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 S wedish 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 S weden. Time in S weden reduces drastically the unemployment days, though from very high initial levels. Refugees from culturally distant I ran/ I raq and H orn of A frica experience considerably more days in unemployment than refugees from the less distant E astern E urope and L atin A merica. The differences are large during the first 20 years in S weden 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.