Immigrants' Political Representation in Canada and Sweden: A Comparative Case Study

Sammanfattning: The increasing trends of immigration in the affluent North nation-states from the global South has led to the growing awareness of the problem of immigrants' political integration and their resulting participation in the existing political systems of this nation.The importance of this subject is underscored by the challenges posed to the established understanding of nation and citizenship, on the one hand, and the problems connected with the need to simultaneously ensure immigrants' rights and to spearhead their integration into liberal-democratic frameworks of political participation. Subsequently, this study aims to deal with the aforementioned problems and their related issues by focusing on the concept of political representation as a key determinant of the degree to which immigrants may achieve parity and solidarity with native-born citizens of their host nations. The attainment of this objective will be guaranteed by the implementation of a case study-based comparative research in which such nation-states as Canada and Sweden will be selected as key cases. By specifying respective independent and dependent variables of analysis, I focus on institutional and social capital/resources-related variables of immigrants' socio-political integration, so as to conclude that Canada's greater relative efficiency in the course of incorporating immigrants into the structures of political participation and representation may be attributed to the policies fostering the naturalization of immigrants with higher socio-economic status. Thus, paradoxically enough, whereas Canada's integration policies towards immigrants do not correlate with the higher voting activities and presence of immigrants in national representative bodies. At the same time, the study concludes with appropriate observations as to the importance of social class divisions within immigrant communities themselve, which can assumed to be exerting an impact upon the structures of socio-political incorporation of immigrants and their participation in their host nations' political life. In so doing, the development of more inclusive strategies of immigrants' socio-political incorporation could be seen as integrating the need for increasing immigrant communities' social capital and guaranteeing their members' equitable access to labor market and business activities. Altogether, this combination of factors may be assumed to have favorable impact upon the overall social integration of immigrant communities.