Föreställningsmässiga paradigmskiften -- att förklara förändringar i svensk migrationspolitik

Sammanfattning: This paper aims to explain how one can understand changes in Swedish migration policy over the last 50 years. The thesis is that changes in migration policy can be derived from changes in ideas of how the world is percepted. In the paper a neo-institutional theory of ideas is used to explain how changes in perception effects changes in public policy. The paper focuses partly on perceptions of what Sweden is, and partly on how Sweden is percived to be in relation to the rest of the world, from the point of view of the state. Twice during the last fifty years these perceptions has changed so much that it is justified to call it a paradigmatic shifts of perception. Once sometimes in or around the early sixties in connection with workforce immigration and once in the nineteis in connection with globalisation. And thus has Swedish migration policy changed. At the same time the fundamental ideology of the swedish state has remained the same. That is, an ideology mainly based on self interest and survival.