in Europe but that it is not the scale of immigration that made the Swedish welfare state unsustainable. Rather, it is the austerity-driven retrenchment of the Swedish welfare state which, in the past quarter of a century, has steadily undermined the capacity of the welfare model to offer emancipatory and non-discriminatory pathways of incorporation to immigrants. With the neoliberal reforms implemented since the early 1990s, the current reality in Sweden is that of deepening, and increasingly ethnically tinged, class divisions and the long-term social exclusion of sizeable population groups from substantial citizenship rights.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialt arbete (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Work (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Immigration

Sweden

Welfare State

Austerity

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)