Local housing policy for immigrants – Liberal or restrictive policy stances among Swedish municipalities after the European migrant crisis

The dramatic event that the European migrant crisis entailed changed countries’ migration policies. Substantial amendments were hastily made to a policy field in which already tense state-local relations struggled to manage coordination, responsibilities and funding. Sweden, recognised as a final host countries of the massive flow of people fleeing their home countries, was no exception to this. For local governments in Sweden, autonomy became circumvented as immigrants since 2016 are dispersed to them through a specific distribution model and not any longer based on municipal ambitions. Municipalities’ remaining discretion is above all concentrated to one of the most crucial spheres of immigrant integration, that of the outline of local housing policies. While some municipalities grant received immigrants permanent housing contracts, a majority of municipalities do uphold a more restrictive policy through the usage of different forms of temporary solutions. In general, the latter alternative entails that immigrants assigned to these municipalities cannot be certain to have an accommodation in the municipality after their Swedish introduction program are completed. In this paper we, in addition to descriptive analyses of the distribution among Swedish municipalities according stances of local housing policy, conduct a theoretically grounded analysis. This analysis applies the dimension of either a liberal or a restrictive housing policy and relate it to theoretical notions of immigration policy as characterized by either a rights-based or a more restrictive approach, the latter emphasizing duties as a precondition for inclusion. We can thereby complement descriptions over Swedish municipalities’ liberal or restrictive housing policies for immigrants with a typology that distinguish between whether such policy stances are conditional on duties or characteristics among immigrants or without such requirements. Preliminary findings disclose that different motives are used among municipalities when housing policies are made conditional. The descriptive empirical examination can in conjunction with the theoretically performed analysis be valuable for future studies examining variation in local governments ambitions of immigrant integration.