© 2004 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Rd., Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. Unequal Opportunities for Young People with Immigrant Backgrounds in the Swedish Labour Market Alireza Behtoui Abstract. This paper investigates labour-market performance for ‘young people with immigrant backgrounds’ and those ‘born in Sweden with native-born parents’ in the Swedish labour market. It focuses on young people who were aged 18–20 during 1990, and their labour-market status after 8 years, in 1998. The results indi- cate that young people of immigrant descent have lower annual wage income and are at higher risk of not being employed than those born in Sweden with native- born parents. Differences in human capital characteristics cannot explain these results. Other theories, which stress the effect of discriminatory behaviour and the power of social network composition, are discussed as alternative interpretations. Having one native-born parent is considered to be important to labour market success. However, having a native-born father rather than a native-born mother is associated with better labour-market achievement. 1. Introduction Young people of immigrant descent are a large group compris- ing about a quarter of the youth population in Sweden when the group is defined as those who were born abroad and those who have at least one parent who was born abroad. Alireza Behtoui, Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, Campus Norrköping/ITUF, SE-601 74 Norrköping, Sweden, and the National Institute for Working Life, Laxholmstorget 3, 602 21 Norrköping, Sweden. E-mail: Alireza.behtoui@arbetslivsinstitutet.se The author is grateful to the editor and referee of Labour and to Carl-Ulrik Scheirup, Mahmood Arai and Anders Neergaard for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. LABOUR 18 (4) 633–660 (2004) JEL J15, J24, J61, J71