The Nordic countries are home to many people with roots from outside the Nordic region.
In Sweden, the proportion of people with a foreign background has increased significantly in recent decades. Here, up to 25 per cent of the population has an ethnic origin other than Swedish, while in Finland the proportion is just six per cent and in Denmark 15 per cent.
The figures include everyone who was born abroad or who has at least one parent who was born abroad.
How do people with a foreign background relate to each other? An interdisciplinary project is currently investigating this. The project is led by Carl Nordlund from Linköping University.
Using extensive register data from Finland, Sweden and Denmark, they have investigated how residents with foreign roots relate to each other both in the workplace and when it comes to settling and choosing a partner.
"Understanding inter-ethnic relations is important because it teaches us something about integration - not only in terms of how ethnic northerners interact with migrants and vice versa, but also how groups with different foreign backgrounds relate to each other. For example, how do Iraqis and Somalis, two prominent groups in Sweden, relate to each other?" Carl Nordlund asks.
We tend to think of immigrants as one homogenous, unified group, as opposed to ethnic Nordic citizens. Whether people are from Asia, Australia or a European country, the public discourse is that everyone belongs to the group of immigrants. But talking about them as one group is far too stereotypical, says Carl Nordlund.
Choice of partner
The first thing the research group has investigated is what influences immigrants' choice of partner and family formation.
"It's clear that most people choose a partner with the same national background as themselves. This applies to people with roots in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and also European and even Nordic countries. If a Norwegian growing up in Sweden happens to meet someone who also has Norwegian roots, the two are more likely to end up starting a family together than the Norwegian choosing a Swede, when controlling for relative group sizes" says Carl Nordlund.
The results of the research also seem to indicate that Finnish women and Turkish men in Sweden seem to get along well, but this is not the case for Finnish men and Turkish women.
"We see all these peculiar findings on a pairwise basis, which are just really interesting to look at individually because it's like they each have their own story to tell. So we can't generalise yet or compare between the Nordic countries," he says.
The researchers are also investigating how far people travel from their place of residence to find a partner.
"It seems that people with an Eastern European background in Sweden don't travel very far to meet their partners. They live quite close to each other before they get together. Whereas people with an Iranian background travel quite far to find a suitable partner in Sweden. The general trends we see are pretty much in line with the rise of online dating and how the social media Tinder came in and shortened the distance to the partner we choose," he says.
Read more about The Network Dynamics of Ethnic Integration.
The online newspaper Forskning.no has published an article about the project: Nå har Martine og Emil gjort akkurat det samme som mange andre innvandrere (In Norwegian).
