Migration and integration

Skellefteå Municipality’s Refugee Reception Centre receives newly arrived refugees and helps them to integrate into Swedish society. For example, we help them to find accommodation, preschools, schools and to apply for financial support. We provide teaching in Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) and information on the workings of Swedish society.

The Refugee Reception Centre is responsible for the reception itself and for providing support and information during the early period and for stimulating the development of integration-promoting activities in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
The objective of the Refugee Reception Centre is to ensure that newly arrived refugees receive the most efficient and useful introduction possible to Skellefteå.

The municipality’s Refugee Reception Centre makes every effort to ensure that newly arrived refugees gain an understanding of and can participate in Swedish society. In collaboration with stakeholders, we work to make it possible for them to obtain employment and support themselves.

The Swedish Public Employment Service has coordinating responsibility for the establishment of newly arrived migrants in society. The Swedish Public Employment Service is responsible for preparing an establishment programme for all able-bodied people between the ages of 20 and 64. You are required to participate in the programme for 40 hours a week for 24 months. Those who participate in the programme are entitled to remuneration in the form of establishment benefit.

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.
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