スウェーデンへの移民と移民問題

Immigration and Issues of Immigrants in Sweden

Yamamoto Kenji

地誌研年報

Annual Report of Research Center for Regional Geography

This article deals with the history of immigration control of the Swedish government and issues of immigrants in this country in the last decades. Castles and Miller (1993, pp.196～198) classifies countries of immigration into three groups. The first group is classical countries of immigration such as the USA, Canada and Australia, the second is ex-colonial powers such as UK, France and the Netherlands, and the third is countries which adopted guest worker system. According to Castles and Miller (1993), Sweden is included into the first group, although the historical background is very different from the USA and the others. On the other hand, there are only a few articles on the immigrants in Sweden in the Japanese language such as Okazawa (1996) and Takezaki (1994; 1997). They refer only to the positive aspects of the situation of immigrants in Sweden, The author verifies the positive image on the immigration policy and the immigrants in this country on the basis of his own research activity in September 1998 as well as articles and statements of Swedish scholars and officials of the central and local governments. Immigration policy of the Swedish government is not so consistent as the classical countries of immigration and the degree of regulation is not so hard as countries of guest worker system. Nevertheless, the pattern of fluctuation of the number of immigrants resembles the one in a typical country of guest worker system. Many foreigners came to Sweden as temporal workers in the period between the last half of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s. Because of recession, immigration of temporal workers has not been allowed since 1972 with the exception of people from Nordic countries. The temporal workers rejoined their family members from their home countries, and more and more immigrants have become to consist of refugees and asylum seekers from the Third World. Many immigrants have settled down in Sweden regardless of the types of immigration: temporal workers, refugees and asylum seekers. The rati

General geography. Description and travel [ 290 ]

jpn

広島大学総合地誌研究資料センター

[ISSN] 0915-5449

[NCID] AN10199141