The Swedish immigration

Introduction:

Before becoming one of the most important lands of immigration in Europe Sweden was from 1865 to 1925 a land of emigration. It’s common to designate the years 1887-1888 as the peak years of emigration in Sweden. Actually, a crisis broke out in the agricultural sector in Sweden and that time, the economy in the USA was flourished. The immigration in the USA was linked by the possibility to reach a more profitable economic situation.

Around 1940s, many countries in Europe were torn by the Second World War. They lost their infrastructures and wholly or partly their means of production. Obviously, Sweden took benefit of that great need for imports. Actually, this has been synonymous of very positive repercussions on developments in its industry. Moreover, this conjunction led to that big employment expanded mainly in the industrial sector. However, rapidly the lack of labour was felt to be a problem and workers started to immigrate in Sweden to participate to the economic development of the Swedish industry. As for the immigration of Swedes in the USA, it seems that this had been influenced by economic factors. Since 1950s, immigration has played a major role in the economic development of Sweden. However, the link between economic development and immigration hasn’t been so obvious later on.

That is why this might be interesting to analyse how, in the next decades, the development of Swedish economy has influenced the different changes of pattern in immigration. In a first part, we will describe how the great period of growth that Sweden has known during the 1950s got an influence on the immigration. Then, we will see what economic turning point took place since the 1970s and how he has influenced the emergence of new pattern of immigrants.

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Since the post-war years, Sweden became a land of immigration. In this 1st part, we will describe the main pattern of immigrants present in