Employer attitudes towards refugee immigrants: Findings from a Swedish survey

• Author: Per SKEDINGER,Per LUNDBORG
• Date: 01 June 2016
• Published date: 01 June 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12026

Copyright © The authors 2016

Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2016

International Labour Review, Vol. 155 (2016), No. 2

*

Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, email: per.lundborg@

so.su.se. ** Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm, and Linnaeus Uni-

versity, Växjö, email: per.skedinger@ifn.se. The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous help

they received from the National Institute for Economic Research. In particular, they wish to thank

Juhana Vartiainen and Elisabeth Hopkins for their comments and Roger Knudsen for administer-

ing the survey on which this article is based. Thanks are also extended to the Marianne and Marcus

Wallenberg Foundation, for nancial support to Per Skedinger.

Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and

publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Employer attitudes towards

refugee immigrants:

Findings from a Swedish survey

Per LUNDBORG* and Per SKEDINGER**

Abstract. Based on a large-scale survey of Swedish rms, the authors identify sig-

nicant heterogeneity in their attitudes towards refugee hiring, job performance,

wage setting and discrimination, though experience of employing refugees reduces

negative attitudes. Firms’ reasons for discontinuing their employment of refugees

are not related to discrimination by staff or customers, but rather to refugees’ sub-

optimal job performance. While the majority of rms do not regard the collectively

agreed minimum wages as an important obstacle to the hiring of refugees, rms

with a large share of refugees on the payroll report that reducing those wage rates

would enhance employment substantially.

The integration of refugees has become a major issue on the agenda of

many European countries that receive large inows of asylum seekers.

The need for more knowledge about the integration of refugees in countries

like Germany, Sweden and Austria has become especially urgent since the

2015 exodus of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other conict areas. Of

major policy interest are the issues related to the immediate reception of the

new arrivals (e.g. housing), but also those pertaining to education and, in par-

ticular, the long-term integration of refugees into the labour markets of the

receiving countries.

Not only does labour market exclusion generate costs for the refugees

and the receiving country, but it may also cause social unrest and undermine

public support for a generous refugee policy. The challenges of integration can

be identied at three levels at least. First, at the individual level, the obstacles

International Labour Review316

typically include poor language skills, low education, poor mental or physical

health, and little experience of work in developed countries. Many of these

can be overcome by investments in schooling and health care, but this will

nevertheless imply a long period of integration. Second, at the rm level, em-

ployers obviously play a crucial role through their hiring decisions and wage

setting. In this regard, attitudes driven by discrimination on the part of em-

ployees or customers may be an important part of the integration problem.

Wage setting is related to rms’ attitudes to the hiring of refugees since dis-

crimination may imply lower wages. Third, at the policy level, labour market

institutions, such as minimum wages or employment support, may also affect

the integration process.

In this article we focus on the rm level, presenting the results of a large-

scale survey, which, to the best of our knowledge, is unique in its focus on the

employment of refugees. The survey was conducted in Sweden, a country with

a particularly high rate of refugee immigration where the gap in employment

rates between natives and immigrants is the widest in the OECD (OECD,

2011). Relative to the size of its population, Sweden has indeed accepted a dis-

proportionately large share of the refugees seeking asylum in the European

Union (EU). In 2012, for example, it registered 13 per cent of all EU asylum

seekers, numbering over 43,000 applicants. Their countries of origin in recent

years have mainly been Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Serbia and Eritrea (Fred-

lund-Blomst, 2014). In absolute numbers, only Germany and France have ex-

perienced more registrations. Sweden’s integration of refugees, however, has

been less than satisfactory. In particular, the employment rate among its refu-

gee immigrants averages 60 per cent after ten years in Sweden, and it is even

lower in some groups, e.g. 35 per cent among Somalis and 50 per cent among

Iranians and Iraqis (see Statistics Sweden, 20 09).

In the survey on which this article is based, more than 1,800 employ-

ers from a representative sample of rms responded to questions related to

institutions and attitudes of relevance to the employment of refugees. The

questionnaire was designed to reveal the frequency and experiences of their

employment of refugees, their perceptions of how wage setting affects refu-

gee employment, and their views on potential discrimination on the part of

native co-workers and customers. Several questions were also aimed at cap-

turing employers’ attitudes regarding the potential employment impact of re-

ducing collectively agreed minimum wages and their attitudes towards pay

cuts in general. The size of the survey sample allows for quantitative assess-

ments of their responses.

Most of the research on the integration of immigrants has so far focused

on human capital, like language skills, cultural differences, other source coun-

try characteristics or the impact of ethnic enclaves.

1

The previous literature has

1 For studies on human capital, see, for example, Algan et al. (2010), Dustmann and Fabbri

(2003), Rooth and Åslund (2006), and Smith (200 6); on cultural differences and other source country

characteristics, see Bisin et al. (20 08), Blau, Kahn and Papps (2011), and Manning and Roy (2010); and

on the impact of ethnic enclaves, see Edin, Fredriksson and Åslund (2003), and Piil Damm (2009).