Anne Balke Staver visits UiO to present the research project “Regulating migration and membership through monetary requirements (REMIMO)” which explores how time and money affect immigration and integration in Norway.
Money increasingly matters in immigration, and can determine whether you can enter a country, bring in your spouse, stay there over time, and have access to citizenship. This is the case not only for labor migrants, but also for family migrants and refugees.
In addition to having one of Europe's highest income requirements for family reunification, Norway introduced an income requirement for permanent residence in 2017.
While there is a broad academic literature on different requirements that seek to incentivize immigrant integration, such as language and citizenship tests, we know much less about such economic requirements - including whether they work as incentives for the transition to the labor market. REMIMO addresses this knowledge gap on immigration and integration regulation.
Monetary restrictions are interesting policy instruments because they avoid obvious differential treatment according to protected categories such as gender and ethnicity, and yet they may have differential effects precisely along those lines.
The use of income requirements as a policy tool therefore highlights a possible tension between the incentivizing effect of the requirement, and equal treatment as a normative ideal - especially relevant in the Nordic universalistic welfare state.
Anne Balke Staver is Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR) at OsloMet.
This event is hosted by the Research Group on Migration Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. The event is in English and will be moderated by Professor and Chair of the Research Group, Maja Janmyr. Lunch and coffee will be served.