This paper sets out to provide an analysis of refugee integration policies in Sweden and Norway, by means of comparative analysis. There is a particular focus on the ideological foundations of the Swedish and Norwegian refugee integration policies, and the main programmes drawn on by the countries’ authorities in order to integrate refugees. Further, the focus is widened to identify and analyse the changes, disparities and ambiguities in the Swedish and Norwegian refugee integration policies. The paper also seeks to examine how their experience can help in understanding the limitations of extensive state assisted integration measures. It is maintained here that these Scandinavian countries have developed extensive state sponsored integration programmes of a magnitude which is unique in a European context and elsewhere, and that housing and employment assistance are the two major pillars in both Swedish and Norwegian refugee integration policies. The findings suggest that Sweden and Norway have undergone similar experiences in respect of the challenges and long term outcomes of refugee integration policy-making. Although based on the principle of a strong welfare state, which provides extensive resettlement and integration assistance to refugees, refugee integration policies in Sweden and Norway have not succeeded in equalizing the initial inequalities between refugees and the rest of the population.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants (including asylum seekers) in Stockholm between 2004 and 2006, additional interviews with police officers, deportation escorts and staff at Swedish detention centres and some fieldwork in Tehran in June 2005 and August 2007, this article examines the impact of Sweden’s more restrictive asylum policy since the beginning of the decade. From a condition of ‘deportability’ to incarceration in detention centres and then removal from Sweden, asylum seekers have been increasingly criminalised – their confinement and removal being seen as mechanisms for preserving national security. Focusing, in particular, on the techniques used by the detention apparatus to ‘humanise’ and ‘rationalise’ the confinement and expulsion of asylum seekers, it is argued that a discourse of ‘caring’ and ‘saving’ works, in effect, as a disciplinary mechanism that presents asylum seekers as responsible for their own detention and deportation.  

This article focuses on recent policy in relation to asylum which has created a new social category of asylum seeker, increasingly portrayed as ’undeserving’ in contrast to the ’deserving’ refugee. Asylum policy in Britain is preoccupied with control, with no national system for the settlement of refugees. The new social support system for asylum seekers, particularly the voucher system and compulsory dispersal, serve to isolate them from society and promote intense social exclusion. Policies to promote the social inclusion of recognized refugees are limited, uneven and dependent on voluntary initiative. They are also harmed by the punitive system of social support for asylum seekers. Acute recent labour shortages, which have forced employers to recruit overseas, have opened up the debate on immigration, and present the possibility of developing a more progressive agenda based on a commitment to human rights.

The purpose of this study was to map the different forms of Assisted Return that are in place in the EU Member States, thereby facilitating a comparative analysis and providing a basis to support any further policy development at national and EU level that might be undertaken. It does this by outlining inter alia the various approaches of Assisted Return programmes of the Member States in order to identify lessons learned, best practices and possible synergies to further develop and improve Assisted Return programmes in the EU.