Family Migration in the Scandinavian Welfare States: Comparing Denmark, Norway and Sweden

After the turn of the millennium family-related immigration has come to epitomize a whole range of worries and concerns about integration, diversity and continued economic growth. In this policy area we can further see a clear exposure of the strongly interlinked – yet, analytically distinguishable – arguments about ‘economy’ and ‘culture’. Contrary to high skilled labor migration, family migrants are generally perceived as less attractive on the labor market and therefore “unwanted” for economic reasons. In addition, recent policy developments reflect misgivings that ‘the migrant family’ constitutes an obstacle to integration, e.g. by transferring and consolidating traditional and illiberal norms about women’s rights. Just like in Europe at large, in the Nordic countries family migrants and their so called sponsors have become crucial targets of various types of integration requirements associated with the civic turn in immigrant integration policies. But in the Nordic context we should expect concerns over welfare state issues and the legacy of the welfare state model to be particularly salient in debates over family migration. Against this backdrop, this article maps out and compares family migration policy developments since the late 1990s in Denmark, Norway and Sweden to analyze in what way the economic and cultural sustainability of the welfare state values figure in the political discourses and arguments surrounding changes in family migration policies in the three countries.