Over the entire project, we have carried out a range of scientific activities that have developed new knowledge about the lives of refugees and their descendants. Our research has been facilitated by one of our most important achievements, which has been to establish—via collaboration with Swedish government agencies—the most comprehensive collection of longitudinal data on refugees and their descendants that exists for any refugee-receiving country in the world. Using these whole-population data, we have studied the inequalities that are experienced by children of refugees—both those born in Sweden and those born abroad—as compared with Swedish-born children of non-refugee immigrants and Swedish-born children of Swedish-born parents.
Our results show that inequalities are extremely heterogeneous, by age, sex, parental background, and domain of life. For example, children of refugees often experience inequalities during childhood in terms of their education, residential segregation, health and poverty, relative to Swedish-born children with Swedish-born parents. In mid-adulthood, they typically experience inequalities in earnings, unemployment and housing support, despite lower levels of childbearing. However, patterns of inequality vary considerably by parental country of birth. Contrary to theoretical expectations, we also show that those with two refugee parents are less likely to experience inequality as compared with those with one refugee parent and one Swedish-born parent, suggesting that a native-born parent is not necessarily protective against inequality.
We have also gone beyond the state-of-the-art by studying inequality for the grandchildren of refugees, with surprising findings. Not only do we reveal some signs of entrenched socioeconomic inequalities, but we also show that these inequalities are determined to a large extent by parental socioeconomic inequality. As such, it appears that the grandchildren of refugees have yet to achieve parity with descendants of the Swedish-born, at least for some groups in some domains of life.
Overall, we find clear evidence that adaptation is not a uniform process for the descendants of refugees, with some groups much more likely to experience disparities, and these disparities varying across the domains of health, socioeconomics, residential context, and family dynamics. At the same time, we show across a range of studies that the children of refugees often exhibit patterns of adaptation, and that these patterns are similar to children of non-refugee immigrants, for example with respect to childbearing and partnership behaviour. These studies include international collaborations that have helped us to establish that some of our findings appear to generalise to other contexts.
