It turns out that the Aktuellt, a Swedish equivalent of CBC's The National, visited my hometown of Edmonton recently, to do a feature on Canadian immigration policy (ironically, nobody had informed the journalists that I live here).
There is one trait that stands out to me from the piece: It repeats something that is turning into a truism in the Swedish debate: Canadian immigration is so selective, and does not accept many refugees (implication: so no wonder it works better than in Sweden).
That's certainly comforting for Swedish commentators, but it is also, alas, far too simplistic and ignores some important facts that need consideration:
First, while it is true that it is harder for refugees in Canada to find jobs than it is for those who come through the work force immigration stream (in Canada called the Highly skilled stream), it is still quite possible for refugees in Canada to find entry level jobs. In other words, the difficult for Swedish immigrants is to find jobs, period. For a Canadian refugee, entry to the labour market is more challenging than for those who immigrate through other streams, but entry-level jobs are still quite achieveable.
Secondly, this is reflected in the single-minded focus of the Swedish debate, where the issue of whether immigrants there can ever work in their own level of competence (for instance, can an immigrant with a BA find academic level work?) is rarely, if ever addressed. Swedish commentators seem to be content that integration on the labour market works if immigrants just find some kind of job at all, which is indicative of very low levels of ambitions, indeed. The debate in Canada is, instead: how can immigrants reach the same income levels as the native born population, and find jobs in their own competence level. The debate is thus qualitatively different in that regard.
Thirdly, one should not lose sight of the fact that a substantial number of immigrants to both Canada and Sweden come through family class immigration, even though these numbers have dropped somewhat in Canada during the past few years, (a fact which, by the way, have created a lot of frustration in immigrant communities).
There is, thus, no reason for Swedish commentators to feel look at Canada and become complacent about integration in Sweden because of the work force stream employed by this country. It is an incomplete comparison, at best.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Ethnic discrimination and representation
After seemingly long absence from the public debate in Sweden, discrimination has once again been given some attention. Recently, the think tank FORES released a new study does indeed constitute a barrier to labor market integration for immigrants in Sweden. Meanwhile, there've been some comments concerning the case of quotas within the police department, where an ethnic Swedish man experienced discrimination because he was not considered as a recruit because of these quotas. At the same time, another study shows that most Swedish private employers have not even considered ethnic diversity in the workplace, or have to achieve it.
I'm pleased to see the issue re-appearing again. For too long, the public debate has been focused on how to demand more from immigrants, as if the root cause of social exclusion is to be found within the "flawed" immigrants.
What is concerning, though, is that even a decade after this was acknowledged as a problem, employers, both public and private, seem to lack the capacity to deal with the matter. Madon makes a convincing case that the Police seems to have been using quotas in a most blunt manner. Reducing the matter of minority representation within the staff to simply a matter of counting heads of different colours is never a good idea. What is needed is an understanding of substantive representation, that is to say, how a plural work force manages to capture the experience from many different social spaces or environments, allowing the organization to navigate competently in these spaces. That is to say, these experiences, although they maybe not formally recognized with diplomas, can still be considered skills, in the sense that the person who has them has the capacity to view the world from different perspectives, and also gives the organization a greater legimacy across different communities.
Here in Canada, the news recently noted such an example within the armed forces, Lieutenant Colonel Harjit Singh Sajjan, Canada's first Sikh commanding officer. After tours in Afghanistan, he bore witness to how his different cultural capital, his different outlook and capacity to understand more than one perspective, made him invaluable to both the Canadian and American forces on the ground. As he says: "It's not political correctness. For the Canadian forces, it's an operational necessity...".
Employers everywhere need to learn about these very concrete ways of conceptualizing competence if discrimination is to become a thing of the past.
I'm pleased to see the issue re-appearing again. For too long, the public debate has been focused on how to demand more from immigrants, as if the root cause of social exclusion is to be found within the "flawed" immigrants.
What is concerning, though, is that even a decade after this was acknowledged as a problem, employers, both public and private, seem to lack the capacity to deal with the matter. Madon makes a convincing case that the Police seems to have been using quotas in a most blunt manner. Reducing the matter of minority representation within the staff to simply a matter of counting heads of different colours is never a good idea. What is needed is an understanding of substantive representation, that is to say, how a plural work force manages to capture the experience from many different social spaces or environments, allowing the organization to navigate competently in these spaces. That is to say, these experiences, although they maybe not formally recognized with diplomas, can still be considered skills, in the sense that the person who has them has the capacity to view the world from different perspectives, and also gives the organization a greater legimacy across different communities.
Here in Canada, the news recently noted such an example within the armed forces, Lieutenant Colonel Harjit Singh Sajjan, Canada's first Sikh commanding officer. After tours in Afghanistan, he bore witness to how his different cultural capital, his different outlook and capacity to understand more than one perspective, made him invaluable to both the Canadian and American forces on the ground. As he says: "It's not political correctness. For the Canadian forces, it's an operational necessity...".
Employers everywhere need to learn about these very concrete ways of conceptualizing competence if discrimination is to become a thing of the past.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Metropolis Conference Day
I spent most of the day yesterday at the Prairie Metropolis Centre Regional conference here in Edmonton. I was given the honour of presenting a poster of my upcoming paper/dissertation chapter, anchoring the literature on immigrant and ethnic organizations in Bourdieu's theoretical framework. It was a fascinating day in many ways, even for me who is fairly knowledgeable about the subject matter at hand. The keynote address made by Howard Duncan, executive head of the Metropolis Secretariat, was particularly interesting.
He described the profound impact that Metropolis has had in bringing together researchers and practicioners from the field, allowing for very direct communications between governments, NGOs and the academia that is now, in many respects, institutionalized.
Indeed, this was reflected during the conference itself. Community organizations have an active role to play here in Canada and are represented among both the speakers and the guests, and the level of sophistication of the conversation is quite remarkable, focus on how to solve very practical issues of communication between different communites. One example was a presentation about how health care can be delivered effectively to minority communities as well, by raising the cultural competence of health care workers in direct cooperation with the community.
This environment is such a contrast from the practices I remember from Sweden. Over there, the room was habitually filled with civil servants from the local or national governments, with community representatives largely absent, and certainly absent from the list of presenters, sending a strong signal about who was regarded as an authority in the field and who was not.
It is possible that the conference practices have changed in the past six years, but I wouldn't expect any radical change of the situation, since these actors are hardly recognized as legitimate actors in the social service delivery role.
He described the profound impact that Metropolis has had in bringing together researchers and practicioners from the field, allowing for very direct communications between governments, NGOs and the academia that is now, in many respects, institutionalized.
Indeed, this was reflected during the conference itself. Community organizations have an active role to play here in Canada and are represented among both the speakers and the guests, and the level of sophistication of the conversation is quite remarkable, focus on how to solve very practical issues of communication between different communites. One example was a presentation about how health care can be delivered effectively to minority communities as well, by raising the cultural competence of health care workers in direct cooperation with the community.
This environment is such a contrast from the practices I remember from Sweden. Over there, the room was habitually filled with civil servants from the local or national governments, with community representatives largely absent, and certainly absent from the list of presenters, sending a strong signal about who was regarded as an authority in the field and who was not.
It is possible that the conference practices have changed in the past six years, but I wouldn't expect any radical change of the situation, since these actors are hardly recognized as legitimate actors in the social service delivery role.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Sara Mohammed and the competence of the Swedish public sector
Andreas Johansson Heinö is replying to an interesting piece by Lorenzi who rightly raises some concerns about the European onslaught against multiculturalism that I've been following on this blog. She concludes that the critique has largely been founded on strawmen - i.e. a false representation of what multiculturalism actually consists of and has consisted of historically. I largely agree. Johansson Heinö apparently does not, and produces Sara Mohammed's piece in the same number of Axess where he, himself participates.
Sara Mohammed is a Kurdish champion of women's rights and have been working hard to raise awareness around so-called honour-related killings. There is no doubt her work has been very important. There is no doubt that her work can ultimately save many lives and should be supported.
Her article, however, is filled with contradíctions. She is heavily critiquing the Swedish public sector for its awkwardness in handling issues gender equality in immigrant communities. But then she's also critiquing the public sector for "downloading" the issue to immigrant communities and let immigrant organizations address the issue in "integration projects", a choice that, according to her, has led to further enclavization and segregation of the issue. The signal it sends, she asserts, is that honour related killings is something that concerns immigrant communities only. Therefore, such funding and such projects should immediately be cancelled.
This makes little sense. As she herself states, the Swedish public sector has proven ultimately incompetent with regards to handling the matter. Unlike Mohammed, I would not attribute this to the "ideology of cultural relativism", but rather to a fundamental lack of competence with regards to how to relate to the "ethnic others". The Swedish public sector has, historically, been an ethnically very homogenous one, and very little has been done to create an intitutionalized awareness of how inter-cultural matters should be handled in everyday life. Indeed, research, by scholars like Kamali, de Los Reyes, Mulinari, Hertzberg, Pripp and Neergaard, has shown that discriminatory stereotyping is rather entrenched in the Swedish public sector.
The question for me then would be: how would stopping immigrant actors from being agents on this arena alleviate the problem? What about Mohammed's own association - Never Forget Pela and Fadime? My own impression of the NGOs website is that the organization is desperately underfunded - it doesn't even have the resources to produce a website in English - so my feeling is that it would rather need more funding, not less. In my opinion, the organization (like several other similar ones, Terrafem comes to mind) should get sufficient funding to operate several centres for the protection of young girls and boys who become threatened in this fashion by their families, precisely because the public agencies do not have sufficient understanding for how to reach out and find these persons and what sort of support they need. It's exactly these kinds of bottom's up-solutions that are needed to address such issues.
But according to Mohammed's own rationale, any funding to her own organization - an immigrant organization - should apparently be stopped immediately, because funding it would lead to enclavization of the issue. That seems very counter-intuitive to me. I have to ask, why is Mohammed so confident that the public sector agencies, which by virtue of being public operate in a top-down manner, will handle this matter better than her own organization?
If multiculturalism was replaced with increased top-down assimilation-policies, the result would likely be the even more complete dominance of the large public sector organizations on the arena, and organizations like Never Forget Pela and Fadime or Terrafem, those very actors that have been most active and effective in raising awareness on these issues precisely because they are rooted in a particular grass-root practice, would be completely marginalized. Ethnic Swedish civil servants would define what gender equality is, and likely do so based on prejudice and stereotypes of the immigrant "others". That would lead to the further disempowerment of immigrant communities and groups, and further entrench an ethnic hierarchy in society with immigrants on the bottom.
Sara Mohammed is a Kurdish champion of women's rights and have been working hard to raise awareness around so-called honour-related killings. There is no doubt her work has been very important. There is no doubt that her work can ultimately save many lives and should be supported.
Her article, however, is filled with contradíctions. She is heavily critiquing the Swedish public sector for its awkwardness in handling issues gender equality in immigrant communities. But then she's also critiquing the public sector for "downloading" the issue to immigrant communities and let immigrant organizations address the issue in "integration projects", a choice that, according to her, has led to further enclavization and segregation of the issue. The signal it sends, she asserts, is that honour related killings is something that concerns immigrant communities only. Therefore, such funding and such projects should immediately be cancelled.
This makes little sense. As she herself states, the Swedish public sector has proven ultimately incompetent with regards to handling the matter. Unlike Mohammed, I would not attribute this to the "ideology of cultural relativism", but rather to a fundamental lack of competence with regards to how to relate to the "ethnic others". The Swedish public sector has, historically, been an ethnically very homogenous one, and very little has been done to create an intitutionalized awareness of how inter-cultural matters should be handled in everyday life. Indeed, research, by scholars like Kamali, de Los Reyes, Mulinari, Hertzberg, Pripp and Neergaard, has shown that discriminatory stereotyping is rather entrenched in the Swedish public sector.
The question for me then would be: how would stopping immigrant actors from being agents on this arena alleviate the problem? What about Mohammed's own association - Never Forget Pela and Fadime? My own impression of the NGOs website is that the organization is desperately underfunded - it doesn't even have the resources to produce a website in English - so my feeling is that it would rather need more funding, not less. In my opinion, the organization (like several other similar ones, Terrafem comes to mind) should get sufficient funding to operate several centres for the protection of young girls and boys who become threatened in this fashion by their families, precisely because the public agencies do not have sufficient understanding for how to reach out and find these persons and what sort of support they need. It's exactly these kinds of bottom's up-solutions that are needed to address such issues.
But according to Mohammed's own rationale, any funding to her own organization - an immigrant organization - should apparently be stopped immediately, because funding it would lead to enclavization of the issue. That seems very counter-intuitive to me. I have to ask, why is Mohammed so confident that the public sector agencies, which by virtue of being public operate in a top-down manner, will handle this matter better than her own organization?
If multiculturalism was replaced with increased top-down assimilation-policies, the result would likely be the even more complete dominance of the large public sector organizations on the arena, and organizations like Never Forget Pela and Fadime or Terrafem, those very actors that have been most active and effective in raising awareness on these issues precisely because they are rooted in a particular grass-root practice, would be completely marginalized. Ethnic Swedish civil servants would define what gender equality is, and likely do so based on prejudice and stereotypes of the immigrant "others". That would lead to the further disempowerment of immigrant communities and groups, and further entrench an ethnic hierarchy in society with immigrants on the bottom.
Friday, July 8, 2011
The discursive shift in the Swedish right wing....
The Swedish magazine Axess had a seminar recently with the above title. It featured liberal commentators Paulina Neuding, Adam Cwejman and Tino Sanandaji. The frame of the seminar was criticizing multiculturalism, which is the popular activity of the centre-right of the past six months. The speakers, not very surprisingly, spent a great amount of time assigning blame for the failure of integration policies on multiculturalism along now-familiar lines of argumentation.
What particularly gave me pause in this presentation was the number of logical inconsistency in the argumentation by each speaker. Neuding argued that one cannot assume that people coming from authoritarian countries (and she was really refering to dictatorships in the Middle East and Magreb region - i.e. warning people about supposed the danger of Middle Eastern Muslim immigration) are fleeing to the West because they want to enjoy freedom...and then goes on to make the opposite assumption that these refugees should be assumed to be carriers of authoritarian values, which she identifies as the greatest integration problem of the day. This assumption, of course, is at least as unfounded as the one she is arguing against. Indeed, her entire speechs was informed by a highly essentialist conceptualization of immigrant and immigrant cultures, particularly directed against Middle Eastern groups.
Cwejman argued that the problem is that Sweden lacks a patriotic citizenship ideal (a strange argument, seeing as it is hardly a lack of patriotism that leads to high unemployment levels and poverty rates). Generally speaking, he seemed take the same position as others who fear that social cohesion will be undermined by people coming in from the outside bringing other cultures or at least lacking loyalty to the new community. He then said that France and the US are the ideals that should be embraced because these countries do have this strong patriotic citizenship that he longs for.
The problem with this argument is that France has had huge issues with the troubles in the banlieues, which he seemed to have forgotten entirely. I.e. France has hardly been very succesful at managing integration and ethnic relations, something that the Front National is doing its level best to leverage into political mobilization against immigration. The US, on the other hand, actually does permit multiple loyalties, as evidenced by Little Italies, Chinatowns and hyphenated belonging (e.g. Italian-American).
Sanandaji starts his speech by saying that multiculturalism "is dead", citing the speeches by Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy, as well as the terror attack in Spain as examples of this. The problem with that is, of course, that neither France, Germany or Spain were ever countries that embraced Multiculturalism as an official policy. He then talks about the importance of increased Swedish "cultural self-confidence" (whatever that is) and says that Swedes have been too kind towards immigrants. He then states that it's not a matter of immigrants erasing their pasts or not loving their countries of origin anymore...except it is, because they can't expect to keep their norms when entering Sweden. Like Cwejman, he refers to the US as a good example, and like Cwejman, he seems to forget that multiple identities are quite common in that country.
Between the three of these speakers, it is evident that the nationalist populist discourse of a party like the Sweden Democrats have really taken hold among the Swedish centre right intellectuals. It's evident in the following reasoning (the speakers didn't use these precise words, but this was the gist of their arguments):
+ Immigrants bring strange cultures that constitute a threat to social cohesion.
+ Immigrants do not assimilate sufficiently into Swedish norms and culture.
+ More patriotism is needed to rectify this.
+ Sweden is currently confronted by the threat of mass immigration, or an invasion of immigrants.
+ Multiculturalism is an elite project imposed on the Swedish people from above.
This is pretty much the very same series of speaking points that nationalist populists are employing all over Europe, and it's disquieting to see people who call themselves liberals buy in to the same agenda in such a whole-sale fashion. In this radio debate, Anders Lindberg does a decent job of exposing this discursive shift within the Swedish right.
As Isobel Hadley-Kamptz states, once upon a time, liberals used to discuss freedom.
What particularly gave me pause in this presentation was the number of logical inconsistency in the argumentation by each speaker. Neuding argued that one cannot assume that people coming from authoritarian countries (and she was really refering to dictatorships in the Middle East and Magreb region - i.e. warning people about supposed the danger of Middle Eastern Muslim immigration) are fleeing to the West because they want to enjoy freedom...and then goes on to make the opposite assumption that these refugees should be assumed to be carriers of authoritarian values, which she identifies as the greatest integration problem of the day. This assumption, of course, is at least as unfounded as the one she is arguing against. Indeed, her entire speechs was informed by a highly essentialist conceptualization of immigrant and immigrant cultures, particularly directed against Middle Eastern groups.
Cwejman argued that the problem is that Sweden lacks a patriotic citizenship ideal (a strange argument, seeing as it is hardly a lack of patriotism that leads to high unemployment levels and poverty rates). Generally speaking, he seemed take the same position as others who fear that social cohesion will be undermined by people coming in from the outside bringing other cultures or at least lacking loyalty to the new community. He then said that France and the US are the ideals that should be embraced because these countries do have this strong patriotic citizenship that he longs for.
The problem with this argument is that France has had huge issues with the troubles in the banlieues, which he seemed to have forgotten entirely. I.e. France has hardly been very succesful at managing integration and ethnic relations, something that the Front National is doing its level best to leverage into political mobilization against immigration. The US, on the other hand, actually does permit multiple loyalties, as evidenced by Little Italies, Chinatowns and hyphenated belonging (e.g. Italian-American).
Sanandaji starts his speech by saying that multiculturalism "is dead", citing the speeches by Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy, as well as the terror attack in Spain as examples of this. The problem with that is, of course, that neither France, Germany or Spain were ever countries that embraced Multiculturalism as an official policy. He then talks about the importance of increased Swedish "cultural self-confidence" (whatever that is) and says that Swedes have been too kind towards immigrants. He then states that it's not a matter of immigrants erasing their pasts or not loving their countries of origin anymore...except it is, because they can't expect to keep their norms when entering Sweden. Like Cwejman, he refers to the US as a good example, and like Cwejman, he seems to forget that multiple identities are quite common in that country.
Between the three of these speakers, it is evident that the nationalist populist discourse of a party like the Sweden Democrats have really taken hold among the Swedish centre right intellectuals. It's evident in the following reasoning (the speakers didn't use these precise words, but this was the gist of their arguments):
+ Immigrants bring strange cultures that constitute a threat to social cohesion.
+ Immigrants do not assimilate sufficiently into Swedish norms and culture.
+ More patriotism is needed to rectify this.
+ Sweden is currently confronted by the threat of mass immigration, or an invasion of immigrants.
+ Multiculturalism is an elite project imposed on the Swedish people from above.
This is pretty much the very same series of speaking points that nationalist populists are employing all over Europe, and it's disquieting to see people who call themselves liberals buy in to the same agenda in such a whole-sale fashion. In this radio debate, Anders Lindberg does a decent job of exposing this discursive shift within the Swedish right.
As Isobel Hadley-Kamptz states, once upon a time, liberals used to discuss freedom.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
We never had multiculturalism
...is the headline of Johansson Heinö's latest piece in Axess magazine. It's the latest installement in the wave of debates surrounding multiculturalism in Sweden during the past months, and presented as critique of the same. It's quite an interesting text, much more sophisticated than many others I've seen, but one should not be surprised, since a scholar penned it.
In short, the author argues that Sweden needs to come to terms with multicultarlist policies in order to be able to deal with current issues of ethnic diversity. I find this conclusion somewhat surprising, given the different arguments he presents. First, he, correctly in my opinion, asserts that the multiculturalism that came out of the late 1960s and early 1970s was inherently a reaction to the homogenizing nation-state project that had been dominant during the century before.
He then, again correctly, goes on to state that Sweden's commitment to multiculturalism has been somewhat limited historically. While immigrants have been accepted into the country in great numbers, the significant spheres of Swedish society have continued to be very homogenous ethnically Swedish arenas. So, while multicultural rhetoric has been dominant during the past three or four decades, there has been no genuine interest in "the other" on the part of Swedish gatekeepers.
Evidence for this abounds, of course. Political parties speak a lot about how important integration is and how important diversity is, but has made no real efforts to establish any genuine ties with or in immigrant communities. Indeed, immigrant or ethno-cultural organizations in Sweden are quite weak, particularly in comparison with their equivalents in the US or Canada, where these NGOs are entrusted with the delivery of settlement services to newcomers. For all intents and purposes, Sweden retains a strongly hierarchical nation-state.
What comes across as so strange to me is how Johansson Heinö lands in the argument that some form of reckoning with multiculturalism is needed to proceed with better integration. If multiculturalism has only been adopted in a most constrained form, then surely it is difficult to argue that the multiculturalism in a wider sense (i.e. the multiculturalism Sweden apparently never adopted fully) is to blame for current social issues confronting immigrant populations.
Against this background, the energy spent on critiquing multiculturalism also becomes somewhat of a mystery to me. If the goal is to establish a society based on respect between both individuals and groups, and a mutual understanding of different cultures and practices, which Johansson Heinö clearly argues that the goal should be, then it would seem more prudent to me to pay attention to power relations between majority and minority communities in society. This is, of course, because a respectful dialogue between communities can only be achieved when one is not subjected to dominance by the other.
This links directly into issues of empowerment and how to combat ethnic discrimination. Since Sweden has centraliezd social services to powerful paternalistic public agencies, immigrant communities remain disempowered, and the legal framework for combatting ethnic discrimination remains weak, since it is not framed as an issue of human rights, but rather as part of labour market regulation. Instead of addressing these issues of practical legal and organizational matters, the Swedish debate remains focused on what appears to me as a game of shadow boxing against an imaginary enemy - that of a set of policies that were never adopted whole heartedly by the Swedish polity anyway.
In short, the author argues that Sweden needs to come to terms with multicultarlist policies in order to be able to deal with current issues of ethnic diversity. I find this conclusion somewhat surprising, given the different arguments he presents. First, he, correctly in my opinion, asserts that the multiculturalism that came out of the late 1960s and early 1970s was inherently a reaction to the homogenizing nation-state project that had been dominant during the century before.
He then, again correctly, goes on to state that Sweden's commitment to multiculturalism has been somewhat limited historically. While immigrants have been accepted into the country in great numbers, the significant spheres of Swedish society have continued to be very homogenous ethnically Swedish arenas. So, while multicultural rhetoric has been dominant during the past three or four decades, there has been no genuine interest in "the other" on the part of Swedish gatekeepers.
Evidence for this abounds, of course. Political parties speak a lot about how important integration is and how important diversity is, but has made no real efforts to establish any genuine ties with or in immigrant communities. Indeed, immigrant or ethno-cultural organizations in Sweden are quite weak, particularly in comparison with their equivalents in the US or Canada, where these NGOs are entrusted with the delivery of settlement services to newcomers. For all intents and purposes, Sweden retains a strongly hierarchical nation-state.
What comes across as so strange to me is how Johansson Heinö lands in the argument that some form of reckoning with multiculturalism is needed to proceed with better integration. If multiculturalism has only been adopted in a most constrained form, then surely it is difficult to argue that the multiculturalism in a wider sense (i.e. the multiculturalism Sweden apparently never adopted fully) is to blame for current social issues confronting immigrant populations.
Against this background, the energy spent on critiquing multiculturalism also becomes somewhat of a mystery to me. If the goal is to establish a society based on respect between both individuals and groups, and a mutual understanding of different cultures and practices, which Johansson Heinö clearly argues that the goal should be, then it would seem more prudent to me to pay attention to power relations between majority and minority communities in society. This is, of course, because a respectful dialogue between communities can only be achieved when one is not subjected to dominance by the other.
This links directly into issues of empowerment and how to combat ethnic discrimination. Since Sweden has centraliezd social services to powerful paternalistic public agencies, immigrant communities remain disempowered, and the legal framework for combatting ethnic discrimination remains weak, since it is not framed as an issue of human rights, but rather as part of labour market regulation. Instead of addressing these issues of practical legal and organizational matters, the Swedish debate remains focused on what appears to me as a game of shadow boxing against an imaginary enemy - that of a set of policies that were never adopted whole heartedly by the Swedish polity anyway.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Another report...
Another report on the status of labour market integration in Sweden has been published, and I watched the seminar. The affair left me less than impressed, and apparently I'm not alone.
I have a range of questions and observations, with all due respect to the two authors who did a fairly good job of summarizing the state of the art:
1) Summarizing the state of the art reveals that the art still hasn't moved beyond the problem formulation stage. In other words, the Swedish discourse is standing pretty much in the same place as it did in 1996 when Björn Rosengren's Crown Commission report was published - the observed problems were the same. It's quite remarkable that the labour market segregation hasn't budged at all in 20 years.
2) The researchers presented a graph showing labour market developed. It only contained three indicators - being full time unemployed, having at some point had some form of employment, or having left the pool of statistics (death or emigration). My question is: why is there an assumptionthat getting any type of job, for any type of timeperiod, considered an indicator of success in the labour market?
Think about the logic of this, now. A person who has a Ph.D. degree and manages to land a job as a janitor for about a month and then falls back into unemployment is, according to this rationale, considered succesfully integrated in the labour market. A better indicator would be "has full time employment at the own level of competence". I think one reason the authors didn't use that definition, though, is that Swedish labour market statistics simply lacks data on this. The Employment Service doesn't measure. Thus the degree of under-employment in the country remains quite inadequately explored. This reflects the poverty of the Swedish measurement tools, and the fact that nobody has even reflected on this in the public debate is quite alarming, frankly.
3) The authors do mention that discrimination "exists", but the studying the labour market in terms of the ethnic hierarchy that I recall as quite entrenched was not done. All the studies that I took part of between 1996 and 2005 showed very clearly that an ethnic hierarchy existed on the labour market, where racialized minorities, and Africans in particular, were persistently on the bottom of the ladder. But this huge indicator of discrimination seems to have been forgotten in the public discourse since 2005.
In the UK and Canada, there is a continuous effort to track the socio-economic status of "visible minorities", which isn't the best category conceivable, but at least it captures an important dimension of the problem. The Swedish public debate seems incapable of handling this parameter, and the appeals to stop talking about ethnicity will likely simply result on obfuscating this very serious problem, but hardly make it go away. Again, an indicator of the lack of sophistication in the measurement toolbox. In the post-presentation debate, Nima Senandaji touched upon this briefly, but it was not explored by the panel at all.
4) The authors state that the tools for succeeding at labour market integration exist, and see no real reason to make any major changes to the toolset (i.e. the public agencies). This is probably based on the considerable amounts that are, traditionally, assigned to an active labour market policy, and SFI (Swedish For Immigrants). But look at the amounts spent for labour market policy. Do we know if the Employment Service is a competent public agency that actually succesfully assist any unemployed person to jobs, immigrant or not? All the audits I have seen says the exact opposite, and the substantial critique levied against SFI during the past decade seems to have been unaddressed entirely. Is this because macroeconomists, concerned mostly macro-scale statistics, simply have left issues of organizational theory oustide the study? And why would you do that? There is little public management literature that would support such complacency.
What's really interesting is that the authors themselves seem to acknowledge that they actually do not know how the implementation of the existing policies work (did they miss all those audits? How?), but if so, how can they be so sure that we should feel confident that no major reforms of the toolsets are needed? Spending levels alone are very poor indicators of outcomes, and the outcomes - 20 years of clear and present labour market segregation, leave little reason to feel confident about this.
5) The authors argued in favour of better validation of foreign credentials. It's interesting, because it is a problem in other countries as well, including Canada. Only, here, the discussion concerns credential recognition, which is a slightly different, and more precise, perspective. I.e. it's about recognizing foreign experience, not validating it. The authors' suggested solution is a classic Swedish one - institute another public agency to do the work. Given that huge sums have already been invested in "systems" like that, I'm not sure why we should feel confident that another hierarchical and bureaucratic solution would work this time.
Besides, an important part of the problem is likely to be recruitment procedures, so maybe it would be better to raise the awareness among employers about how to make sure that recruitment procedures identify relevant competencies and do not discriminate people with foreign experience. There's a host of such methods to employ from other countries, and this was a topic discussed extensively in the early 00s, but for some reason it's been forgotten now.
6) The authors argue that more "experiments" are need to develop best practices. This is rather remarkable, since experiments and method development have been done for the past 15 years, funded by the EU through the European Social Fund. This is both for labour market policy practices in general, but a certain amount has always been devoted to immigrants as a special target group. If the authors are unaware of these experiments (I'm going to have to assume that this is the case), then why have these efforts passed into oblivion? Where are the reports? Who reads them? Hundreds of projects have been started up and finished. Have any been succesful (I know some have, though most might not have been). Why has the knowledge transfer been so poorly done that these experiments haven't even made a dent in the public discourse for a decade and a half?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that the reason is simple: the Employment Service is the biggest single national adminstration in the country. It has a huge budget, and obviously a vested interest in keeping keeping the status quo. The well-being of the clients is, most likely, a very secondary concern in that context. And that leads me to the next question:
7) Why are there no practitioners present at the seminar? No frontline civil servants or client representatives were present. There is, seemingly, no connection between the macro-scale economics and the experiences of the people who are outside the labour market, the very people these statistics are supposed to represent, and that will likely affect not only how the problem is formulated, but the ability present solutions that actually address client needs adequately. To do that, the clients of these interventions would need to have power to at least make their voices heard, or even better, the capacity to influence the agenda. That still doesn't exist in the Swedish debate.
The host asked if the consensus of the room reflected the consensus of the public discourse or simply reflected the panel being skewed. The answer, in my opinion, is: both. It does reflect the current state of the Swedish public discourse, and that public discourse is quite skewed, dominated by the perspective of macroeconomists (sociologists need not apply, it seems, and there is currently a grand total of one political scientist who make repeated appearances in the public spotlight). In short, it seems to me that it suffers from a high degree of tunnelvision which incapacitates it, stalls it, makes it incapable of moving forward or absorbing impulses from outside, and given how often speakers repeated that things are not very alarming, the reaction to this seems to be one dominated by complacency. That's both quite frustrating and quite alarming.
I have a range of questions and observations, with all due respect to the two authors who did a fairly good job of summarizing the state of the art:
1) Summarizing the state of the art reveals that the art still hasn't moved beyond the problem formulation stage. In other words, the Swedish discourse is standing pretty much in the same place as it did in 1996 when Björn Rosengren's Crown Commission report was published - the observed problems were the same. It's quite remarkable that the labour market segregation hasn't budged at all in 20 years.
2) The researchers presented a graph showing labour market developed. It only contained three indicators - being full time unemployed, having at some point had some form of employment, or having left the pool of statistics (death or emigration). My question is: why is there an assumptionthat getting any type of job, for any type of timeperiod, considered an indicator of success in the labour market?
Think about the logic of this, now. A person who has a Ph.D. degree and manages to land a job as a janitor for about a month and then falls back into unemployment is, according to this rationale, considered succesfully integrated in the labour market. A better indicator would be "has full time employment at the own level of competence". I think one reason the authors didn't use that definition, though, is that Swedish labour market statistics simply lacks data on this. The Employment Service doesn't measure. Thus the degree of under-employment in the country remains quite inadequately explored. This reflects the poverty of the Swedish measurement tools, and the fact that nobody has even reflected on this in the public debate is quite alarming, frankly.
3) The authors do mention that discrimination "exists", but the studying the labour market in terms of the ethnic hierarchy that I recall as quite entrenched was not done. All the studies that I took part of between 1996 and 2005 showed very clearly that an ethnic hierarchy existed on the labour market, where racialized minorities, and Africans in particular, were persistently on the bottom of the ladder. But this huge indicator of discrimination seems to have been forgotten in the public discourse since 2005.
In the UK and Canada, there is a continuous effort to track the socio-economic status of "visible minorities", which isn't the best category conceivable, but at least it captures an important dimension of the problem. The Swedish public debate seems incapable of handling this parameter, and the appeals to stop talking about ethnicity will likely simply result on obfuscating this very serious problem, but hardly make it go away. Again, an indicator of the lack of sophistication in the measurement toolbox. In the post-presentation debate, Nima Senandaji touched upon this briefly, but it was not explored by the panel at all.
4) The authors state that the tools for succeeding at labour market integration exist, and see no real reason to make any major changes to the toolset (i.e. the public agencies). This is probably based on the considerable amounts that are, traditionally, assigned to an active labour market policy, and SFI (Swedish For Immigrants). But look at the amounts spent for labour market policy. Do we know if the Employment Service is a competent public agency that actually succesfully assist any unemployed person to jobs, immigrant or not? All the audits I have seen says the exact opposite, and the substantial critique levied against SFI during the past decade seems to have been unaddressed entirely. Is this because macroeconomists, concerned mostly macro-scale statistics, simply have left issues of organizational theory oustide the study? And why would you do that? There is little public management literature that would support such complacency.
What's really interesting is that the authors themselves seem to acknowledge that they actually do not know how the implementation of the existing policies work (did they miss all those audits? How?), but if so, how can they be so sure that we should feel confident that no major reforms of the toolsets are needed? Spending levels alone are very poor indicators of outcomes, and the outcomes - 20 years of clear and present labour market segregation, leave little reason to feel confident about this.
5) The authors argued in favour of better validation of foreign credentials. It's interesting, because it is a problem in other countries as well, including Canada. Only, here, the discussion concerns credential recognition, which is a slightly different, and more precise, perspective. I.e. it's about recognizing foreign experience, not validating it. The authors' suggested solution is a classic Swedish one - institute another public agency to do the work. Given that huge sums have already been invested in "systems" like that, I'm not sure why we should feel confident that another hierarchical and bureaucratic solution would work this time.
Besides, an important part of the problem is likely to be recruitment procedures, so maybe it would be better to raise the awareness among employers about how to make sure that recruitment procedures identify relevant competencies and do not discriminate people with foreign experience. There's a host of such methods to employ from other countries, and this was a topic discussed extensively in the early 00s, but for some reason it's been forgotten now.
6) The authors argue that more "experiments" are need to develop best practices. This is rather remarkable, since experiments and method development have been done for the past 15 years, funded by the EU through the European Social Fund. This is both for labour market policy practices in general, but a certain amount has always been devoted to immigrants as a special target group. If the authors are unaware of these experiments (I'm going to have to assume that this is the case), then why have these efforts passed into oblivion? Where are the reports? Who reads them? Hundreds of projects have been started up and finished. Have any been succesful (I know some have, though most might not have been). Why has the knowledge transfer been so poorly done that these experiments haven't even made a dent in the public discourse for a decade and a half?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that the reason is simple: the Employment Service is the biggest single national adminstration in the country. It has a huge budget, and obviously a vested interest in keeping keeping the status quo. The well-being of the clients is, most likely, a very secondary concern in that context. And that leads me to the next question:
7) Why are there no practitioners present at the seminar? No frontline civil servants or client representatives were present. There is, seemingly, no connection between the macro-scale economics and the experiences of the people who are outside the labour market, the very people these statistics are supposed to represent, and that will likely affect not only how the problem is formulated, but the ability present solutions that actually address client needs adequately. To do that, the clients of these interventions would need to have power to at least make their voices heard, or even better, the capacity to influence the agenda. That still doesn't exist in the Swedish debate.
The host asked if the consensus of the room reflected the consensus of the public discourse or simply reflected the panel being skewed. The answer, in my opinion, is: both. It does reflect the current state of the Swedish public discourse, and that public discourse is quite skewed, dominated by the perspective of macroeconomists (sociologists need not apply, it seems, and there is currently a grand total of one political scientist who make repeated appearances in the public spotlight). In short, it seems to me that it suffers from a high degree of tunnelvision which incapacitates it, stalls it, makes it incapable of moving forward or absorbing impulses from outside, and given how often speakers repeated that things are not very alarming, the reaction to this seems to be one dominated by complacency. That's both quite frustrating and quite alarming.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Some notes of ideas about homogeneity and heterogeneity
It's quite common, in debates about multiculturalism, immigration and integration, to hear comments about demographic change in populations, where the assumption is that these changes have had significance for "social cohesion" or the integration between populations in some respect. This is also common in comparisons. One common sentiment is that the conditions for immigration will be different in, for instance, Sweden than it will be in Canada because "Sweden is a homogenous nation while Canada is an immigrant nation". However, such comments might say more about contemporary perceptions about ethnocultural similarity and difference than they say about actual historical change. Let me explain.
"Race", "ethnicity" or "culture" are not biological "things" but rather social "things". I think that is a fairly straightforward statement, but it has some important implications for how these matters are discussed. From the above statement, it might seem like people in the early 1900s might have talk about the "homogenous peoples of Sweden", and the "heterogenous peoples in North America", but that was not the case. Rather, people in the those days discussed difference between populations, just as we are today, and they did both in Canada and Sweden.
At the time, the great concern was that of "race", based on Gobineau and the theories of "racial biology" and the assumption was that in the early times, human races were "pure", and mixing them would dilute that "purity". That was particularly detrimental, so it was argued, for the "more developed races", i.e. the blond, blue eyed "Aryans". If this seems familiar (think about Nazi race doctrine), it's no coincidence - Gobineau and the "scientific discipline" of racial biology was a great source of inspiration for German Nazi policy, but that movement was hardly the founder of the theory. Rather, those thoughts were accepted as common sense by mainstream politics at the time to a, forthe modern viewer, shockingly great extent.
In Canada, it manifested in the immigration laws. The country's first Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, explicitly embarked on a programme of building a homogenous British nation-state. For that purpose, he only wanted to allow "British Aryans" to immigrate. He never met with much success in this because there weren't enough English immigrants to satisfy the needs for new settlers, and thus the government slowly expanded the number of "races" that were acceptable as immigrants, based on ideas of "compatibility" with the "English race": Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, French, Eastern Europeans, Italians, etc. Meanwhile, people of Chinese and African heritage were actively discouraged from entering the country.
In Sweden, the parliament created one of the most significant centre for racial biological studies in Europe and conducted a great many studies to categorize phenotypical difference between people living in Sweden, categorizing them into the "most developed race", i.e. people of Swedish ethnicity, which were compared to "less developed races", like Finns, Sami or Roma populations. It's interesting to note that the forced sterilization programme that was implemented after WWII was often implemented on people who belonged to these "less developed races", like the Roma.
A historical study of the treatment of "us" and "them" in public space thus clearly shows there was a great deal of worry about "them" a century ago, too. So, when I hear people talking about demographic changes today, I have to say that I'm less than convinced that these changes are particularly significant for segregation. What has happened, rather, is that the label for who is "them" and who is "us" has moved. In Sweden, "we" used to be a fairly narrowly defined category of ethnic Swedes, and "them" were Jews, Finns, Russians, Sami and Roma. In Canada, "us" were the English, and "them" were Chinese and Africans, but also, to some extent, Eastern Europeans (who were very "otherized" during WWI).
This is the legacy and historical background one has to take into consideration when issues like "social cohesion" and "cultural compatibility"is discussed in public space. The term "race" might have (for good reason) become outdated, but the basic logic seems to be the same: people who are "like us" are "not a problem", but "they", "the different ones" are. This is also why I'm so concerned with the current focus on blaming multiculturalism for segregation and the "lack of social cohesion" as the cause of social problems associated with immigration. Like in the early 1900s, this discourse lays blame on "the others" for today's dilemmas, and, also like in those days, it advocates some form of assimilation as the solution. This is highly problematic, because it distracts attention from the power relations between mainstream populations and racialized minorities who are often marginalized on the political arena.
"Race", "ethnicity" or "culture" are not biological "things" but rather social "things". I think that is a fairly straightforward statement, but it has some important implications for how these matters are discussed. From the above statement, it might seem like people in the early 1900s might have talk about the "homogenous peoples of Sweden", and the "heterogenous peoples in North America", but that was not the case. Rather, people in the those days discussed difference between populations, just as we are today, and they did both in Canada and Sweden.
At the time, the great concern was that of "race", based on Gobineau and the theories of "racial biology" and the assumption was that in the early times, human races were "pure", and mixing them would dilute that "purity". That was particularly detrimental, so it was argued, for the "more developed races", i.e. the blond, blue eyed "Aryans". If this seems familiar (think about Nazi race doctrine), it's no coincidence - Gobineau and the "scientific discipline" of racial biology was a great source of inspiration for German Nazi policy, but that movement was hardly the founder of the theory. Rather, those thoughts were accepted as common sense by mainstream politics at the time to a, forthe modern viewer, shockingly great extent.
In Canada, it manifested in the immigration laws. The country's first Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, explicitly embarked on a programme of building a homogenous British nation-state. For that purpose, he only wanted to allow "British Aryans" to immigrate. He never met with much success in this because there weren't enough English immigrants to satisfy the needs for new settlers, and thus the government slowly expanded the number of "races" that were acceptable as immigrants, based on ideas of "compatibility" with the "English race": Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, French, Eastern Europeans, Italians, etc. Meanwhile, people of Chinese and African heritage were actively discouraged from entering the country.
In Sweden, the parliament created one of the most significant centre for racial biological studies in Europe and conducted a great many studies to categorize phenotypical difference between people living in Sweden, categorizing them into the "most developed race", i.e. people of Swedish ethnicity, which were compared to "less developed races", like Finns, Sami or Roma populations. It's interesting to note that the forced sterilization programme that was implemented after WWII was often implemented on people who belonged to these "less developed races", like the Roma.
A historical study of the treatment of "us" and "them" in public space thus clearly shows there was a great deal of worry about "them" a century ago, too. So, when I hear people talking about demographic changes today, I have to say that I'm less than convinced that these changes are particularly significant for segregation. What has happened, rather, is that the label for who is "them" and who is "us" has moved. In Sweden, "we" used to be a fairly narrowly defined category of ethnic Swedes, and "them" were Jews, Finns, Russians, Sami and Roma. In Canada, "us" were the English, and "them" were Chinese and Africans, but also, to some extent, Eastern Europeans (who were very "otherized" during WWI).
This is the legacy and historical background one has to take into consideration when issues like "social cohesion" and "cultural compatibility"is discussed in public space. The term "race" might have (for good reason) become outdated, but the basic logic seems to be the same: people who are "like us" are "not a problem", but "they", "the different ones" are. This is also why I'm so concerned with the current focus on blaming multiculturalism for segregation and the "lack of social cohesion" as the cause of social problems associated with immigration. Like in the early 1900s, this discourse lays blame on "the others" for today's dilemmas, and, also like in those days, it advocates some form of assimilation as the solution. This is highly problematic, because it distracts attention from the power relations between mainstream populations and racialized minorities who are often marginalized on the political arena.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Timbro-seminar 2: Subsidy, the road to work?
The second Timbro seminar I watched concerned the significant discrepancy in employment between immigrants and the native born population. This discrepancy is hardly new, but has persisted for at least as long as I've been actively studying the field (i.e. since 1998). To the best of my knowledge, it started sometime in the mid 80s. All the same, it is good to give it continuous attention, since it is a solid indicator of segregation.
Von Bahr, the author of the report presented in the seminar, discusses different explanatory variables that have been addressed in the public debate. She argues that discrimination is hardly a convincing such, since a survey conducted for the report showed that Swedes are more tolerant than many other populations (including, for instance, the Norwegians). Nor is there a lack of interventions. In fact, Sweden is known for spending heavily on programmes and training to integrate newcomers into the labour market. Rather, one should look to general labour market policies, like wage levels and work security. Since these are both very high, internationally speaking, there are some signifcant thresolds for immigrants to get over before they can enter the labour market. I.e, the entry level sustenance jobs that are found in many other countries (including Canada) do not really exist in Sweden, which creates an impediment for labour market integration.
In short, Timbro is saying pretty much the same as it has been saying for the past decades - reform work security legislation and lower pay roll taxes, and integration will improve.
Now, there is some truth to these arguments, I'd say. For instance, in a labour market where "the last one in, the first one out" is a regulatory regime at lay offs, new people (i.e. immigrants, youth and possibly women returning from maternity leave) in the labour market will, on a structural basis, find it harder to get entrenched there. This much I can agree with.
However, there are several problems with the presentation, as well (again, I have yet to get around to read the full report):
1) Discounting discrimination as problem is difficult to do based on the presented material. Opinion surveys, it seems to me, are probably a weak instrument at best to capture prevalence of discriminatory practices on the ground. This was wisely commented on by one of the commentators on the report, Ardalan Shekarabi, who pointed out that if you ask people if they are tolerant, they'll likely answer "yes", which says little about how they will actually conduct themselves when confronted with a situation where stereotypes and essentialist ideas about "others" come into play. This is probably particularly true in Sweden, where being tolerant is very much a deeply entrenched part of the Swedish self-image. What is needed, instead, is participatory observation and situational testing, and I'm not aware that anyone has conducted such studies in a comparative fashion between countries. Those that have been carried out in Sweden during the past decade consistently show that discriminatory behaviour does exist, both in employment situations, as well as when seeking housing, for instance.
2) Large sums of money are devoted to providing newcomers with language training and labour market interventions, this much is true, but being satisfied with this assumes that outcomes can be directly correlated to spending levels, and I'm not aware of any public management literature who would find this assumption convincing. In fact, the Swedish public administration has been consistently criticized for not knowing if the labour market policy administration delivers any measurable outcomes at all, both for the population in general and for immigrants. The past decade has even seen a lot of critique directed towards Swedish as a Second Language courses. I even believe that Timbro as sometime was part of that choir. It's strange that this dimension seems to have been left out in the report.
3) Entry level jobs are often a necessary first step for newcomers, this is true. But Swedish labour market statistics seem to stop measuring labour market success at that point, seemingly content as long as an immigrant has gotten a job, any job, regardless of the immigrant's previous work experience or educational level. That is hardly very satisfactory. If a great number of highly skilled people are doing work below their levels of competence, there is still a significant integration problem, and I'm not at all convinced that this would be addressed by simply lowering the payroll taxes.
Von Bahr, the author of the report presented in the seminar, discusses different explanatory variables that have been addressed in the public debate. She argues that discrimination is hardly a convincing such, since a survey conducted for the report showed that Swedes are more tolerant than many other populations (including, for instance, the Norwegians). Nor is there a lack of interventions. In fact, Sweden is known for spending heavily on programmes and training to integrate newcomers into the labour market. Rather, one should look to general labour market policies, like wage levels and work security. Since these are both very high, internationally speaking, there are some signifcant thresolds for immigrants to get over before they can enter the labour market. I.e, the entry level sustenance jobs that are found in many other countries (including Canada) do not really exist in Sweden, which creates an impediment for labour market integration.
In short, Timbro is saying pretty much the same as it has been saying for the past decades - reform work security legislation and lower pay roll taxes, and integration will improve.
Now, there is some truth to these arguments, I'd say. For instance, in a labour market where "the last one in, the first one out" is a regulatory regime at lay offs, new people (i.e. immigrants, youth and possibly women returning from maternity leave) in the labour market will, on a structural basis, find it harder to get entrenched there. This much I can agree with.
However, there are several problems with the presentation, as well (again, I have yet to get around to read the full report):
1) Discounting discrimination as problem is difficult to do based on the presented material. Opinion surveys, it seems to me, are probably a weak instrument at best to capture prevalence of discriminatory practices on the ground. This was wisely commented on by one of the commentators on the report, Ardalan Shekarabi, who pointed out that if you ask people if they are tolerant, they'll likely answer "yes", which says little about how they will actually conduct themselves when confronted with a situation where stereotypes and essentialist ideas about "others" come into play. This is probably particularly true in Sweden, where being tolerant is very much a deeply entrenched part of the Swedish self-image. What is needed, instead, is participatory observation and situational testing, and I'm not aware that anyone has conducted such studies in a comparative fashion between countries. Those that have been carried out in Sweden during the past decade consistently show that discriminatory behaviour does exist, both in employment situations, as well as when seeking housing, for instance.
2) Large sums of money are devoted to providing newcomers with language training and labour market interventions, this much is true, but being satisfied with this assumes that outcomes can be directly correlated to spending levels, and I'm not aware of any public management literature who would find this assumption convincing. In fact, the Swedish public administration has been consistently criticized for not knowing if the labour market policy administration delivers any measurable outcomes at all, both for the population in general and for immigrants. The past decade has even seen a lot of critique directed towards Swedish as a Second Language courses. I even believe that Timbro as sometime was part of that choir. It's strange that this dimension seems to have been left out in the report.
3) Entry level jobs are often a necessary first step for newcomers, this is true. But Swedish labour market statistics seem to stop measuring labour market success at that point, seemingly content as long as an immigrant has gotten a job, any job, regardless of the immigrant's previous work experience or educational level. That is hardly very satisfactory. If a great number of highly skilled people are doing work below their levels of competence, there is still a significant integration problem, and I'm not at all convinced that this would be addressed by simply lowering the payroll taxes.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Timbro-seminar 1: Who should be able to become a Swedish citizen
Timbro, the Swedish equivalent of the Canadian Frasier Institute (i.e. a right-wing think tank), is holding a series of seminars on integration, presenting reports they have solicitied on the subject. Dr. Johansson Heinö was the first presenter (followers of this blog will recall that he also presented on the Axess seminar). This was a follow up on his previous report "Integration or Assimilation".
This time, Johansson Heinö presented a proposal to improve integration, through addressing the status of citizenship. Sweden has, by international standards, a very low requirement for citizenship. In practice, all you need to do is to fulfill a certain period of residence. There are no tests, nor any oath of allegiance. This, evidently, has some concerned about the social cohesion of the country, arguing that this devalues the status of citizenship and undermines pride and a sense of belonging. At this point, I can't recall that I've seen any research to support that claim.
Johansson Heinö's remedy is to introduce a language test and make citizenship dependent on the applicant being fluent in Swedish.
While I'm not as opposed to this proposal as some others might be, there are still a number of reservations that should be brought up (note that this is based on watching the webcast seminar, I'll have to read Johansson Heinö's report to make further commentary):
1) The connection to improved integration is not very well established. MIPEX ranks Sweden as very succesful in the field of integrating immigrants (which I take exception to because it only studies formal processes) and does so specifically because citizenship is so easy to access. By this rationale, if citizenship is harder to attain, the integration process will actually become impeded. Since research shows that the level of integration is correlated to processes of naturalization, this is actually quite a convincing argument.
2) The connection between how difficult the citizenship is to attain and the sense of belonging is also not established. From what I recall from other studies, sense of belonging tends to be more correlated to immigrants' experience of how just society is in terms of equal opportunities and protection from discrimination as well as accumulated social capital within immigrant communities, so this suggestion might simply be addressing the wrong dimension of the process.
3) What do to with elderly immigrants? I seem to recall that older people have a harder time learning a new language, and it's quite established that many elderly immigrants never learn the language of the new country at all. This suggestion might very well become a barrier for that category of people.
4) Why addressing language, particularly? I'm asking, because the citizenship test in Canada is based on learning civics and history, which seems more conducive to creating the capacity to orient in the new country, including topics like how to vote and the basics of the democratic system, which are functions a citizen will need to know about to be able to participate fully in civic life. Learning about the common points of reference of the host society just seems, on an intuitive level, more conducive to increasing a sense of belonging than a test of grammar. Note that the Canadian test is written in one of the two official languages, so some level of linguistic ability is implicit, but testing history knowledge is quite different from testing vocabulary.
This time, Johansson Heinö presented a proposal to improve integration, through addressing the status of citizenship. Sweden has, by international standards, a very low requirement for citizenship. In practice, all you need to do is to fulfill a certain period of residence. There are no tests, nor any oath of allegiance. This, evidently, has some concerned about the social cohesion of the country, arguing that this devalues the status of citizenship and undermines pride and a sense of belonging. At this point, I can't recall that I've seen any research to support that claim.
Johansson Heinö's remedy is to introduce a language test and make citizenship dependent on the applicant being fluent in Swedish.
While I'm not as opposed to this proposal as some others might be, there are still a number of reservations that should be brought up (note that this is based on watching the webcast seminar, I'll have to read Johansson Heinö's report to make further commentary):
1) The connection to improved integration is not very well established. MIPEX ranks Sweden as very succesful in the field of integrating immigrants (which I take exception to because it only studies formal processes) and does so specifically because citizenship is so easy to access. By this rationale, if citizenship is harder to attain, the integration process will actually become impeded. Since research shows that the level of integration is correlated to processes of naturalization, this is actually quite a convincing argument.
2) The connection between how difficult the citizenship is to attain and the sense of belonging is also not established. From what I recall from other studies, sense of belonging tends to be more correlated to immigrants' experience of how just society is in terms of equal opportunities and protection from discrimination as well as accumulated social capital within immigrant communities, so this suggestion might simply be addressing the wrong dimension of the process.
3) What do to with elderly immigrants? I seem to recall that older people have a harder time learning a new language, and it's quite established that many elderly immigrants never learn the language of the new country at all. This suggestion might very well become a barrier for that category of people.
4) Why addressing language, particularly? I'm asking, because the citizenship test in Canada is based on learning civics and history, which seems more conducive to creating the capacity to orient in the new country, including topics like how to vote and the basics of the democratic system, which are functions a citizen will need to know about to be able to participate fully in civic life. Learning about the common points of reference of the host society just seems, on an intuitive level, more conducive to increasing a sense of belonging than a test of grammar. Note that the Canadian test is written in one of the two official languages, so some level of linguistic ability is implicit, but testing history knowledge is quite different from testing vocabulary.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Late comment on the Axess seminar...
So, I've finally been able to catch up on some work, and got around to see the Axess seminar "Beyond Multiculturalism", an event that was commented widely by the Swedish media. It was a full day seminar, available here.
It had some interesting comments, particularly from dr Johansson Heinö, who correctly pointed out that Sweden has only partly adopted multicultural policies, because while there were some grants to cultural events and so on, the higher echelons of professionals and economic stratas remained rather ethnically clean.
However, for me, it was the absences and silences that were more noteworthy. For instance, looking through the list of presenters (14 in total if I recall correctly), only Sarah Mohammed, representing Glöm aldrig Pela och Fadime, an NGO focusing on protecting people from honour-related persecution, could be said to represent racialized minorities in a wider sense, and Dr Johansson Heinö was the only academic with a clear focus on matters of ethnic relations. Where was SIOS, the largest umbrella organization of ethno-cultural associations in the country? Where was SIMBA, an organization that for more than a decade have excelled in finding entry points in the labour market for African immigrants? And where were all the academics who have studied ethnic relations in Sweden for the past decades? No one representing the Multicultural Centre, or IMER, or any of the research centres actually focusing on these issues was present. Nor was there any representative from frontline workers who try to address segregation on the labour market on a daily basis (Sara Mohammed being the exception).
If this seminar was organized in North America, it would have been unthinkable to exclude NAACP in the US, or the Metropolic Research Centres in Canada, and yet, the equivalent actors were not even on the guest list, from what I could see on the footage.
This lack of experience came across in the discussions, which drifted towards polemics against some left wing form of multiculturalism that, so it was claimed, is the core problem today because it creates ghetto mentality and a fragmented comunity (echoing Neil Bissoondath in Canada). Personally, I've never seen anyone ague that murder is ok when culturally motivated, but it felt like there was an understated sentiment in the seminar that some left-wing figures would have argued this. Please refer me to a text where such a position is taken.
Indeed, the only person present bringing attention to the issue of discrimination was Ardalan Shekarabi, problem that was otherwise largely ignored during the debate.
Taken in the context of the proposals presented from the centre-right wing parties in Sweden (strongly represented through politicians or think tank supporters), I'm afraid the seminar comes reinforced the momentum in public space where blame is laid on immigrants for problems with integration. Sara Mohammed's comments are illustrative of how this came across. She argued most fervently against the conservative elements of immigrant communities who have constantly enforced the oppression that she is working against, and she was very, and understandably, frustrated with Swedish public authorities accomodating and legitimizing those actors at the cost of those who become victimized.
Now, I understand that Ms Mohammed takes part in the seminar - Swedish immigrant actors are generally underfunded, neglected by the media, and will thus will naturally take any chance to advocate their position when given some public space. Still, the tragic irony is that if this trajectory is pursued, there is a great likelyhood that immigrant actors, immigrant associations, at large will become further de-legitimized and branded as suspect "special interests". If that happens, Sara Mohammad might find, one day, that public funders will withdraw their funding from her organization because it's seen as a less-than-trustworthy by those who have power over funding decisions. This would be quite countr-productive, because I'm confident that the clients Ms Mohammed seeks to support would very likely be better served by her NGO than a less than competent public agency. Indeed, I'd argue that she founded the organization precisely because the Swedish public sector lacks the competence to deal with these issues.
The effects of the seminar have already appeared, of course, an one commentator argues that it is time for the multiculturalist pendulim to swing back. The problem with that conclusion, of course, is that swinging back means a return to paternalist assimilitary policies, which will hardly solve the problem of disempowered immigrant communities, but rather aggravate it. And that's not "moving beyond multiculturalism" at all...
It had some interesting comments, particularly from dr Johansson Heinö, who correctly pointed out that Sweden has only partly adopted multicultural policies, because while there were some grants to cultural events and so on, the higher echelons of professionals and economic stratas remained rather ethnically clean.
However, for me, it was the absences and silences that were more noteworthy. For instance, looking through the list of presenters (14 in total if I recall correctly), only Sarah Mohammed, representing Glöm aldrig Pela och Fadime, an NGO focusing on protecting people from honour-related persecution, could be said to represent racialized minorities in a wider sense, and Dr Johansson Heinö was the only academic with a clear focus on matters of ethnic relations. Where was SIOS, the largest umbrella organization of ethno-cultural associations in the country? Where was SIMBA, an organization that for more than a decade have excelled in finding entry points in the labour market for African immigrants? And where were all the academics who have studied ethnic relations in Sweden for the past decades? No one representing the Multicultural Centre, or IMER, or any of the research centres actually focusing on these issues was present. Nor was there any representative from frontline workers who try to address segregation on the labour market on a daily basis (Sara Mohammed being the exception).
If this seminar was organized in North America, it would have been unthinkable to exclude NAACP in the US, or the Metropolic Research Centres in Canada, and yet, the equivalent actors were not even on the guest list, from what I could see on the footage.
This lack of experience came across in the discussions, which drifted towards polemics against some left wing form of multiculturalism that, so it was claimed, is the core problem today because it creates ghetto mentality and a fragmented comunity (echoing Neil Bissoondath in Canada). Personally, I've never seen anyone ague that murder is ok when culturally motivated, but it felt like there was an understated sentiment in the seminar that some left-wing figures would have argued this. Please refer me to a text where such a position is taken.
Indeed, the only person present bringing attention to the issue of discrimination was Ardalan Shekarabi, problem that was otherwise largely ignored during the debate.
Taken in the context of the proposals presented from the centre-right wing parties in Sweden (strongly represented through politicians or think tank supporters), I'm afraid the seminar comes reinforced the momentum in public space where blame is laid on immigrants for problems with integration. Sara Mohammed's comments are illustrative of how this came across. She argued most fervently against the conservative elements of immigrant communities who have constantly enforced the oppression that she is working against, and she was very, and understandably, frustrated with Swedish public authorities accomodating and legitimizing those actors at the cost of those who become victimized.
Now, I understand that Ms Mohammed takes part in the seminar - Swedish immigrant actors are generally underfunded, neglected by the media, and will thus will naturally take any chance to advocate their position when given some public space. Still, the tragic irony is that if this trajectory is pursued, there is a great likelyhood that immigrant actors, immigrant associations, at large will become further de-legitimized and branded as suspect "special interests". If that happens, Sara Mohammad might find, one day, that public funders will withdraw their funding from her organization because it's seen as a less-than-trustworthy by those who have power over funding decisions. This would be quite countr-productive, because I'm confident that the clients Ms Mohammed seeks to support would very likely be better served by her NGO than a less than competent public agency. Indeed, I'd argue that she founded the organization precisely because the Swedish public sector lacks the competence to deal with these issues.
The effects of the seminar have already appeared, of course, an one commentator argues that it is time for the multiculturalist pendulim to swing back. The problem with that conclusion, of course, is that swinging back means a return to paternalist assimilitary policies, which will hardly solve the problem of disempowered immigrant communities, but rather aggravate it. And that's not "moving beyond multiculturalism" at all...
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Integration or assimilation
Dr Johansson Heinö made an interesting contribution to the debate about immigrant integration in Sweden recently. He rightly observes that the word "integration" very often is used meaning assimilation in the debate in Western Europe. Sweden is no exception. The seminar presentation of his report contained one of the more sophisticated discussions on integration in Sweden that I can recall.
I agree with Johansson Heinö: it would make the public debate more sophisticated, nuanced and to the point if politicians used the word assimilation when they present assimilatory policies. When the word "integration" is used instead, it is misleading, and muddles the concept until it becomes essentially without meaning. Of coruse the reason it continues to be used is that it is much less controversial than "assimilation", and also that "integration" is often much less well defined, making it easier to make policy without having to be accountable for it.
Note: both the report and the seminar are in Swedish.
I agree with Johansson Heinö: it would make the public debate more sophisticated, nuanced and to the point if politicians used the word assimilation when they present assimilatory policies. When the word "integration" is used instead, it is misleading, and muddles the concept until it becomes essentially without meaning. Of coruse the reason it continues to be used is that it is much less controversial than "assimilation", and also that "integration" is often much less well defined, making it easier to make policy without having to be accountable for it.
Note: both the report and the seminar are in Swedish.
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