More about the seminar 

Today both researchers and policy-makers agree that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. In this seminar, Peo Hansen shows that this consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox “sound finance” doctrine. By shifting perspective to examine migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, Hansen is able to demonstrate sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research. Most importantly, this undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing.

In addition to the EU perspective, Hansen also investigates the case of Sweden, the country that has received the most refugees in the EU in proportion to population. Hansen demonstrates how Sweden’s increased refugee spending in 2015–2017 proved to be fiscally risk-free and how the injection of funds to cash-strapped and depopulating municipalities, which received refugees, boosted economic growth and investment in welfare. Given that the Swedish approach to the 2015 refugee crisis has since been discarded, discredited and deemed fiscally unsustainable, Hansen’s aim is to reveal its real effects and its applicability as a model for the EU as a whole.

About Peo Hansen

Peo Hansen is Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University. He is the author of several books on European integration, including (with Stefan Jonsson, 2014) Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism and, most recently, A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (2021).

Discussants: Anna Lund, Ben Wilson

Open to the public, Zoom-link: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/68145499085