Local challenges and national concerns: municipal level responses to national refugee settlement policies in Denmark and Sweden
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852315586309 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Symposium Articles |
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2017, Vol. 83(2) 322–339
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852315586309
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International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Article
Local challenges and national
concerns: municipal level
responses to national refugee
settlement policies in Denmark
and Sweden
Gunnar Myrberg
Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University,
Sweden
Abstract
This article investigates how Danish and Swedish national policies vis-a
`-vis refugees and
asylum seekers are perceived, and responded to, at the municipal level in the cities of
Aarhus and Malmo
¨. As will be spelled out in the article, municipal representatives raised
their voices in both Denmark and Sweden during the middle of the 1990s, arguing that
their municipalities had to carry a larger ‘burden of reception’ than they could manage,
and they thus urged for changes in the national dispersal and migration policies. The
response at the national level was dramatically different in Denmark than in Sweden,
however. This is today apparent not only in the sheer numbers of newcomers but also
in municipal introduction practices as well as in the institutional memories of municipal
officials.
Points for practitioners
The findings presented in this study point both to the possibility for municipalities to
have a direct impact on national policies, in this case mainly on refugee settlement
policies, but also to how policy decisions at one point in time shapes the political
opportunity structures at national as well as local levels at later points in time.
Keywords
Denmark, migration, multi-level government, refugees, regional and local governance,
Sweden
Corresponding author:
Gunnar Myrberg, Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Box 514, Uppsala 751 20,
Sweden.
Email: gunnar.myrberg@ibf.uu.se
Introduction
During the last decade and a half, Denmark and Sweden have become increasingly
dissimilar in terms of migration policy. While Sweden has remained relatively open
with regard to refugees and asylum seekers, Denmark has gradually closed its
borders to the extent that it has been questioned whether the country even lives
up to the minimum standards set by international conventions (Brochmann and
Hagelund, 2010; Mouritsen and Olsen, 2011; Sainsbury, 2012).
Sweden has a refugee dispersal policy which allows newly arrived refugees,
asylum seekers and their relatives to choose freely where in Sweden they want to
live, provided that they can find their own housing in that particular location. In
Denmark, on the other hand, refugees, asylum seekers and their relatives are dis-
persed as evenly as possible over the countries’ municipalities, and they have to stay
in the assigned municipality for a period of three years before they can move freely
within the country. It has thus been argued that in Denmark it is the state that
decides where newcomers are to reside, while in Sweden newcomers themselves
take that decision (Borevi and Bengtsson, 2014; Djuve and Kavli, 2007: 23; Piil
Damm, 2006; Wren, 2003).
This article seeks to examine the relationship between local challenges and
national concerns in the subfield of migration policy that specifically regards the
settlement and introduction of newcomers (Borkert and Caponio, 2010;
Christensen and Lægreid, 2008). As will be spelled out in the article, municipal
representatives raised their voices in both Denmark and Sweden during the middle
of the 1990s, arguing that their municipalities had to carry a larger ‘burden of
reception’ (Robinson et al., 2003) than they could manage, and they thus urged
for changes in the national dispersal and migration policies. However, the response
at the national level was dramatically different in Denmark than in Sweden, which,
in turn, has had a profound impact on the municipal level in the two countries.
More precisely, this article investigates how differences between Danish and
Swedish national policies vis-a
`-vis refugees and asylum seekers are perceived
among municipal officials in the cities of Malmo
¨(third largest city in Sweden)
and Aarhus (second largest city in Denmark). As will be shown, there is a wide-
spread feeling of crisis in the reception of refugees in Malmo
¨, while the view in
Aarhus is rather that things are under control, especially in comparison to how it
was before, during the 1990s, when the situation was more akin to Malmo
¨’s.
While this overall result may be less surprising, the extent and nature of the
differences between the reception processes of the two municipalities are highly
interesting from an immigration policy perspective: Generous migration policies
in combination with an explicit respect for the individual autonomy of newcomers
have, apparently, created a difficult situation in terms of housing and introduction
in Malmo
¨, which, in turn, probably affects the integration process of newcomers in
a negative way. On the other hand, restrictive migration policies in combination
with virtually no respect for the individual autonomy of newcomers have created a
much smoother process of housing and introduction in Aarhus, while the long-run
Myrberg 323
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