Thursday, March 4, 2010

Forum on integration on Swedish TV

Swedish public service TV gathered experts and politicians for a debate on integration politics the other day. Blogg commentators seem particularly pleased by the statements of Sakime Madon, who is regarded as an expert on the field by many. She criticizes what she lables "identity politics" - i.e. the tendency for Swedish governments to devote special attention and programmes to interventions targeted at immigrants specifically and even argues that they do more harm than good by singling out immigrants as particularly helpless.

While some of her arguments are sound - the programmes have indeed had little effect - her analysis still falls short in some respects. For instance, she fails to recognize that long-term unemployed immigrants do often face more barriers to employment than the average unemployed person would. Indeed, it is an inescapable fact that the Swedish labour market, like in so many other entrenched democracies, is strongly ethnically segmented, where clearly the most racialized minorities are to be found at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarcy (in Sweden, this will often be Somalis). Instead of getting hung up on the percieved evils of identity-politics (critiquing identity politics and multiculturalism seems quite fashionable in Sweden now), maybe experts should ask themselves why these quite substantial government programmes have failed....

On a brighter note, Pernilla Ouis writes an quite sound analysis of the typical ideological pitfalls in the Swedish political debate on islam in all ideological camps.

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