Migrant Successfully Accessing Their Vocation in Sweden: The Significance Labour Market Initiatives to Facilitate the Integration of Migrants and Refugees

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter addresses how integration is conceptualised in Swedish refugee integration policy and how this conceptualisation shapes integration practices in Sweden. I look at the consequences of these practices for refugees who have successfully returned to the vocation acquired in their country of origin. To make sense of the measures, I use Foucault’s theory of governmentality. The chapter shows how the policy and practice of governmentality functions as a control mechanism to classify, categorise, and order immigrants’ knowledge and competence, but more importantly, to inculcate in immigrants that their existing knowledge and competence is irrelevant, or partly relevant, in relation to accessing their vocation in Sweden. I suggest that the success of these policy practices is contingent not on the measures per se, but rather on serendipity, which seems to be a red thread running through informants’ success stories.