Analyzing migrant youth's patterns of social exclusion in Sweden: What role for ethnicization processes?

Starting from 1980s, the concept of social exclusion has become a buzz word in the discourse of international organizations and western-countries’ policymakers and has often been narrowed down to the relation between the individual and the labor market.

The case of Sweden effectively illustrates this trend. Traditionally regarded as a model of tolerant and egalitarian multicultural welfare society, Sweden has recently seen the introduction in its political debate of the term utanförskap (outsideness), which is mainly used to point out the lack of employment among people with foreign background.

This paper aims at illustrating and explaining in a more comprehensive way the features of young migrants’ “outsideness” in Sweden.

To this purpose, Amartya Sen’s conceptualization of social exclusion as capability deprivation proves to be particularly useful, since it enables to distinguish among different modalities and levels of exclusions, i.e. active/passive exclusion and social exclusion/unfavorable inclusion, and to conceptualize social exclusion as a multidimensional phenomenon.

I apply such capability-based conceptualization of social exclusion to interpret the output of an exploratory Latent Class Analysis which maps the population of young people currently living in Sweden. More specifically, I cluster the outcomes of young migrants’ trajectories of life in terms of different degrees and modalities of inclusion and distinguishing among the different life domains in which such inclusion/exclusion takes place (e.g. education, attachment to the labor market, housing). Exploring similarities and differences between the patterns observed among Swedish-born youngsters and those characterizing youth with migrant background, it clearly emerges that differences in youth’s human capital or in the one of their parents do not justify my findings.

Indeed, as confirmed by a critical exam of the policies of integration implemented by Sweden since the 1970s, the actual practices of inclusions adopted by this country have been characterized by significant processes of ethnicization.