Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how integration policies in Norway frame settled refugees and labor migrants as differing from each other with regards to integration challenges, capacities and needs. It explores the policies' underlying ideas and the lived consequences for immigrants in the two categories.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how integration policies in Norway frame settled refugees and EU labor migrants as different from each other with regards to integration challenges, integration capacities and integration needs, reflecting the voluntary-forced framework that typically informs migration management and policy. The aim of the paper is to examine the underlying ideas of these dual policies and to explore the lived consequences of them for immigrants in the two categories. A point of departure is the political understanding of employment as means to integration, which entails that labor migrants are expected to be ‘self-integrating’. In contrast, refugees are understood as ‘in need of integration’ and are thus obliged to attend an extensive two-year introduction program consisting of language training and work-life preparation, whereas similar training and interventions for labor immigrants are voluntary, minimal, and often payable. Labor migrants are sometimes referred to as ‘the invisible immigrants’, yet, studies have shown that they also experience marginalization, exclusion, and vulnerability in relation to work-life and everyday life in Norway. Drawing on in-depth interviews with labor migrants and settled refugees, the paper explores ways in which the groups are constructed differently with regards to ‘integration’, how this shape lived realities and experiences for individuals in the two categories of migrants, and how their experiences also intersect and overlap. We will use these empirical insights to engage critically with questions around the rationale and the consequences of the binary model of immigrant integration, as well as with migrant categorization more broadly.