Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Immigration and the Swedish Welfare State

Tomorrow is the big day in Sweden, when the Final Report on Immigration Policy will be released by the Swedish government.

Swedish reader LN sends a detailed summary of the situation, with translations of excerpts from Swedish sources, plus his own commentary:

In the Weekly Standard, February 28, 2005, Christopher Caldwell writes: In a country where, as the Swedish sociologist Åke Daun puts it, “People like being like each other,” there is evidence of profound exhaustion with immigration, whether the reasons for this exhaustion are rationally well-founded or not. In the moral-superpower context, it is the equivalent of “imperial overstretch. Swedes tell pollsters they want no more asylum-seekers. (A common complaint is that prospective arrivals have figured out how to “game” the rules of asylum applications, and that the best way to render one’s story unchallengeable under the law is to destroy one’s identity papers.) A very low rate of mixed marriage is an indication that Swedes may not have been crazy about this immigration in the first place.

Masoud KamaliCaldwell then quotes Masoud Kamali, an Iranian-born professor of ethnic studies at the University of Uppsala who arrived in Sweden 1987 under the pretext of being a political refugee. He studied efficiently: Ph.D. in December 1995, 1999 senior lecturer in sociology and since 2002 he is a professor in ‘social work’. He has declared himself being a non-believing muslim (sic).

“Many of us,” says Masoud Kamali, “saw Sweden as the homeland of tolerance, solidarity, and democracy, based on the image of Sweden abroad. Yet foreigners find that the longer they live in Sweden, the more foreign they feel.”

Kamali, who directs studies on xenophobia and social exclusion for both the E.U. and the Swedish government, says: “Integration is a complete failure: No one can deny it.”

Kamali, a radical and controversial figure, speculates that a fear of getting segregated out of the society may be the reason that immigrants have shown themselves in favor of European Union membership, both at the ballot box and in opinion polls. “They think: ‘You are not going to be a Swede — or, at least, it’s not you who’s going to decide if you are a Swede.’ but perhaps you can choose to be a European.”

Mona SahlinThe then integration minister Mona Sahlin — in several contexts mentioned as a society-smasher — in 2004 set up an investigation into a new “Integration Policy”. After a year, she chose to replace the research management since they did not present preliminary results in line with the policy of the party (Social Democrats). The investigation had come to the conclusion that Sweden favours immigrants in many different ways, and such research-results did she not want (another Swedish link in English!).

The controversial Masoud Kamali was appointed the new head of the investigation. The investigation has already presented 12 partial reports before the final report, which will be made public on the 17th of August 2006. These have shredded the picture of the Swedish integration policy and have become fuel in the hot discussion about what the investigator calls “a policy that has crashed” (havererat).

The right wing daily paper SvD has published part of Kamali’s proposals from a draft of the future Final Report . The conclusion of this investigation is that Sweden now is characterized as having structural discrimination targeted against persons with foreign backgrounds and that a we-and-them thinking permeates the society.

The two dozen points that the document contains have in common the demand that policy be turned around, from setting demands on the immigrants to the requirement that the society must be changed.

Within five years Swedish authority staffing must reflect what Sweden looks like ethnically. State authorities with more than ten employees must introduce an entire new personnel policy, suggests Masoud Kamali. The objective is that the personnel’s ethnic composition within five years must be changed, so that it reflects what Sweden’s population looks like.

The authority of patrolling police officers to intercept persons on the street and to do “arbitrary intervening” must be limited.

In order to correct the current situation, where persons with background in non-European countries are under-represented, the investigator suggests that the State Authorities introduce positive special treatment. Persons with one parent from Africa, Asia or Latin America will be favoured.

The investigator also wants to abandon the wording in the school law that says that the school rests on a common value-system-base characterized by Christian tradition and occidental humanism. As this idea about a value-system-base is built on an established we-and-them thinking, immigrants are incorrecly considered as alteration-objects, according to the draft.

Masoud Kamali has also suggested that people living in “exposed areas” ( does he mean “immigrant-ghettos”? — translator) by law should get priority in jobs in comparison to others with equivalent qualifications.

Current integration minister Jens Orback has been strongly hesitant about many of these ideas.

Masoud Kamali has refused to comment on the content before the investigation becomes public. Nor does Jens Orback want to comment.

Making sense of this kind of foolishness is difficult. It’s like a man with a burned hand sticking it back into the flame in an attempt to cauterize the wound.

15 comments:

bernie said...

immigrants are incorrecly considered as alteration-objects

I get it. Swedes should be the ones to be considered as alteration objects. I do not see why Sweden is wasting all this time. Why not just change the national language to Arabic and make Islam the coutry's default religion now?

Obviously Masoud Kamali sees the fact that immigrants have not integrated with Swedish values as a problem with Swedish values. The solution is for Swedes to become Muslims.

Looks like one day we may need to nuke Sweden. Scandirania is not far away.

Frank said...

Baron said: "Making sense of this kind of foolishness is difficult. It’s like a man with a burned hand sticking it back into the flame in an attempt to cauterize the wound."

As a procedure, on paper, that should work. Cutting off one's arm immediately after a snakebite on the wrist would preclude general poisoning as well.

Unfortunately there are far too many people willing to defend these types of solutions when the topic is immigration, because to admit the truth; to admit that floodgate ethnic immigration across the west has been a failure of epic proportions; has implications far beyond where most people want to go. Its far easier to imagine that its not the open floodgates that are the problem...its the drowning victims who are to blame.

Zonka said...

Bernie - Nuking Sweden isn't a good idea, unless you want Denmark to become collateral damage in the process!

Voyager said...

Why not just change the national language to Arabic and make Islam the coutry's default religion now?

I am certain the Swedes will do just that, but I doubt they could replace the Gay Lutheran Church with Islam - I think unless the Muslims compromise on gay rights the Swedes will resist.........they have already controlled alcohol...........but if they can compromise on Gay Mullahs I bet the Swedes would jump at the chance to be included in the Ummah

Mr. Spog said...

"Moral superpower"—what a handy expression. "To you I may seem to be a no-good loser, but actually I'm a moral superpower!"

In Russet Shadows said...

If the Swedes are burdened with immigration fallout (ooh, I like that) already, how in the world does Kamali think they'll react to his immigrant-centric focus and his own preposterous society-inverting plans? I suspect that this will go over like a lead balloon and that the next elections will be interesting to watch.

A. Eteraz said...

man, where do u find this stuff?

thanks a lot. you do me a great service by teahcing me of these things.

salutations.

Profitsbeard said...

Since when are pickpockets allowed to complain about the snugness of their victims' pants?

Back to Mecca with all such ingrates.

Let them learn some basic humility.

(Or are they simply infil-traitors and 'jizyah'-leeches, working as the advanced guard for the growing conquering colonists, and not as the humble immigrants they are posing as?)

What is "Occupation" said...

my best friend is german. He and I ( a jew) discuss this nonsense and his answer is wait...

He states: the Euro-man is the greatest murder machine ever invented, just look at history. He makes the observation that his grandparents had no problems in exterminating Jews and they brought culture, jewelry, crafts, tailors, butchers, resturants, theatre, art, industry, educators, science & more.

He point was simple, there will be a time when this killing machine wakes up to the islamic hoards at the gates, and this time it wont be the jews they go after, it will be..... (fill in the blank with any non-assimilating ghetto creating peoples)

i guess my friend is right, the jews have been slaughtered, those that did not die are few left in europe, the arabs have replaced a giving culture with a taking one...

Karma?

For both the arabs and the europeans maybe...

no matter, my german friend and I live well and near one another in peace.. in the USA

Zerosumgame said...

This guy appears to have abandoned one religion -- Islam -- and adopted the predominant religion in Sweden -- Marxism.

kidbuck said...

I just want to see Sweden's Gross National Product plummet when the diaper heads begin trying to produce Volvos by having Camels hump Saabs.

Zerosumgame said...

Kidbuck:

I just want to see Sweden's Gross National Product plummet when the diaper heads begin trying to produce Volvos by having Camels hump Saabs.

It was pointed out at Techcentralstation last year that Sweden, which once had a higher GDP per capita than the USA, has fallen so far behind the USA now that in terms of per capita income, it is now less even than Mississippi, which is America's poorest state.

Reliapundit said...

leftism destroyed sweden, now islamism is gonna poick up the pieces.

Voyager said...

when the diaper heads begin trying to produce Volvos by having Camels hump Saabs.

Don't worry - GM wrecked Saab - now they are building them in Japan and Germany but saab is assembling Cadillacs in Sweden..................see how they lost $190 billion !!!!

Voyager said...

Sorry - it was only $10 bn this time around.............I shouldn't have leaked next year's 10K