Labor migration and the moral sustainability of the Norwegian welfare state

Principal investigator Stein Kuhnle (Project Leader)
Description
The 2004 enlargement of the European Union, with the ensuing movements of Accession 8 migrants, has and will continue to have a profound impact on migration patterns in Norway. Both the demographic and geographic characteristics of immigrants are shifting , and much of the hostility directed towards the traditional "asylum seekers" now turns towards the new East European migrants. The aim of the research project Labour Migration and the Moral Sustainability of the Norwegian Welfare State is to examine cent ral aspects of this new immigration: 1) The first part of the project, Labour immigration and the welfare state, examines various aspects of the welfare state in light of the new immigration patterns in Norway. Firstly, we study the extent to which these new patterns threaten the continued support of the welfare state in general and Norwegian welfare state in particular, and how they affect and shape preferences on how to make moral trade-offs in the design of welfare polices. Secondly, we study the extent to which labor migration to Norway is labour induced by conducting a qualitative case study of how poles living as labor migrants in Norway make use of the welfare system. Thirdly, we study how the Norwegian and Polish press portray the migration from Poland to Norway, e.g. the extent to which it accurately reflects reality. 2) The second part of the project, Segregation, economic dependence, and gender equalization, examines the importance of social network denominators among the new labor migrants i n the value creating system in Norway. Furthermore, the project will calculate how much of the value creation in Norway that are reaped by foreign owners and employees in sectors and regions, as a proxy on how dependent value creation in Norway is on work force migration. Finally, the gender composition of the Norwegian and foreign work force will be compared to see how much, if at all, migration reverses the gender equalization of Norwegian industries.
Year 2013

Taxonomy Associations

Migration processes
Migration consequences (for migrants, sending and receiving countries)
Migration governance
Methods
Geographies
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