Anton Ahlén

Sverige har under det senaste decenniet infört skärpta villkor för olika typer av invandring. Bakom utvecklingen finns bland annat en föreställning om att en restriktiv migrationspolitik svarar mot väljarnas krav. En ny studie om anhöriginvandring ger anledning att ifrågasätta hur självklar den kopplingen är. Inför den nya mandatperioden bör partierna därför inte utgå från att väljarna automatiskt efterfrågar ytterligare villkor och begränsningar, skriver fem statsvetare.

European family migration policies increasingly impose economic, linguistic, and legal requirements on residents seeking reunification with family members abroad. Based on a conjoint experiment in three European Union member states, this article examines public attitudes towards this policy trend. Contrary to expectations, the respondents do not support conditioning reunification on residents’ status or attributes. Resident family members’ economic resources, work experience, language skills, and legal status exert minimal influence on respondents’ preferences for allowing family reunification. These findings indicate that, while conditionality is a central feature of contemporary migration policy, it does not reflect public sentiment regarding residents’ opportunity to reunite with family members living abroad. The study uncovers a new and significant opinion–policy gap, which has not been noted in migration studies so far.

Family migration constitutes by far the largest form of entry into countries with established democracies. Yet, it remains widely neglected in the literature on public attitudes. One of the key challenges in researching this topic is its inherent complexity. Family migration involves not only the claims of outsiders seeking entry, but also those of insiders wishing to reunite with family members. To address both dimensions simultaneously, we designed a conjoint survey experiment using an innovative dyadic approach. Respondents were presented with hypothetical cases of aspiring family migrants, alongside their respective family members already residing in the destination country. Key attributes, such as financial resources and types of family relationships, were randomized for each pair. We conducted the survey with 5,000 respondents across France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Our results suggest that respondents pay close attention to the characteristics of the incoming family migrant, such as language skills, while also being concerned with the economic resources of the family member already residing in the destination country. These findings indicate that research on public attitudes cannot treat family reunification as just one among many immigration motives. Study designs must also systematically account for the status of the family member already living in the destination country.

This article analyses the development of family-immigration admission policies in 4 Europe between 1990 and 2018. It assesses three expectations in previous research: policy 5 convergence, a 'race to the bottom', and a 'civic turn'. Drawing on the IMPIC dataset, the article 6 distinguishes between eligibility criteria, which define who may sponsor or enter as a family 7 member, and qualifying conditions, which impose additional economic or integration-related 8 requirements. The analysis combines policy-event counts, average restrictiveness, policy 9 dispersion and a configurational mapping of 20 European countries. The results show a clear 10 restrictive drift, driven primarily by qualifying conditions rather than a uniform narrowing of 11 eligibility. Crosscountry variation declined over the period as a whole, but convergence was 12 partial and uneven, and countries did not adopt a single policy model. The findings point less to a 13 straightforward race to the bottom or uniform civic turn than to a broader conditionality turn. 14 15

In Sweden, as elsewhere in the European Union (EU), irregular migrants are subject to contradictory policy frameworks shaped by the goal conflicts between Member State's interest in migration control and their responsibility to protect human rights. By EU comparison, Sweden provides irregular migrants with comparatively strong protection of labour and social rights. Despite this, substantial gaps remain both with regard to what rights are protected and the extent to which irregular migrants actually access the rights they have. In addition, there is ongoing reform work that places increasing emphasis on migration control and decreasing the emphasis on rights. This policy context also appears to have implications for how irregular migrants in practice access their labour and social rights. This policy brief highlights how we can find better approaches to balance migration control and rights protection in order to reduce vulnerabilities among irregular migrants without increasing irregularity.

The IMISEM dataset contains indicators that measure migration policies of polities from Europe, South East Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The IMISEM project adopts a comprehensive view of migration policy that includes both its emigrant/ emigration and immigrant/ immigration sides, bridging the two sides of migration policy. Thus, the dataset includes indicators that measure emigration policies (exit policies and control of outflows), immigration policies (entry policies and control of inflows), emigrant policies (rights granted, services offered and obligations imposed on non-resident citizens), immigrant policies (mainly, rights granted to non-citizen residents) and citizenship policies (mainly, access to naturalization for immigrants and retention of citizenship by emigrants). The main sources used to complete the IMISEM questionnaires are legal sources (i.e. laws, regulations). Legal sources are complemented with secondary sources (for instance, policy reports) and interviews with experts. The original IMISEM Dataset was one of the main outputs of the “The Every Immigrant is an Emigrant Project (IMISEM)” funded by the Leibniz Gemeinschaft and carried out at the GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies between 2017 and 2020. In 2026, the IMISEM was updated in collaboration with Uppsala University.

Frågan om vem som ska ha tillgång till välfärden är återkommande i migrationsdebatten – både i Sverige och internationellt. I många länder är detta en omstridd fråga, och systemen skiljer sig åt beroende på hur välfärdsstaten är utformad och hur mottagnings- och integrationssystemen för utrikes födda ser ut. I Sverige har frågan nyligen aktualiserats genom Tidöregeringens förslag om att införa kvalificeringskrav för vissa välfärdsförmåner.