The Swedish government has committed to reducing immigration and is increasingly moving toward stricter migration policies and reduced rights for migrants. This article provides an overview of migration policy developments in Sweden during 2024, drawing on a unique database that maps and categorizes migration policy changes from 1954 to the present. The year 2024 saw a mix of restrictive and liberalizing reforms, including tighter asylum reception rules, more demanding citizenship criteria, and expanded access for highly skilled labor migrants under the EU Blue Card scheme. Additionally, temporary protection holders from Ukraine gained improved access to services. Ongoing and upcoming government inquiries signal a continued shift toward more restrictive policies, reflecting a broader realignment in Sweden’s migration governance.

Whilst artificial intelligence tools are already have significant impacts upon academic education, our starting point as scholars should always be to first ask: why do we provide academic education? The practices, values, and rationale contained in however you answer that question provide the guidelines by which to relate to AI. The Social Sciences and Humanities are comparatively well-placed in the ‘AI age’ because critical thinking, an area in which our subjects excel, is seen as one of the core human skills AI cannot automate. 

Whilst AI risks undermining the validity of many exams through enabling easier plagiarism, misuse of the technology most threatens our education wherever it accelerates loneliness and a disconnect between students and lecturers through replacing human communication. We therefore need to put new resources into building academic communities amongst students and lecturers.

Take-home papers as a form of examination are under threat but we still need to train students’ writing skills. Colleagues are now shifting to sit-down exams, but to protect writing skills we need time for in-person academic discussion to assess students’ learning, e.g. also if they’ve written a text. Increasing space for in-person academic discussion forms part of a bigger goal to build and strengthen our academic learning communities within each programme so students do not feel isolated and alone with AI.

This article examines the motivations behind Sweden’s longstanding commitment to refugee resettlement, contributingto broader debates about state-led humanitarian action and global responsibility sharing. Drawing on parliamentarydebates from the 1950s to the 2020s, the study identifies key shifts in how Swedish policymakers have framedand implemented resettlement as a durable solution in collaboration with the UNHCR. Initially driven by labor marketneeds and humanitarian concerns post-World War II, Sweden’s policy shifted towards more diverse, non-Europeanrefugee groups in the 1970s and beyond, showcasing a broader commitment to international solidarity and responsibilitysharing. The parliamentary debates reflect a political consensus to support the growth of the internationalrefugee resettlement regime by showing humanitarian leadership and leading by example. The recent 2022 policyshift to reduce the refugee quota signals a recalibration influenced by domestic concerns.

In 2008, Sweden changed its labour-migration policy to facilitate more labour migration from countries outside the EU. Most state ambitions to shape labour migration, including practices such as the use of labour-market tests and the assessment of migrants' human capital, were abandoned and the responsibility to select migrants was transferred to employers. We use Swedish register data and adopt a difference-in-differences approach to assess the effects of the policy change on labour migrants' labour income, in comparison to non-EU migrants who moved to Sweden for reasons other than work. The effects of the policy change are substantial. Labour migration from outside the EU increased and its composition changed after the reform, resulting in a significant decrease in mean income. We conclude that changes in their occupational composition were the main drivers of the income drop for labour migrants. In sum, the new non-selective labour-migration policy lowered labour migrants' mean income by opening the door to unskilled labour.

This article investigates labour market segmentation of EU-13 workers in Sweden. Labour market segmentation is a driver of income differences between natives, EU-15 migrants and EU-13 migrants in many EU member states. There are, however, indications that labour market inequalities as a result of segmentation among EU-13 migrants is less pronounced in Sweden. Previous research, both quantitative and qualitative, has shown surprisingly low levels of labour market segmentation among the employed. The structural differences on the labour market has, instead, been between the employed and unemployed, with a large employment gap between natives and all migrant groups including EU-13 migrants. We address the functional integration in the labour market from a longitudinal perspective, using several quantitative indicators to measure the degree of labour market segmentation. Natives and other migrant groups (EU-15 and refugees) are used as reference groups. Our results shows a low but increasing labour market segmentation among the employed born in EU-13 countries. The dissimilarity between employed natives and EU-13 workers is increasing, especially among men. Men from EU-13 countries is the only category where the occupational position has deteriorated. From having a similar occupational position as EU-15 migrants in 2007, their position in the labour market in 2015 is more similar to the refugee group. This development is driven by a large increase of Polish construction workers on the Swedishlabour market.

In this article, we investigate local level reactions to the top-down state steering for the housing of refugees in Sweden. We especially reflect on events after the increased refugee reception in Sweden in 2015 and the introduction of a Settlement Act in 2016 which made it mandatory for municipalities to receive a specific number of refugees and organise accommodation. This has resulted in a wide array of housing situations for refugees concerning standard, costs and temporary solutions. A multi-level governance framework from on central government steering perspective is applied. We argue that the modified legislation can be understood as a change in governance throughout the years - from persuasion to economic incentives and, finally, to coercive methods. Sweden is a country that has distinguished itself as one refraining from particularity and continuing to work towards equality between newcomers and citizens. In relation to recent legal and political developments, we identify a change - a paradoxical change, as governance for the more-equal reception of refugees in Sweden seems to lead to increased inequalities for refugees on the local level.

This article will explore the extent to which a focus on the ‘local’ can tell us something meaningful about recent developments in the governance of displaced migrants and refugees. Taking a multi-sited approach spanning cases in the south and north of Europe, we consider how the challenge of housing and accommodation in particular, a core sector of migrant reception and integration, can shed light on the ways local and city level approaches may negotiate, and sometimes diverge from, national level policy and rhetoric. While it can be said that despite variation, local authorities are by definition ultimately ‘always subordinate’ (Emilsson, Comparative Migration Studies, 3: 1-17, 2015: 4), they can also show evidence of ‘decoupling’ across geographies of policy delivery (Pope and Meyer, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 3: 280–305, 2016: 290). This article traces how possible local variations in different European cases are patterned by ground-level politics, local strategic networks, and pre-existing economic resources in a manner that is empirically detailed through the study of housing.

In this paper, we investigate whether integration policy improves refugees' economic performance, specifically examining the effects on refugees' income of Sweden's 2010 reform of the introduction programme (or IP). We also evaluate how the reform effects vary depending on refugees' gender and educational attainment. Our key finding shows a strong positive effect of the reform on refugees' income, immediately after the completion of the IP. More importantly, this positive effect intensifies over time, with no signs of diminishing, which implies a longer-term effect of the reform. Furthermore, the effects of the reform do not significantly vary between men and women or between the highly educated and the less-educated, suggesting that the new Swedish IP benefits refugees to the same extent, regardless of their gender and educational attainment.

This article analyses the relationship between human capital and career outcomes using the case of highly skilled young Latvians and Romanians in Sweden. As a non-English-speaking country with regulated labour markets, the Swedish case provides a contrast to previous studies on EU10 to EU15 mobility that usually focus on English-speaking receiving countries with less regulated labour markets. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews are analysed from a life-course perspective to map the education and career trajectories before and after their mobility. Three career trajectories are found: match, re-skilling, and de-skilling. Most young migrants tend to prioritize general, rather than country specific, human capital investments, which negatively affects their career outcomes. The results highlight the importance of individual human capital investment choices as well as structural opportunities in receiving countries for understanding the relationship between human capital and career outcomes for young EU-migrants.