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IMMIGRATION

IN DATA: Why have so many of Sweden’s Afghan child refugees got jobs?

A recent report from Statistics Sweden found that eight out of ten young men who came to Sweden as child refugees in 2015 now have jobs, a higher employment rate than people of their age born in Sweden. What's behind this success and has it come at a price?

IN DATA: Why have so many of Sweden's Afghan child refugees got jobs?
Afghan child refugees queue to enter Sweden's parliament to watch a debate on their future in 2017. Photo: Alexander Larsson Vierth/TT

Some 35,000 unaccompanied child refugees came to Sweden during the refugee crisis of 2015, the overwhelming majority of whom were teenage boys from Afghanistan’s oppressed Hazara minority. Only 2,847 were girls, and 22,806 of the 32,522 boys were from Afghanistan. 

According to the Statistics Sweden report, around 13,000 of them were then given residency as unaccompanied child refugees, with a further 7,000 given residency under the so-called “Gymnasium Law” or gymnasielagen.

This was an amnesty law which gave those whose asylum claims were rejected temporary residency in Sweden to complete their studies at upper secondary school, after which they had six months to get a job. 

A poor welcome

On arrival in Sweden, the group were often dismissed as skäggbarn, or “bearded children”, with claims that many had lied about their age to take advantage of more lenient asylum rules. The Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine was tasked with carrying out controversial examinations to check their ages. 

The group were blamed for harassing girls at music festivals, and there were also reports of their being drawn into heroin use and crime.   

Most have jobs

Six years on, though, the statistics show a more positive picture. 

Of those born in 1999, the most common age for the group, 82 percent of the young men were described as sysselsatta or “employed” in November 2022, when the snapshot was taken, a number that rises to 85 percent for men who received residency under the Gymnasium Law.  

This compares to about 66 percent for young men born in Sweden in 1999, and about 74 percent for young refugees who came to Sweden with their parents in 2015. 

According to the study, 71 percent of those with residency under the Gymnasium Law and 67 percent of those with residency as unaccompanied child refugees have an income of at least 222,900 kronor year, or about 18,575 kronor a month, which was more than both young men born in Sweden (48 percent) and refugees who came with their parents (46 percent). 

In a sense, the high employment rate among those who gained residency under the Gymnasium Law is not surprising, given that they were given six months to get a job or risk being deported. 

“The explanation is usually that they are dependent on themselves for support, so they more or less have to get a job to be able to take care of themselves,” Karin Lundström, the demographer at Statistics Sweden who led work on the report, told The Local. 

Muhammed Ali, Chair of Sweden’s Association of Unaccompanied Child Refugees, told the broadcaster TV4 that the findings were expected. 

“This report is nothing that surprises us, because both we ourselves and those who support us know how well it’s going for us,” he said. 

But he said that the group’s success had come despite the often harsh treatment they have received in Sweden. 

“We’ve been struggling over these years. We’ve been treated extremely badly and brutally. We have never been a priority for the authorities, but we have also managed to create a network,” he said.   

Most work in elderly and healthcare

The study found that the most common job for the group was health and elderly care or social care, with 38 percent of men who got residency as child refugees employed in these roles and 34 percent who got residency under the Gymnasium Law. This compares to just five percent of men born in Sweden. 

“We can see that a larger share of those with [residency under] the Gymnasium Law are working in healthcare, which is a profession where there’s a lot of need for for people,” Lundström explained. “So we can see that they have chosen a profession and education which matches the jobs in demand. 

The next biggest roles were “business services” or företagstjänster, a broad term which can cover everything from high-level IT services to janitorial work, which employed 14 percent of those those given residency as unaccompanied child refugees and 12 percent of those who got residency under the Gymnasium Law, manufacturing and recycling, retail, hotel and restaurant, and the building industry – which all employed around 10 percent.

Very few are studying, and many didn’t graduate from upper secondary

The downside of the Gymnasium Law was that it forced those given residency under it to go directly into the workforce after completing upper secondary education, as going into higher education did not count as grounds for extended residency. 

Only 3 percent of men who got residency as unaccompanied child refugees were studying in November 2022, compared to 17 percent of those born in Sweden and nearly 11 percent of those who came with their parents. 

For women born in 1999 who came as child refugees, it was 7 percent, while for those born in Sweden or who arrived as refugees with their parents, the share studying was 20 percent.    

Some 55 percent of men who got residency as child refugees have studied to gymnasium level, and fully 75 percent of those who got residency under the Gymnasium Law, but only about 4 percent of male child refugees have studied to a higher level, and only 2 percent of men who received residency under the Gymnasium Law. 

Almost all of those who studied chose a vocational line: 80 percent of child refugees, and fully 94 percent of men who got residency under the Gymnasium Law.  

Only 6 percent of those who got residency under the Gymnasium Law studied a programme at upper secondary school which counts as preparation for further education.

For men who got residency as child refugees, only 15 percent studied a programme expected to lead to further education, while for women the share was 18 percent. 

Of those born in Sweden, fully 44 percent studied courses leading to further education, and for those who came with their parents, 40 percent did.

Lundström said she expected that this might change in future as more decided to improve their skills through study. 

“It’s not been that long since they finished upper secondary school and got their first jobs, so maybe if we were to look at this group in another five or 10 years, it would be a little bit different and a higher share of them would have started and finished higher studies.” 

Many have very low salaries

According to the report, more than 70 percent of men who gained residency under the Gymnasium Law have an income of at least three “income base payments” or inkomstbasbelopp.

As an income base payment was set at 71,000 kronor in 2022, this constitutes an income of 213,000 kronor, or 17,750 kronor a month. 

Around 30 percent of those with residency under the Gymnasium Law earned even less than this, and with those with residency as child refugees the number is more like 35 percent. 

There is no information in the study on how many of those earning “at least 17,750 a month” earned 26 700 kronor, which was the average salary for a care home assistant in 2022.

Lundström warned that the figures could be misleading here as many of those in the study would not have worked a full year by November 2022. 

Even in November 2022, she said, about 50 percent of those studied had an annual income corresponding to about 25,000 kronor per month.  

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Politics in Sweden: What’s in the Social Democrats’ plan to eradicate Sweden’s ‘vulnerable areas’?

The Social Democrats have given a sneak preview of their plan to eradicate Sweden's so-called 'vulnerable areas', where extreme segregation is combined with severe crime problems. Would it make a difference?

Politics in Sweden: What's in the Social Democrats' plan to eradicate Sweden's 'vulnerable areas'?

With “strategic demolitions” in the most segregated and crime-ridden housing areas, a ban on people on benefits moving into them, and a limit on the share of rental housing in such areas, the plan sketched out in an opinion piece in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper on Sunday is the boldest new policy proposal the Social Democrats have made in years. 

It’s basically a sanitised version of the “ghetto plan” launched in Denmark back in 2018. 

And judging by the reaction – with right-wing commentators decrying what they call tvångsblandning (forced mixing) and bussning (using buses to swap pupils between areas) and left-wing ones decrying the demolition plans and proposals to let educated people jump rental queues, it promises to be almost as controversial. 

But what’s the alternative, Lawen Redar, the Social Democrat MP who led the working group on segregation, asked Swedish public broadcaster SVT on Sunday. 

“Should we just leave the situation like it is today?” she said of Sweden’s 59 problem housing areas, in some of which 80 percent or more have an immigrant background. “I am extremely frustrated over this. Something must be done.” 

What are the Social Democrats proposing? 

Redar and her three colleagues made 11 proposals in their article: 

1. A national list of “vulnerable areas” with a set of targets to promote: the physical reconstruction of the areas to combat segregation and promote integration; a better mix in the population; an increase in the use of Swedish language in welfare services; bold moves to increase the amount of people in work; and an increased police presence to fight criminality.

2. Central government to hold so-called “Sweden negotiations” with municipalities to jointly fund physical improvement of the areas, by new building, densification, strategic demolitions, and new traffic and public transport solutions. 

3. A limit to the proportion of rental apartments in vulnerable areas. Areas with high levels of rental apartments would be required to take action to increase the share of private and cooperative housing. 

4. Government to give credit guarantees to companies building detached, semi-detached, and terraced houses in vulnerable areas.

5. Government funds for renovation and upgrading of “Million Programme” areas. 

6. Minimum income for those moving to vulnerable areas. Landlords would be banned from renting out property in vulnerable areas to anyone who has lived off benefits in the last six months. 

7. People with university degrees would be given priority in the queue for rental apartments in vulnerable areas.

8. New regulations to prevent landlords setting high income requirements for rental properties outside vulnerable areas. 

9. Government to give credit guarantees and other forms of investment support to companies building affordable rental apartments outside vulnerable areas. 

10. An inquiry into how to increase the share of rental properties owned by non-profit and public housing companies outside vulnerable areas 

11. An inquiry into how to give municipalities first right to bidding on socially important and strategic land. 

What’s the problem? 

Although Sweden’s recent epidemic of gang shootings has been blamed by many on the country’s extreme housing segregation, Redar and her colleagues said that this was far from the only problem. 

Fully 40 percent of adults between the ages of 20-64 in Sweden’s 59 “vulnerable areas” cannot support themselves through their work, three out of 10 children in such areas leave secondary school without the grades needed to go to upper secondary school or gymnasium.

Part of Sweden’s segregation problem, as Lawar recognised, is built into the architecture. The Social Democrats’ “Million Homes programme”, enacted between the mid 1960s and the mid-1970s, may have rescued people from slum conditions, but it also created a series of isolated urban communities on the outskirts of Sweden’s cities, often cut off from the rest of towns and cities by motorway ring-roads. 

Although they were initially built for working-class ethnic Swedes, as the rate of immigration to Sweden picked up in the 1980s,1990s and early 2000s, Swedes became outnumbered as part of so-called “white flight”.  

Fully 80 percent of those living in the so called “especially vulnerable areas” now have a foreign background, a share that rises to above 90 percent in five of the most segregated districts. 

“We believe that there is no more important task for Sweden than breaking segregation and fighting the class society. No task is more urgent,” Redar and her colleagues wrote in their article.

“The fact that children and young people are growing up in this cemented inequality is nothing less than a social failure which brings shame to our country. It must come to an end.”  

What are opponents saying about it? 

Fredrik Kopsch from the right-wing Timbro thinktank complained that efforts to increase the number of people with immigrant backgrounds in middle class and rich areas of Swedish cities would not work. 

“The income requirement [for rental apartments] will be reduced through the law, and state subsidies will create cheap rental apartmments in socio-economically strong areas. It is detached from reality to think that this will help deprived people,” he wrote in an article in Svenska Dagbladet.  

Will it help the Social Democrats? 

The Social Democrats were criticised for lacking concrete policy proposals, both in the run-up to the 2022 general election and in their first year and a half in opposition. 

With this proposal, together with a proposal to make kindergarten compulsory for children over three years old, that has changed. 

If the rest of the 11 policy working groups set to present their conclusions at the party’s congress in August come up with similarly detailed proposals, the party will be overflowing with new ideas. 

While this will finally give its politicians something to say for themselves, it will also make them easier to attack. 

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