Abstract
While family migration has often been categorized as “unwanted” or “suffered” immigration in the immigration literature and by policy makers, a closer examination of entry and integration rules for family migrations in Norway suggests that this is only partly true. While the admission of family members is rooted in human rights norms and, in particular, the right to protection of family life, the actual practices of family-based admissions cannot be understood without an analysis of the selectivity of family migration policies according to economic criteria, which reveals that some family migrants are in fact more wanted than others, and that the income requirement allows Norwegian policy makers to select and reject family migrants.
Introduction
Putting into words the objectives of many European policy makers, Nicolas Sarkozy announced in 2006 his desire to encourage “chosen” immigration while cutting immigration subie—or immigration that is “endured” due to international legal obligations; most important, through the family and asylum routes (see Raissiguier, 2010). This distinction echoes Joppke’s (1998) analyses of why liberal states accept “unwanted” immigration, pointing to a gap between policy objectives and outcomes. Family immigration—which has usually been placed in this category of being “unwanted” by the state—makes up a large proportion of permanent migration to Europe. Family admission rules have indeed recently been tightened in many European countries (e.g., Pascouau & Labayle, 2011) while these same countries have eased access for skilled workers (Menz & Caviedes, 2010). Taking the case of Norway, this article examines in more depth the status of family migrants as determined by entry and integration regulations. The main question that this article seeks to answer is how and why Norway determines who is eligible for family immigration. I argue that family migrants are not simply “endured,” but in fact also chosen—increasingly through economic criteria—and that some types of family migrants are perceived as more desirable than others. The broader aim of the article is to document an “economic drift” in Norwegian family immigration policies, in which family migrants are selected and rejected based on their spouses’ position in the labor market.
Literature Review
The existing literature on the Norwegian family immigration rules (Akkerman & Hagelund, 2007; Bredal, 2006, 2011; Eggebø, 2010, 2013; Myrdahl, 2010) is to some extent inscribed in a broader literature which has analyzed family immigration and associated policies through a cultural lens, sometimes referred to as “the politics of belonging” (see, e.g., Gedalof, 2007; Rytter, 2010; Schmidt, 2010). An important motif in this literature is the construction of the “migrant woman” either as a victim or as a carrier of “other” cultures (Gedalof, 2007). Myrdahl analyzed the family immigration provisions in the 2004 Immigration Act proposal (NOU 2004:20, 2004) as a “racial project,” but in doing so, she was examining the views of migration experts rather than the views of policy makers—and the focus on “legislating love” which she identified is arguably highly implicit (2010)—the word “love” occurs only once in the text. Bredal (2011) has examined efforts to prevent forced marriages, asking whether the means adopted take the force in forced marriages seriously or if they are “protecting the nation” rather than the young persons at risk. Others have examined how women’s rights have been politicized and used as markers to distinguish between “us” and “them” and as arguments for restricting immigration (Akkerman & Hagelund, 2007; Hagelund, 2008).
Identity and culture have been fruitful analytical perspectives through which we can understand certain aspects of family immigration policy, especially during the early 2000s and in the context of a questioning of multiculturalism across Europe. I would argue, however, that these analyses fail to capture the “economic drift” 1 in family immigration policies which is particularly evident in Norway since around 2008. While this economic focus was not evident in the 2004 Immigration Act proposal, it was developed subsequently in the policy process. Eggebø (2010), especially in her analysis of the “problem of dependency,” identifies the economic realities of the welfare state as a relevant context in which to analyze family immigration policy, as well as the shifting focus toward paid labor as a yardstick by which sponsors are measured. She perceptively identifies how the policies seek to ensure simultaneously independence of women and independence from the welfare state—two objectives which work at cross-purposes, as the effort to ensure that sponsors are self-sufficient indirectly places migrant spouses in a relationship of dependency to a breadwinner sponsor. However, she misses the importance of seeing (parts of) the family immigration rules in light of parallel changes to labor migration policies and integration policies. By analyzing this “economic drift” further, this article adds to the understanding of Norwegian family immigration policy.
The Case of Norway
As Norway is not a member of the European Union (EU) and hence not bound by the Family Reunification Directive, the Norwegian case is arguably “special” rather than representative of a broad European trend. It is, however, interesting to note that since the implementation of a high Norwegian income requirement an even stricter income rule has been put in place in the United Kingdom—another Western European country formally unaffected by European immigration policy harmonization and European Court of Justice rulings on the Directive’s income rules. 2 The Norwegian case is also interesting in that it represents a country that has received high immigration numbers in recent years both from the European Economic Area (EEA), 3 through the family stream, and through the non-EEA labor migration stream. 4
Material and Analytical Approach
Before proceeding, I will outline the corpus of texts analyzed in this article as well as the analytical concepts used to examine them. This article presents parts of the results of a broader project on Norwegian family immigration policies. The corpus of texts examined in that project goes back to the 1970s, but here I focus on the 2004 to 2009 period, and include the 2004 NOU/Expert proposal for a new Immigration Act (NOU 2004:20, 2004), the 2007 Immigration Bill, the 2008 White Paper on Labor immigration (Arbeids-og inkluderingsdepartementet, 2008) and the 2008 5 and 2009 6 consultations on the income requirement regulations and on labor immigration. Additionally, I examined the 2001 Integration Act proposal (NOU 2001:20, 2001) and subsequent policy documents. In a close reading of these texts, I have sought to identify policy objectives, logics and instruments, as well as assumptions about the economic and integration “potential” of the migrants and sponsors concerned—especially with regard to their likely labor market participation. The income requirement is specified in the immigration regulations, and it is therefore insufficient to look at primary legislation and legislative debates in order to adequately understand it.
I am approaching this article as a means to examine the creativity of policy makers with regard to selecting family migrants through increasingly sophisticated policies—a process which has, in the past couple of years, involved an increased reliance on economic criteria. I see policy makers as facing two constraints: a normative or moral constraint, as well as a legal constraint in the shape of European Convention on Human Rights–Article 8 on the right to family life. The moral constraint suggests that the state should allow “insiders” (defined as citizens and other persons with a reasonable permanence of residence) to reunite with their family members (see Carens, 2003). While the “insider” concept has been problematized, and scholars have suggested that it has been used by policy makers to argue for the deservingness of some categories of sponsors over others (often those of minority background; see, e.g., Block, 2012; Wray, 2011), the Norwegian legislative history (especially during the 1980s, but also more recently) suggested a more universal understanding including both citizens and others with a reasonable permanence of residence (i.e., most people with the major exception of seasonal workers). It is in this “Soysalian” sense that I use the term insider here (Soysal, 1994). This moral constraint is, however, quite weak and has not prevented policy makers from emphasizing other considerations such as the desire to implement strict immigration policies. The legal constraint is stricter, but at the same time much narrower in scope, only covering some migrant families. The right to family life is a conditional right, under which there is no unequivocal right to enter for family members. There is a notable exception, however, where the state has a narrower margin of maneuver—sometimes called the “elsewhere approach” based on the question “can family life be exercised elsewhere?” This is most notable in the case of refugees: as they cannot exercise family life where they were persecuted, they have a much stronger claim to family reunification in their host country (Anderfuhren-Wayne, 1996). While I acknowledge these constraints, I share Bonjour’s (2011) skepticism toward them. As she notes, “the tenacious tendency in the control gap debate to look for ‘constraints’ that might explain liberal immigration polices is based on the equally tenacious assumption that what ‘the state’ really wants is to restrict immigration” (p. 116). As I seek to demonstrate here, state interests and categorizations of “wanted” or “unwanted” migrants are not so clear-cut, and constraints in themselves cannot explain policy outcomes.
Rather, I argue that states operate according to an economic logic of selection and rejection. For those whose family members are admitted indirectly as a result from the above constraints (primarily family members of refugees and some citizens), we may most accurately speak of immigration subie—the state’s own interests do not direct its action. The concerns policy makers pursue relate to “independence” and self-sufficiency (see Eggebø, 2010) and involve rejection of those who do not fulfill economic expectations and may be reliant on the state. The state (or parts of it) may, however, have an interest in going beyond what is required under these constraints in other cases, in which family immigration becomes chosen, based again on economic criteria. This is the case when family reunification is facilitated to attract workers. These logics and the assumptions underlying them can be easier discerned if we examine entry rules and integration rules in conjunction.
Regulating Family Immigration
Family Migration to Norway
Family migrants made up 40% of immigration from outside the Nordic countries between 1990 and 2008 (Henriksen, 2010) and is thus the single most important category of immigrants. Of these, 60% came for family reunification and 40% through family formation; 7 two thirds were women; and the largest group were Poles, followed by Thais, Iraqis, Somalis, and Pakistanis. 8 Reunifications increased relative to formations following increased labor migration from eastern Europe after the 2004 EU accession round. In 2012, more than 12,000 family migrants arrived from outside the EEA (Utlendingsdirektoratet, 2013). The top five countries of origin were Thailand, Somalia, the Philippines, Eritrea, and India. The growing numbers of Indian family migrants follow increased arrivals of skilled Indian workers (mainly engineers) coming to Norway. Additionally, 12,000 family migrants came under EEA rules during 2012, of whom 4,500 were Poles 9 (Utlendingsdirektoratet, 2013). While 42% of accepted non-EEA family migrants joined Norwegian or Nordic citizen sponsors, 14% joined persons with international protection status, 20% joined persons with a skilled work permit, 10 and 11% joined residents (Utlendingsdirektoratet, 2013). 11
Reforming Family Immigration Regulations in the 21st Century
During 2004 to 2010, there was a drawn-out process to reform Norwegian immigration legislation for the 21st century. Much of the legislation was based on a 2004 expert proposal from the Immigration Act Commission (NOU 2004:20, 2004), but there were changes and additions along the way. The Commission was central in discussing and defining the limits of Norway’s international legal obligations with regard to family immigration, emphasizing the conditional nature of the right to family life and the margin of maneuver of the state. They also argued that new relationships (family formation) were entitled to less protection than existing family relationships (family reunification), leading to the formal distinction of the two categories in Norwegian legislation. Two themes stand out in the report, signaling a particular understanding of the “problems” of family immigration. First, liberal family immigration rules were seen as a possible pull factor for asylum seekers, as Norway had experienced a drop in asylum applications from Northern Iraq after the introduction of a temporary permit without access to family reunification for asylum seekers from this area in 2000. The Commission concluded, however, that the family rules should not be used to deter asylum seekers (in particular, as these cases could engage the “elsewhere approach,” see above). The linkage between family migration rules and asylum flows reappeared in the government’s 2008 “13 points” to reduce asylum flows, as a rationale for the law’s “four-year rule” (Lunde-Danbolt, 2010), which specified that persons who came through the asylum stream would have to work or study for 4 years to be able to sponsor new family members in case of family formation. Second, the report focused on forced marriage prevention through the immigration rules (for a critical reading, see Myrdahl, 2010). In this context, the commission proposed an age limit for spousal sponsorship, relying on a maturity logic whereby a higher age would make the individual better equipped to resist familial pressure. The targets of family immigration regulation were thus mainly identified as the family members of refugees and persons with humanitarian status, and young persons of minority background who could be at risk of forced marriage.
These two target groups remained central in the preparatory works with parts of the expert report repeated verbatim in the Immigration Bill (Arbeids-og inkluderingsdepartementet, 2008). Other things had changed. As the possible age limit to prevent forced marriages was scrapped after a controversial consultation in 2007, a heightened income requirement became the central means of prevention. A strict income rule would require sponsors to be financially independent with a stable income over time, which, it was thought, would give young persons the independence to resist pressure from their parents. The requirement of income over time would demonstrate independence both from parents and from the welfare state, showing that sponsors were good working citizens (see Eggebø, 2010). The Expert Committee had expressly warned against the use of an income requirement to prevent forced marriages, as they were concerned it could lead young people to drop out of higher education (NOU 2004:20, 2004).
While the “main rule” of an income requirement was implemented as part of the Immigration Act passed in the spring of 2008, 12 the specifics of the rule were subsequently laid out in secondary legislation. A consultation was held on the income requirement in the fall of 2008—but relatively few organizations responded to it (13, half of which were public bodies, and thus less than a quarter of the turn-out for the 2006 round). In the consultation, the income requirement emerged as an all-purpose tool of family immigration regulation, ascribed the following wide-ranging policy objectives: (a) “increasing the likelihood that the requirements give a real assurance that persons given residence permits will have sufficient means of support,” (b) “making sure conditions are favorable for integration,” (c) “preventing forced marriages,” and (d) “confronting the issue of higher asylum inflows” (Arbeidsdepartementet, 2008). This abundance of policy objectives showcases the flexibility of the income requirement as a tool of family immigration regulation.
In an unremarked-on sentence, the ministry noted that “in accordance with more detailed guidelines from the Directorate of Immigration, exemptions may be made from the requirement of past income for labor migrants” (Arbeidsdepartementet, 2008). The following year, these potential exemptions were developed further in a separate consultation on labor migration policy (Arbeidsdepartementet, 2009). Labor migration had been liberalized in Norway since around 2000, in part driven by a growing demand for engineers and other experts in Norway’s important oil and gas sector. There has been much focus on facilitating access for these sorely needed workers—which, in turn, has included focus on their family members. The 2008 White Paper on Labor Migration stated that “it is important to arrange it so that highly skilled workers and specialists can have their family come to Norway as soon as possible [emphasis added] after the issuance of their permit” (Arbeids-og inkluderingsdepartementet, 2008).
The Ministry of Research and Education argued in its response to the labor migration consultation for a completely separate family immigration policy for the highly skilled. It wanted the rules to be made so that “one differentiates family reunification on general grounds and family reunification in relation to labor immigration.” As they argued,
in an arena where the battle over bright minds is great, most will not let themselves be recruited to work in a country which requires that their family stays in the home country for a long time awaiting the processing of an application for a residence permit.
As this shows, different ministries may indeed have different interests in immigration regulation (see also Bonjour, 2011). As these rules were elaborated separately from the income rules themselves, the differences in treatment passed under the radar.
Reform Outcomes
The outcomes of the reform processes were the following income rules: Sponsors must currently document an income equivalent to 246,136 NOK (approximately €29,500, level adjusted annually) in the year of application. Most must also show an equivalent income in the preceding year (past income requirement)—but crucially, skilled workers were exempted from this rule. Furthermore, sponsors must document suitable housing and that they have not received social assistance in the past 12 months. The income rules do not apply for reunification with children younger than 15 years. Refugees (but not those with humanitarian permits), who apply for reunification (not family formation), are exempted from the income requirement during their first year in Norway, to ensure family unity.
As past income must be documented through the preceding year’s tax return, the documentary requirements may add significantly to the time before those sponsors who are bound by it qualify. According to the then head of the Family Migration Department in the Directorate of Immigration, failure to comply with it is the single most important reason for rejected applications (Sæther, 2012). Applications for family reunification with skilled worker sponsors are processed “within eight to nine weeks,” compared with up to 7 months for other family migrants. 13
By 2010, when the new income rules were implemented, something odd had happened. The least onerous requirements for family immigration, it turned out, were those for skilled workers. At the opposite end, having to comply with the full set of restrictions, were citizens, permanent residents, and those with permits on humanitarian grounds. During 2011 to 2012, the income rules came under criticism in the media as (White) Norwegian women in particular were denied reunification on income grounds, for instance after having been stay-at-home moms abroad and subsequently taking up work in Norway (Hellstrøm, 2011). The director of the Directorate of Immigration—unusually for a bureaucrat who has shied away from being too “opinionated”—publicly announced that the effect of the rules had turned out to be different from what parliament had intended and recommended changes (Børresen, 2012). The minister responded that “unanticipated consequences” of the income requirement, especially along gender lines, would be further investigated (Faremo, 2012). Some exceptions from the past income requirement were introduced in July 2012 (Justis-og beredskapsdepartementet, 2012), which mainly made it simpler for Norwegian citizens who had worked abroad with lower salaries to return home with family members by adding new exemptions to the past income requirement. Further changes were considered in late 2012, but were postponed. The Equality Ombud responded to the consultation that the proposed raising of the income requirement for family formation could exacerbate the already gender discriminatory impact of the rules. No one pointed out that the dreaded past income requirement did not apply at all to skilled workers, and any repeal for other groups was off the table.
Separate from these policy developments are EU free movement rules. Norway, while not a member of the EU, has implemented the Citizens’ Directive (2004/38/EC) and is part of the single market through the EEA Agreement. Under the free movement rules, EU citizens who move to Norway have secure rights to family reunification and are not bound by any form of income requirement. As access to family reunification for persons exercising their free movement rights has been liberalized in parallel to the development of stricter national-level rules (for some groups), deepening “reverse discrimination” 14 has been documented between persons exercising free movement and other groups (Staver, 2013; Walter, 2008).
Inventing and Reforming Integration Policy
It is interesting to see the family immigration rules in light of integration provisions developed during the same decade. As many European countries, Norway began to consider integration legislation in the second half of the 1990s. While the perceived challenges of immigration in the 1960s and 1970s had mainly related to housing shortages, focus had turned to labor market participation in the 1980s. The unemployment rate of immigrants was progressively worsening compared with the native population, especially affecting those from Africa and Asia (Brochmann & Hagelund, 2010). The question of how an egalitarian and universal Scandinavian welfare state could incorporate an increasingly diverse population, especially if parts of this population would have lower labor market participation, became ever more pressing. Integration policy, then, was from the start focused on the question of work.
As with the Immigration Act, integration legislation was initially proposed by an expert commission in 2001. The Introduction Act Commission considered asylum seekers and their family members the appropriate targets of integration policy. This was partly due to the concerns of the time—prior to the 2004 EU enlargement and in the early days of the heightened problematization of transnational arranged marriages. They explicitly ruled out labor migrants from integration measures. As this group must be working to qualify for residence in Norway, “they have already from the beginning reached one of the central goals of the law, that is integration into the labor market” (NOU 2001:20, 2001, p. 73). Their family members were not considered at all. EEA citizens were brushed off in a sentence as an “unnatural target group for introduction support” (ibid), and must also work as a condition of their stay. Family migrants joining citizens were excluded on the grounds that they were a group with large internal variation (NOU 2001:20, 2001, p. 74). Such internal variation was not expected among asylum seekers and their family members, however, who were characterized thusly: “most newly arrived immigrants in our target group will lack the basic prerequisites for participating in society” (NOU 2001:20, 2001, p. 76).
Subsequently, policy makers added other target groups to integration measures. In particular, concerns were also raised in Parliament about female family migrants, as “experience shows that some women with immigrant background are prevented from learning Norwegian or do not want to learn Norwegian because their network at any rate is not made up of ethnic Norwegians” (Kommunal-og Regionaldepartementet, 2002, pp. 47-48). Some (female) marriage migrants, implicitly those joining second-generation Pakistani Norwegians, were sometimes seen as needing guidance to integrate and in order to find work. This mirrors concerns over minority women evident in debates over immigration rules. Likely as a response to the increased focus on this group of family migrants, Norwegian and social orientation classes for family migrants joining citizens and residents were introduced in a 2003 amendment.
There was some back and forth about whether EEA citizens and labor migrants should be targets of integration policy. The original public consultation document had proposed that tuition for EEA citizens and labor migrants be a right, but not a duty (Kommunal-og Regionaldepartementet, 2003, p. 30). Later, the ministry reasoned that the government has no particular responsibilities toward labor migrants, and that as salaried employees they should be able to pay for their own and their family members’ classes, in the same way that they were expected to be financially self-sufficient (Kommunal-og Regionaldepartementet, 2003, p. 32). At the same time, EEA citizens were completely removed from the proposed law, as any duty to learn Norwegian could be construed as an obstacle to free movement (Kommunal-og Regionaldepartementet, 2003).
A tiered system was put in place whereby refugees, persons with humanitarian status, and their family members must participate in a 2-year full-time introduction program composed of language classes and vocational training, while the family members of citizens must take a certain number of Norwegian language classes within their first 3 years in Norway before they qualify for permanent residence. The number of hours required was raised from 250 to 500 in 2012. Labor migrants and their family members must take 250 hours of Norwegian as well in order to qualify for permanent residence—but their required hours were not raised so as not to burden them unduly.
Discussion
“To Be a Wage-Earner Is to Be Integrated”: Immigration, Integration, and Work
In light of concerns over the integration of family migrants, several countries (most notably the Netherlands) have imposed integration-related requirements such as preentry language tests for family immigration (Bonjour, 2010; Goodman, 2011). This blurring of integration and admissions policies suggests that the two should be seen as a whole, in what Brochmann and Hagelund (2010) call a country’s “migration regime” (pp. 32-33). Examining the two together yields interesting insights. The Norwegian rules for family immigration are already stratified (Kraler & Bonizzoni, 2010) with differential access for EU migrants, skilled labor migrants, citizens, refugees, and persons with humanitarian status—a fact which becomes particularly obvious when we look at the income requirement. These differences in many ways map onto the stratifications I have noted in integration legislation. In integration legislation, we see different expectations about different groups of migrants’ likelihood and possibility to have an attachment to the labor market. Those groups that are expected to have a lesser attachment to the labor market are often those that face more strenuous economic requirements for family reunification—for instance, persons with humanitarian status have specifically been singled out with the income requirement to encourage labor market participation since 2003 (see Bratsberg & Raaum, 2010), but since 2010, even citizens must demonstrate that they are working (mainly to show independence, to prevent forced marriages). Labor migrants are expected to move straight into the labor market, and face less comprehensive integration requirements as well as fewer income requirements for family reunification. When looking at integration and immigration rules together, we see that those groups that are expected to integrate easily into work also face less strenuous income requirements for family reunification.
As Engebrigtsen (2007) has argued, “the so-called ‘arbeidslinja’ or ‘work-line’ [the idea that work and economic activity should be the norm], is central to the ideology of ‘politics of integration’ in Norway; to be a wage-earner is to be integrated” (p. 734). She describes Norwegian integration policy as an “elaborate and compulsory system of resocialisation that prepares migrants for the Norwegian labour market and society” (Engebrigtsen, 2007, p. 733). It is arguably a sign of the deviance of refugees and their family members that they must prepare for 2 years to be ready for the labor market. As Olwig (2010) has argued,
the [Scandinavian Introductory Programs’] strong focus on local socio-cultural skills that must be mastered before it is possible to manage in society has had the unfortunate consequence that they have tended to treat newcomers in terms of what they are lacking, rather than what they can offer to the receiving society. (p. 186)
The labor market is invariably perceived as the central site of integration, with work also being integration’s end goal. Labor migrants, whether they are from within the EEA or outside, seem to come “preintegrated.”
Selecting Immigration Subie
A central argument of this article is that family migration is not simply immigration subie which the state “endures” without being able to do anything about it. In spite of the constraints facing the state—in the shape of a moral obligation and expectation that family reunification should be allowed, and European Convention on Human Rights–Article 8 on the right to family life—the state has quite a bit of leeway with regard to family migrant selection. Other authors have argued that much of this selection has operated according to cultural criteria. This is, of course, often the case—for instance, family rules are usually written to conform to the Western notion of the nuclear family. I have, however, wished to emphasize economic criteria which have become increasingly important in recent years. It is interesting in this context to note that the single largest group among the “most wanted” family members, that is, those of skilled migrants, are from India, while one of the least desired groups, that is, parties to transnational arranged marriages of minority young persons, are often also from the Indian subcontinent (generally Pakistan)—complicating the well-known narratives of “race” or “ethnicity” which sees the family immigration rules as a tool for separating “us” and “them” (see, e.g., Schmidt, 2010).
I asked at the beginning of this article how and why family migrants are selected through family immigration policy. The income requirement—present in Norwegian legislation since the 1970s but dramatically changed in 2010—has emerged in Norway as a highly versatile tool for family immigration regulation and is in many ways the answer to the first part of the question. As I showed, this simple rule is ascribed at least four different policy objectives: preventing forced marriages, ensuring the self-sufficiency of sponsors, improving immigrant integration and reducing asylum inflows (through the signal effect of strict immigration policy). It is difficult to ascertain exactly which of these rank highest, and indeed different objectives can be emphasized in different contexts.
The fact that the income rule is specified in secondary legislation rather than in the Immigration Act gives it additional flexibility. While changes to the rules generally require public consultation, they are not debated in parliament. Through the relatively discreet process of writing secondary legislation it has been possible to exempt skilled worker sponsors with little public notice. This has had significant effects on migration outcomes: looking at acceptance rates by the status of the sponsor for the year 2012, skilled migrants towered above other groups, as they were granted family reunification 99% of the time. In comparison, acceptance rates for citizens, residents, and refugees were 68%, and 42% for persons with humanitarian permits (Utlendingsdirektoratet, 2013). As noted, failure to comply with the income requirement is the most common reason for failed applications.
Why has Norway pursued this selective family immigration policy? It appears from the evidence presented here that economic considerations have played an important role in family immigration policies—and that family immigration policy is not immune to the selective logic of “migration management” (Geiger & Pécoud, 2010). Arguably, the family members of skilled workers are admitted for instrumental reasons, as it is expected that the “brightest minds” would only choose to work in Norway under sufficiently attractive conditions. If they expected difficulty bringing their family members, they might instead choose to work somewhere else—and Norway has seen an important demand for skilled workers such as engineers, in particular in the oil and gas sector. Here, then, more liberal family rules are used to attract one group of migrants. At the same time, a high income requirement is expected to deter another group of migrants, that is, asylum seekers. Norway wishes to signal that its family rules are strict, so that asylum seekers may opt for another European country. As we know, asylum migration is much more controversial, and my examination of the process of integration policy development shows that there has been a pervasive understanding in Norwegian integration policy making that asylum seekers and refugees are generally ill-equipped to participate in the Norwegian labor market. The income requirement allows for these objectives to be pursued simultaneously. The paradox here is that the state—which, most would agree, allows family immigration fundamentally because of moral and legal constraints—may in fact provide family reunification under more favorable conditions when these constraints are not its primary motive for action, such as when family migration is used as a “carrot” to attract workers from abroad.
Conclusion
The existing literature on family immigration has not taken into account the relationship between family immigration policy and labor immigration policy to a sufficient extent. As I have argued in this article, the Norwegian family immigration rules do not simply reflect a “racial project” or a desire to separate “us” and “them,”—they work to actively select migrants on economic grounds. The mechanism through which family migrants are selected is the versatile tool of the income requirement, which indirectly selects family migrants based on the sponsor’s position in the labor market. This has particularly interesting consequences when looking at skilled labor migrants. Through (the spouse’s) work, it seems that class—as evidenced by one’s position at the “top end” of the labor market in sectors such as engineering—“trumps” race or ethnicity. The ethnicity of labor migrants is simply not a relevant concern. One might speculate that, whereas family migrants who enter in the context of highly skilled work are assumed to be more culturally similar, those who enter in the context of traditional arranged marriages are not—even when they come from the same part of the world—as the skilled migrants must necessarily have completed higher education. The extent to which the rules facilitate the immigration of family members of skilled migrants and limit the immigration of other family members (including those of citizens and long-term residents) is most obvious when we compare the almost universal acceptance rate for labor migrant sponsors (99%) to other groups (two thirds or fewer accepted). What we see, then, is that “insiders” (citizens and long-term residents) must prove themselves to be good workers to qualify for reunification, whereas labor migrants are assumed to be so from the start. These numbers also suggest that the income requirement is an effective tool for family immigration regulation, which policy makers can discreetly fine-tune to suit their needs, and select migrants that were otherwise thought of as beyond their powers of control.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article has benefited greatly from comments received at the 2012 IMISCOE workshop on family immigration and integration, the 2013 Metropolis Conference Workshop on Family Immigration Policies, Jan-Paul Brekke, the editors of this issue, and from the anonymous reviewer.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.