In 2008, Sweden's nonsocialist government introduced legislation altering long-standing restrictions on labor migration, introducing a more liberal and employer-led approach that expanded the opportunities for foreign workers to enter Sweden. Gregg Bucken-Knapp's Defending the Swedish Model carefully examines the politics of these shifts, advancing a clear and original argument about the determinants of political preferences over migration policy. In contrast to work focusing on radical right parties' support for restrictive immigration policies, Bucken-Knapp details the more restrictive stance taken by the Social Democrats (SAP) and the trade union confederation, LO, providing an important contribution to both the literature on migration and that on the dilemmas of the European Left in the twenty-first century.

Bucken-Knapp argues that the preferences of labor and social democratic parties are not constant across contexts. Instead, to understand the position that the SAP and LO took, we need to look at how specific migration proposals interacted with Sweden's highly coordinated labor market and extensive welfare state. He argues that both the SAP's and LO's core preference was, and is, to preserve the Swedish state's commitment to full employment and universal social policy. Both groups saw the liberalization of migration proposed by the Swedish Right as threatening a loss of control over the Swedish labor market. Both worried that allowing employers to determine the flow of labor migration threatened to reduce the power of unions and the long-standing emphasis on active labor market policy for the unemployed. Moreover, both saw an influx of immigrants as potentially putting new demands on the welfare state. Since restricting benefits for migrants would contradict the Swedish emphasis on universalism, the author argues that the SAP and LO saw entry restrictions as crucial.

Bucken-Knapp works through the nuances of this position, drawing on published reports, parliamentary debates, and media sources to carefully detail the debate over migration between 2002 and 2008. He begins by briefly reviewing the SAP's and LO's long-standing support of an active labor market policy as an alternative to labor migration. While initially open to some labor migration in the 1950s, he argues, from the 1960s onward both actors moved to support the activation of women and other domestic workers to fill labor shortages, as well as toward greater local, and union, control of migration through the Swedish Labor Market Board (AMS).

In 2002, the Swedish employers' federation (SN), in conjunction with the Liberal Party, reinvigorated the question of reforming labor migration. Both called for a more liberal employer-centered approach, gaining support from the nonsocialist parties and the Green Party (one of the SAP's allies). Both the LO and the SAP rejected these liberal entry policies—in particular, employer gatekeeping over entry—yet did support some measures to integrate foreign workers into the labor market and provide social benefits for migrants. Bucken-Knapp argues that neither the SAP nor LO were opposed to migration per se, but they opposed moves reducing their control over it and substituting migration for active labor market measures. The conflict over migration was, in his words “a battle of incentive compatibility” with the existing Swedish model.

Bucken-Knapp further examines the political debate over transitional arrangements for migrants from new European Union member states. Here, the SAP and LO took different stances, with the LO opposing transitional limits on migration from new EU states while the SAP supported them. The author argues that these differences arose from a different interpretation of common goals: The SAP was worried that new labor migration might swamp the Swedish welfare state, while the LO saw transitional arrangements as weak, and pushed for broader guarantees on labor market conditions.

This book makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of migration policy, Swedish politics, and social democracy more generally. First, Bucken-Knapp thoroughly conceptualizes the dependent variable—outlining six dimensions of conflict over labor migration: who is gatekeeper for migrant entry, what criteria the gatekeepers use, the location and conditions attached to migrant job searches, the possibility to upgrade work permits into longer-term residency permits, and access to benefits. In so doing, he shows that the conflict over migration is a conflict over the details of who controls migration, offering a rich picture of the politics of migration.

Second, Bucken-Knapp carefully traces the preferences of a key tranche of the labor movement. Despite its small size, Sweden has long been a theoretically important case for scholars of social democracy. In showing how the institutions built by the Swedish Left shape the way it responds to new migration pressures, he offers an insightful picture of the dilemmas that immigration creates for the Left in developed welfare states. The book shows that an ideological commitment to the Swedish model explains the restrictive, yet complex, stance of the SAP and LO.

In order to fully develop this point, however, there are several areas, both empirically and theoretically, where Bucken-Knapp could have augmented the argument. First, the book could provide more background on the politics of migration in Sweden. Although the author hints at the interdependence of questions of labor migration with the incorporation of existing asylum seekers and other migrants, his book does not venture far beyond questions of labor migration. This focus leaves questions as to how, or whether, the relatively large increase in nonlabor migration from the 1970s affected debates over labor migration, and what role race, nativism, and specific occupational dynamics played in this story. Given the recent (albeit still limited) success of anti-immigrant political movements in Sweden, more explicit discussion of the SAP's and LO's stance toward asylum policy and other forms of migration would have provided a clearer picture of the politics of migration and how it has developed over time.

A second area for development lies in the discussion of the specific strategic contexts facing the SAP and LO. In discussing the SAP, Bucken-Knapp largely sidelines the dynamics of electoral politics. His claim, though not stated in precisely these terms, is that elite preferences over migration within the SAP are largely ideological—not derived from electoral competition. While he occasionally points to polling on migration issues, he does not really examine the electoral dimension. Yet throughout the time period under investigation, the SAP was undergoing a longer-term process of change in its support base and facing an increasingly competitive electoral environment, raising questions about whether we can remove migration policy preferences from electoral considerations. Equally, Bucken-Knapp does not delve into the specific challenges facing the LO. Again, throughout this period, the LO's influence was changing, particularly as the white-collar unions grew in support. While he is certainly convincing in showing how the broader institutional context shaped the Left's preferences, theorizing the different pressures faced by the SAP and LO might have given the book more leverage in explaining the differences between them that did emerge—such as the sharply varying stance on transition measures for EU migrants.

Finally, conceptually, Bucken-Knapp aims his argument at the “Varieties of Capitalism” (VoC) literature. In some ways, this framing is a missed opportunity. Although strongly suggesting that employers were motivated by the desire to uproot aspects of the Swedish model, thus challenging the VoC literature's account of employer accommodation to the welfare state, the focus on the labor side leaves the discussion of the motivations of employers less developed. While the author's claim that politics and ideology matter is an important one, he is also speaking to a broader literature on the changing role of partisanship, the scope for social democratic economic policy in a globalizing economy, and the nature of conflict in advanced welfare states. Here, he could have further developed his theoretical contribution, expanding on the implications of his claims about how the Left uses particular types of protectionist migration strategies to preserve the position of labor.

These criticisms should not detract from what is a carefully argued and researched book, which makes a key contribution to our understanding of the politics of labor migration and the Left in age of migration.