Does ‘Swedish For Immigrants’ (SFI) matter? A longitudinal assessment of the impact of SFI on migrants’ position in the Swedish labour market.

Young adults with a migrant background living in Sweden are particularly exposed to the risk of social exclusion, which results in their overrepresentation among the unemployed and low-income workers. A basic requirement to strengthen their employability is the command of the Swedish language. Swedish governments have acknowledged the fundamental role of this skill for a long time, by incorporating Swedish For Immigrants (SFI) in the system of public education. However, no formal assessment of the impact of SFI on its participants’ integration in the labour market has been conducted so far. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating whether SFI functions as a protection against the risk of unemployment or confinement to marginal jobs. Our longitudinal analysis shows clearly that going through SFI has a positive effect both on immigrants’ chance of finding a job and of reaching a certain minimum income. Moreover, SFIs’ effects are very stable, since they remain substantially unchanged, irrespective of the other covariates and controls we added progressively in our Cox regression models. This indicates that, for young unemployed or low-income earners with a migrant background, higher education is less important than skills in the Swedish language for improving their situation in the Swedish labour market.