Influence and role of Sweden in EU immigration policy since 2000

This thesis aims to monitor the influence of Sweden on the process of making immigration policy after 2000. In the first chapter the thesis outlines the initial effort to harmonize EU immigration policy before 2000 in order to build on the description of the current situation. In the second chapter the thesis describes the development of Swedish policy towards immigrants from third countries and proves that an open attitude towards immigrants comes from the Swedish experience during the World War II. In the third chapter two levels of legislative processes of the EU are monitored. First, it is described how the rules for the adoption of legislation on immigration are generated and second the process of adopting particular legislative proposals is described. These three chapters make theoretical background for the analysis the role of Sweden in adopting both types of legislation since 2000. Based on the analysis the author concludes that the influence of each Member State in the EU legislative process is very complicated, if not impossible, to study, mainly because of the lack of transparency in the whole process. One of the biggest shortcomings the author considers is the fact that Member States do not public their positions on particular issue when negotiating legislative proposals in the working groups..