Migration and integration
Skellefteå municipality’s Refugee reception centre receives newly arrived families, adults and unaccompanied children and helps them to integrate into Swedish society.
Refugee reception centre
The municipality's refugee reception centre receives families and individuals with residence permits who are assigned to the municipality. We can, for example, help them to find accommodation, pre-school, school and financial support, and provide information about how society works.
We also receive unaccompanied minors and young people who are assigned here immediately after arrival in Sweden. We are then responsible for accommodation and care both during the asylum process itself and during the residence permit period.
The refugee reception centre provides support and information during the initial period to make it easier to integrate into Swedish society. Together with other actors, we encourage integration-promoting activities and enable new arrivals to find employment and support themselves. We want new residents' skills, creativity and labour to be put to the best possible use.
The Public Employment Service's introduction programme
The Swedish Public Employment Service is responsible for coordinating the establishment of new arrivals in terms of work and education. The introduction programme (etableringsprogrammet) provides support through activities and training for some recently arrived immigrants. The goal is to be able to learn Swedish, find a job and financially support yourself as quickly as possible.
Skellefteå Municipality has an integration plan stating that the municipality shall:
- strive for cultural diversity by granting people equal rights and opportunities regardless of ethnic and cultural background;
- counter xenophobia, racism and discrimination;
- encourage active participation in clubs and associations and community life;
- make Skellefteå an attractive home municipality for refugees and migrants; and
- provide people from diverse cultures with the preconditions to support themselves and realise their life goals.
It is important to the future of Skellefteå that people foreign-born people choose to move to the municipality. It is also important that the municipality shoulders its responsibilities pursuant to international humanitarian law by offering a place to those in need. Skellefteå shall offer a secure place in which the individual has opportunities to participate and develop. When people succeed in establishing themselves here, our community develops through a growing population and labour market. This reinforces the local economy with new knowledge and international experience and relationships, as well as contributing to skills provision.
Why the focus on foreign-born?
The term foreign-born is used by Statistics Sweden when compiling statistics. When society is analysed based on the categories Swedish-born and foreign-born, it emerges that how easy it is for these groups to establish themselves differs and that society provides them with different conditions and, to a certian extent, different resources to succeed. That said, the term should be applied cautiously: it disguises differences between the people within the groups. There is also a risk that, being static, it will cement differences between people based on their origins, rather than giving due consideration to the fact that people and conditions change over time.
What does establishment mean?
In this context, establishment has three parts: to establish oneself in the community; to establish oneself on the labour market in accordance with one’s qualifications; and to establish oneself in a home of one’s own.
Skellefteå Municipality:
- acknowledges that all establishment is based on the individual’s circumstances and is facilitated by society’s interaction with the individual;
- supports people when they arrive as asylum seekers and continues to provide targeted initiatives to facilitate their establishment for the first three years after they are granted a residence permit;
- highlights the importance of upholding every individual’s democratic freedoms and rights according to Swedish law;
- develops collaborations with non-governmental organisations;
- develops collaborations with the private sector;
- develops collaborations with various stakeholders, other municipalities and government agencies;
- works interdepartmentally and is a distinct collaborator externally;
- develops the ability to capture the various competences that migrants bring with them;
- utilises its workplaces to create encounters that facilitate establishment;
- works to establish migrants on the labour market, with an emphasis on employability and entrepreneurship; and
- works to ensure a desegregated housing market.