Skills and Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children in Norway

Norway’s foreign-born population has tripled since 2000, and the share of migrants among the population has seen one of the largest increases across the OECD, mostly driven by labour migration from EU countries. Most migrants from non-EU countries, in contrast, are refugees and their family members. High qualification levels and labour market participation of the native-born raise the question of an adequate benchmark for integration outcomes, especially for the low-educated refugees and their families. Against this backdrop, Norway puts significant investment into integration, and a number of recent reforms have been aimed at strengthening the system. This review, the third in a series on the skills and labour market integration of immigrants and their children, provides an assessment of these reforms and the remaining challenges. It includes an overview of Norway’s integration services – and the many substantial changes in recent years – as well as challenges in access and uptake of integration offers, activation programmes and outcomes of native-born children of immigrants in Norway. Earlier reviews in this series looked at integration in Sweden (2016) and Finland (2018).