Combatting long-term unemployment among immigrants beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

This report documents and compares how immigrants have been affected by long-term unemployment, and investigates which policies and initiatives policymakers at national, regional, and local levels of governance implemented to support them.

Concretely, this report aims to answer the following research questions:

• Have immigrants in the Nordic countries been more likely to face long-term unemployment during the pandemic than their native-born peers? How has the number of long-term unemployed immigrants developed during the pandemic,
and is it an ongoing challenge?

• Which national-level institutions and actors have been involved in supporting long-term unemployed immigrants and´which policies and measures have been used?

• Which initiatives have been implemented at regional and local levels in the Nordic countries to help long-term unemployed immigrants in finding new employment? What can we learn from these initiatives?

The report finds that across all Nordic countries, immigrants were more likely to face long-term unemployment during the pandemic than their native-born peers, making this a key integration challenge across the Nordic Region. Nonetheless, the Nordic countries differ in how acute the challenge of long-term unemployment among immigrants was during the early phases of the pandemic, and how rapidly the situation improved afterwards.

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