Back to the “origins”? A capability-based assessment of the most recent migration policies in Sweden

In this paper I use Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach as a framework to assess the impact of migration policies in a fashion that overcomes the limits of the approaches usually employed for this purpose. Indeed, despite being targeted to human beings all over the world, with a range of different characteristics, needs and capabilities, migration policies are usually evaluated from a ‘high-income-nation’ and capital centred perspective. The latter appraises the outcomes of people's international movement merely for the contribution it gives to the maintaining of “Northern growth and competitiveness”.

Resting upon a person-centred, capability-based explanatory and normative framework, which conceives migration as a fundamental human capability, I examine the impact on migrants’ multidimensional well-being of the most recent reforms implemented by Sweden in the fields of education for adults and labour market mobility.

My analysis shows that, in discontinuity with the tradition of highly inclusive migration policies Sweden has built since the 1970s, such reforms strongly contribute to de-construct migrants from third countries as denizens/potentially full citizens, bearers of rights and safeguards. In sharp contrast with the evaluation provided by the 2010 ‘Migrant Integration Policy Index’ (MIPEX) - a survey of the integration policies implemented by 31 Western Countries funded by the European Commission - I argue that these measures, e.g. employability-enhancing devices and ´circular migration’ schemes, tend to construct migrants as a cheap and ‘silent’ factor of production, conveniently exploitable within the second tier of an increasingly polarised labour market. In sum, these reforms, disenfranchising migrants of some fundamental capabilities, such as the capability for voice, autonomy and work and for affiliation/cultural freedom, risk bringing the country back to the epoch of guest-workers recruitment programmes.