Gregg Bucken-Knapp

The missing factor: why social democracy can lead to restrictive immigration policy

It is puzzling that social democratic parties are rarely the main focus of attention in the migration policy making literature, despite their crucial role in most European party systems and their frequent tenure in government. In this article, we seek to address this shortcoming by examining key immigration policies advocated by the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) over the past 40 years. This article shows that the SAP believes there are distinct limits to the ability of ‘the peoples home’ to make room for immigrants. Given social democracys clear adherence to notions of solidarity, inclusiveness and internationalism, the empirical findings of this article are counter-intuitive. Specifically, the Swedish Social Democrats have, since the late 1960s, continuously backed, and indeed initiated, strict immigration policies. Party ideology has been the missing factor in understanding these concrete immigration policies.

Just a train-ride away, but still worlds apart: Prospects for the Øresund region as a binational city

This article considers whether the cities of Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden, recently joined by the Øresund bridge, ought to be considered as one binational city. Working from the assumption that the project of constructing this binational city is a top-down endeavor whose success ultimately rests on the degree of support it receives from regional inhabitants, I focus on public opinion survey data collected one year after the opening of the bridge. Analysis shows that there are sharp national differences in the amount of support for the construction of a binational greater metropolitan region. I discuss how these differences may lead to an asymmetrical development for the emerging binational city, with Malmö eclipsed by the Danish capital Copenhagen, as well as how the heavily multi-cultural population of Malmö can impact Danish-Swedish cooperation on the Øresund.

Testing our borders: Questions of national and regional identity in the Øresund region

Abstract Drawing upon current debates as to whether or not cross-border cooperation projects pose a threat to the maintenance of national identity, this article explores the attitudes that inhabitants in the Danish-Swedish region of Øresund hold towards their respective nation-states and the emerging cross-border region. Analysis shows that there are sharp differences between Danes and Swedes when it comes to support for the Øresund region, with Swedes far more likely to identify with the cross-border region. These findings are then used to suggest how discussions of identity construction and potential identity trade-offs need to involve significantly greater nuance.

Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy, and the Public Sphere

Discursive governance refers to implicit mechanisms of governance such as narratives, leitmotifs, and strategic metaphors in political language. It examines how the framing of policies affects political and social representations in accordance with the wishes of political authorities. Ad hoc discourses generate a space where politicians configure, transmit, and initiate politics ideationally, rather than vouchsafing substantial policy change with respect to governance. This book studies the dynamics of political discourse in governance processes. It demonstrates the process in which political discourses become normative mechanisms, first marking socially constructed realities in politics, second playing a role in delineating the subsequent policy frames, and third influencing the public sphere. The key contribution of this volume is tracing the discursive relationships among actors, namely governments and political parties, policy participants and societal actors, and the public in European nation states, intergovernmental organizations, subnational or regional entities, and geographies beyond Europe where European norms trigger ideational processes of change. The book extends earlier work in the field by exploring how policy and politics create social knowledge, make some ideas publicly salient, and bring together coalitions of actors that find certain policy alternatives attractive and eventually generate political and policy change.

Ideology and Entry Policy: Why Center-Right Parties in Sweden Support Open-Door Migration Policies

On September 20, 2010, Swedes woke up to a new political landscape. The openly xenophobic Sweden Democrats (SD [Sverigedemokraterna]) had, with 5.7 percent of the votes at the general election, comfortably gained Riksdag (parliament) representation for the first time. However, although newly elected, signs had existed for nearly a decade of its impending political breakthrough, as SD had steadily increased its representation in the country’s regional and local political administrations. Moreover, while the party’s success may have been a sea change in Swedish politics, it was not the first time a far right populist party had broken through nationally. The New Democracy (NYD [Ny Demokrati]) party gained nearly 7 percent of the seats during the 1991 Riksdag election, before losing practically all of its votes in 1994.

Passing the Buck: The case of failing multilevel governance and vulnerable EU migrants in Sweden

Abstract Sweden represents an intriguing paradox regarding EU migrant integration. Its welfare state institutions are highly developed; its integration policies have a solid record. Still, a substantial proportion of EU migrants are facing poor working conditions, unemployment and homelessness. This article highlights the ongoing difficulties, both for EU migrants to Sweden, as well as for a broad range of Swedish public actors seeking to devise governance solutions in a frequently ad hoc manner. We argue that while EU migrant integration is a policy challenge reflecting a multilevel setting, there is little evidence that multilevel governance has emerged thus. Rather, actors at all levels seek instead to shift the responsibilities associated with EU migrant integration to other levels, maintaining that EU migrant integration is beyond their competencies and resource levels. The analysis draws upon public documents and interviews with the key national and local stakeholders.

Immigration and Integration Policies: Assumptions and Explanations

Migration is one of the key issues in contemporary European politics and society, placing high on the political agenda in local, national, and transnational political contexts, and widely debated in the media. All European states must grapple with the challenges posed when people move across borders. However, little is known about the relationship between the construction and elaboration of political discourse and its impact on institutions and actors associated with immigration, as well as the lives and everyday realities of frequently vulnerable migrant populations. This book engages with politics and political discourse that relate to and qualify immigration in Europe. It brings together empirical analysis of immigration both topically and contextually, and interprets such empirical evidence with the use of policy and discursive analyses as methodological tools. Thematically, this volume focuses on how discourse and politics operate in issue areas as varied as immigrant integration and multilevel governance, Roma immigration and their respective securitization, the uses of language in determination of asylum applications, gendered immigrants in informal economy, perceptions of integration by the migrants, economic interests and economic nationalism stimulating immigration choices, ideology and entry policies, and asylum processes and the institutional evolution of immigration systems.

The Multi-Level Governance of Intra EU Movement

Free movement management is a challenge that emerged in a multi-level context, with policies developed at one level having unclear implications for actors working at other levels, and with questions of authority and competencies remaining highly uncertain. Broader issues of national and local contexts, as well as traditional institutional practices, all lay the groundwork for the need of clearly articulated governance solutions. As is clear from previous chapters, the flows of CEE migrants, as well as the social consequences of their presence in urban regions that are often unequipped in both policy and administrative terms, has led to substantial challenges for actors at all levels of government, both public and private, when it comes to free movement management.

Introduction: Discursive Governance: Operationalization and Applications

This book studies the dynamics of political discourse in governance processes. Our starting point is Searle’s key argument—that some rules do not just regulate, but also create the possibility of the very behavior that they regulate (2010). Specifically, this book demonstrates the process in which political discourses become normative mechanisms, first marking socially constructed realities in politics, second playing a role in delineating subsequent policy frames, and third influencing the public sphere. The book traces such discursive processes within a set of key policy contexts, such as European integration, regional development, citizenship, migration, health care, family, gender, and sexuality. It shows how ideas acquire roles in effect to politics and policymaking, and then reverberate in the public sphere. In this effort, our book draws upon frameworks from different empirical and theoretical fields such as policy research, social representations theory, party politics, and citizenship.

The Eye of the Beholder: Narrating Crisis in the Ongoing Swedish Labor Migration Policy Debate

In 2008, the four party center-right Swedish government, with the support of the Green Party, enacted legislation making it substantially easier for non- European Union citizens (so-called third-country nationals (TCN) to live and work in Sweden. Casting aside a decades-old policy in which trade unions and labor market authorities played a crucial role in regulating the foreign labor tap, the reformed policy has made employment offers the key criterion in determining whether a work permit is granted. The resulting policy is now considered to be among the most open for OECD countries (OECD 2011). However, such a policy shift was far from uncontroversial. Indeed, the five parties in support of liberal labor migration faced substantial opposition from Social Democrats (SAP), the Left Party, and trade unions (Berg and Spehar 2013; Bucken-Knapp 2009; Hinnfors, Spehar, and Bucken-Knapp 2012; Spehar, Bucken-Knapp, and Hinnfors 2013), all of whom expressed fears that a permit-granting system based largely on employment offers would undermine core features of the Swedish labor market. Five years on, nearly 60,000 TCNs have been granted work permits for employment across sectors of the Swedish labor market (Swedish Migration Board 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012). While the initial numbers of new labor migrants were lower than forecast by the Swedish Migration Board (Goteborgs-Posten 2009), this has not resulted in the issue fading from public debate. Indeed, largely reflecting persistent media coverage of instances where TCN labor migrants have suffered at the hands of unscrupulous employers, the ongoing debate over Sweden’s liberal labor migration policy has only continued to gather steam and remains a regular feature on the op-ed pages of the leading national and regional daily newspapers.