Swimming against the tide: why Sweden supports increased labour mobility within and from outside the EU

Abstract

While the free movement of labour in the EU is generally depicted as a positive feature of the single market, it was also controversial in the debate on EU enlargement. Actors opposing enlargement argued that large waves of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would ‘swamp’ Western labour markets, leading to so-called social tourism and increasing xenophobia. Contrary to the developments in other countries, Sweden was one of the only three Member States to immediately open its doors to citizens from the EU accession countries of 2004 and 2007. Sweden has also been one of the few EU countries to actively promote greater liberalisation of labour migration policy for third-country nationals (TCNs) within the EU, and the new Swedish Immigration Law of 2008 dramatically liberalised the TCN labour migration policy and made it more employer-driven. We argue that in order to understand why Sweden has supported increased labour mobility within and from outside of the EU, we need to complement existing explanations by analysing the preferences of the political parties. A two-dimensional analysis focusing on economy and culture provides an understanding of why so-called unholy coalitions of parties in support of liberal labour policies have emerged in Sweden during the 2000s. The article ends with a discussion of lessons learned from the Swedish case and wider implications for rights-based mobility in the EU.

Keywords:

• EU
• free movement
• labour migration policy
• political parties
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants in the panel on free movement and rights at the 19th International Conference of Europeanists (CES), Boston, 22–24 March 2012 and the participants in the Swedish Network for European Studies in political science (SNES) spring conference, Lund 19–20 March 2012, and two anonymous reviewers for all helpful comments. In addition, the special issue editors, Emma Carmel and Regine Paul, deserve many thanks for their work and excellent comments.

Notes

1. Swedish Minister of Migration, Tobias Billström, 4 November 2008.

2. Since the 1970s to the 2000s, labour migration to Sweden was sharply limited, with short-term temporary work permits being the norm, and with virtually no opportunities for conversion to permanent residency. Immigration to Sweden during this time was instead strongly dominated by refugee immigration and family reunion.

3. We use the word policy preferences to denote the parties own standpoints, views and proposals about free movement of labour, whereas the concept party position is used in relation to the two-dimensional analysis and our placement of the parties positions regarding the different cases.

4. The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), with an anti-immigrant agenda, gained seats in the Swedish parliament for the first time in 2010, receiving 5.7% of the votes.