tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30943845712972630802024-03-08T03:28:31.524-07:00Mikael HellströmComments on matters of interest to me: multiculturalism, integration and ethnic relations in Canada and Sweden and public administration as well as teaching at the post-secondary level.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-84608149014603724032016-11-02T09:20:00.000-06:002016-11-02T09:21:43.813-06:00Utopianism on the right: Walling in "the nation"It is interesting to me that so much of right wing social visions today is about security and keeping us safe from things. It would seem that the world is a dangerous place (in spite of all the data showing that the world has become a much safer place over the last century) and that there is an urgent need to protect us. Much of that concern is focused on "securing the borders" from "illegal immigration" and to ensure that those who receive welfare "do not abuse the system". We hear that from politicians across the democratic world, particularly in relation to the ongoing refugee situation in Europe, during the Brexit debate and certainly during the American election campaign. It would seem that immigrants and poor people are dangerous.<br />
<h3>
The Fatalist Way: Management by mistrust</h3>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Key Values: Mistrust, suspicion, security, rule enforcement</h4>
<div>
The right wing narrative about the dangerous world is based on the assumptions that inform Fatalist management, which I often refer to as management by mistrust, namely that solidarity is impossible to achieve and that every system invites fraud, free-riding and opportunism. To counter that, governments need to take protective steps. Some of those are random controls, like the breath-tests used by traffic control law enforcement.</div>
<br />
The management model is clearly top-down but there is also little coordinated action, because trust levels are so low. This is rational within this system. Since actors fear each other, they don't dare enter into partnerships, because if they do, their ideas might be stolen by others. Alternatively, they have to work a lot while others don't work at all, just free-riding on others' efforts. Anyone who's done group work in school will recognize it. For those who do the work, there's just too little benefit for the high cost involved. Under such circumstances, people stop collaborating.<br />
<br />
That becomes a substantive problem when it occurs throughout society. Democracy builds on trust. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker Alexis DeToqueville described why American democracy worked: because people spontaneously came together, formed mutual aid groups and helped each other. Putnam later called this "social capital" and found, in a classic study, that Southern Italy's socioeconomic challenges could be tied to the lack of trust prevailing there. Citizens did not get organized and work together, because they did not trust each other. At a certain level, the lack of cooperation - the lack of social networks, social capital - becomes a problem and undermines democracy.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Keeping people in poverty: Workfare schemes</h4>
A very common Fatalist policy is the workfare program. It has been adopted for social welfare services across the democratic world in the last couple of decades and frames social welfare users as untrustworthy opportunists. To make sure recipients don't "abuse tax payer dollars", applicants are put through all sorts of rigorous tests, including drug use or literacy. Sometimes case officers force them to complete public work before giving them their welfare remuneration. The negative effects on the user have been well documented and they certainly don't do anything to get people off welfare or closer to self-sufficiency (Herd, Mitchell, & Lightman, 2005; Lightman et al., 2006; Lightman et al., 2006). In some cases, clients were unable to provide all the requested information and thus were disqualified (Herd, Mitchell, & Lightman, 2005). In one study, interviewed welfare recipients described how the system was “dominated by suspicion and a mentality of policing” (Herd et al., 2005, p. 13). Civil servants end up caught in the middle; they do not like having to treat clients this way. Senior managers complained that the system had been turned into an “eligibility machine” (Lightman et al., 2006, p. 137), which meant that they could not do what they wanted to, to support clients towards an improved life situation. The case demonstrates how destructive management by mistrust can be, particularly in social policy areas.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Walling in the nation to "keep it safe"</span></h3>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">By now, it should be easy to spot the consistency between the values of the Fatalist Way and what conservatives in all democratic countries are saying about immigrants and refugees: "They are here to abuse our generous system and we have to keep our borders safe from free-riders and people who might be criminals". That sentiment clearly builds on mistrust and a treatment of these categories as potential free-riders and opportunists whose primary motivation is to abuse "our hospitality/system". </span>While there is little new to say about him, <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Donald Trump's plan for immigration reform</a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> constitutes a good example of a Fatalist framing of immigration. The below identifies some typical Fatalist analysis in the plan.</span><br />
<br />
Here is the free-rider frame: "Current immigration policy costs taxpayers $300 billion a year." Note how Trump ignores the contributions immigrants ("legal" or "illegal") are making to the US economy by adding their productivity to the overall workforce. They could make even greater contributions if they could work without fear of deportation, so their status as illegal is actually a drag on the American economy, but Trump ignores that possibility, too.<br />
<br />
The crime-frame is referred in nine of ten bullets. Notably, most research shows that crime rates among immigrants in the US are lower than among the native born population, so this is incorrect, but it's essential to build the impression of a dangerous world that the Fatalist approach to governance thrives in. The point (no. 5 in Trump's list) about tripling the number of border control agents also supports that perspective, as does the now-famous proposal to build a wall. Trump wants to emphasize policing, rather than reform laws that are costly in both humanitarian and economic terms.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Consequences</h3>
The consequences of applying Fatalist policy as widely as Trump (and many other nativist, nationalist politicians want to) would be a decline in trust and cooperation in society as a whole. When that happens, we see a decrease in the formation of voluntary organizations, and a lack of capacity to do things together. Withering away trust on such a wide level risks undermining the political culture needed to support democracy itself.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-57543550058771999632016-08-08T13:26:00.002-06:002016-08-08T13:27:23.452-06:00When Utopian dreams meet reality...Politics has Utopians of many stripes; the radicals, the ones who want to stop "middling through" and change the whole system or just dump it and replace it with something else. Such attitudes can seem appealing, particularly for voters who think that most political parties are so similar that they are merely quibbling about technicalities, or just pretending to quibble about technicalities. Now, I do have some radical political ideas myself. For instance, I'm in favour of open borders. I am thus no alien to the appeal of radical solutions as such.<br />
<br />
Radical ideas become problematic, however, when they are based on powerful wording, but little consideration of the practicalities of implementing the idea or its possible consequences. For a political vision to be meaningful, it has to be possible to do it, to put it in practice, too. That means having a notion for how it should be organized. Who should do what, when, with what mandate, and under what accountability? To answer those questions, we land right in the issue of public administration, which many consider to be the least sexy of all topics in politics (I know, I thought so once). However, the questions cannot be avoided for anyone who wants to do anything political.<br />
<br />
It thus behooves those who want to change society to understand public administration and how it works. Those who don't will not be able to assess the potential consequences of moving a political vision from words to action.<br />
<br />
<i>Grid/Group Cultural Theory </i>is very helpful for this type of work. It was developed to categorize different forms of bureaucracy based on their a) level of regulation and b) how socially coherent they are as a unit:<br />
<br />
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<b>From Hood, Table 1.1(9) Four styles of public management
organization: Cultural theory applied, in Hood, C (2000) <i>The Art of The
State: Culture, Rhetoric and Public Management</i>, Oxford: Clarendon <o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
</tr>
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<br /></div>
</td>
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<b>Group
(Social cohesion)<o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 7.3pt; mso-yfti-irow: 2;">
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 7.3pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 187.35pt;" valign="top" width="250"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 1.95pt;">
<b>Low<o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 7.3pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 198.45pt;" valign="top" width="265"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>High<o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
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<td rowspan="2" style="border-top: none; border: solid windowtext 1.0pt; height: 80.45pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 35.5pt;" valign="top" width="47"><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b>Grid
(Rule-boundedness)<o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 80.45pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 37.7pt;" valign="top" width="50"><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>High<o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 80.45pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 187.35pt;" valign="top" width="250"><div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Fatalist Way<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Low-co-operation, rule-bound approaches to organization.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Example:</i> Atomized societies sunk in rigid routines. <o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 80.45pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 198.45pt;" valign="top" width="265"><div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Hierarchist Way<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Socially cohesive, rule-bound approaches to organization.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Example:</i> Stereotype [sic] military structure<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Low<o:p></o:p></b></div>
</td>
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<u>The Individualist Way<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.95pt;">
Competitive approach stressing negotiation and bargaining.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 1.95pt;">
<i>Example:</i> Chicago-school doctrines of ‘government by
the market’ and their antecedents.<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-left: none; border-right: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border-top: none; height: 7.3pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; width: 198.45pt;" valign="top" width="265"><div class="MsoNormal">
<u>The Egalitarian Way<o:p></o:p></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
High-participation structures in which every decision is ‘up for
grabs’.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="page-break-after: avoid;">
<i>Example:</i> ‘Dark green’ doctrines of alternatives to
conventional bureaucracy.<o:p></o:p></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The four types of administration are:<br />
<h4>
<b>The Hierarchist Way</b></h4>
This is the classic bureaucracy. It is top-down organized, has clear ranks with senior managers, middle managers, and frontline clerks and case officers who are supposed to act on orders. In political science, it's known as Weberian bureaucracy. The military is the most clear example of it, but it has been so popular that it has been the go-to model for how to structure a government agency since World War II, if not longer.<br />
<br />
It's good at decision-making and allocating responsibility. The buck stops in a clear location (the top) and the pyramid structure makes it easy to quickly take a decision and send an order down the ranks. It's bad at allowing for bottom-up impulses and flexibility for local needs. I.e. if the front-line case officers notice that the order makes little sense for conditions in their area, they have little recourse, and little chance of making their concerns heard in upper levels.<br />
<h4>
<b>The Fatalist Way</b></h4>
This is the go-to model for catching cheaters. It's not necessarily as rigidly structured as Hierarchism, but builds on the assumption that the world is a hostile place and people are out to get you. For that reason, it introduces randomized controls to catch free-riders and rule-breakers and makes sure that the staff rotates so they can't form cliques that could undermine the top's control.<br />
<br />
Those randomized controls does make it a decent model for catching cheaters, as evidenced by its prolific use in, for example, traffic controls or by revenue agencies. But like Hierarchism, it's bad for flexibility and also tends to systematically destroy trust among the people involved, so it quickly stifles innovation ("what's the point?") and undermines cooperation ("too much work and risk if the others will just rip me off"). It's generally incapable of responding to rapidly changing conditions.<br />
<h4>
<b>The Egalitarian Way</b></h4>
This is the classic communitarian way of management, where the objective is to eliminate the difference between producer and user entirely. It has been seen in a range of experiments by "alternative" communities for the last century, including, of course, hippies and deep green environmentalists. We saw similar attempts when the Occupy Wall Street wanted to eliminate the leadership cast. In short, the organization should be as flat as possible. Unlike the Hierarchist and Fatalist Ways, which are both top-down, this model is bottom-up, decentralizing decision-making to provide grassroots with much more power. Likewise, accountability is exercised through peer pressure. Versions of this model has been practiced in mainstream politics as well, and includes collaborative models that see public agencies partner with community groups - for instance law enforcement collaborating with the neighbourhood watch, or parent-school councils and so on.<br />
<br />
The strength of this model is that when decisions are made, they have strong buy-in or legitimacy from the membership. Among small groups of like-minded, it can thus work very well However, if the group fails to reach consensus or if factionalism develops, it can very quickly grind to a complete halt because the discussion never ends. As such, if there is disagreement, it can be very hard to get a decision made at all, and that has often been the Achilles heel that made Utopian community experiments come crashing down.<br />
<h4>
<b>The Individualist Way</b></h4>
This is the classic free-market solution. The most recent incarnation that made a big impression and triggered a global reform wave was New Public Management (the implementation of which is a whole can of worms in itself, requiring a separate blog post). The idea is to use the free market to make the public administration more cost-effective and less burdened by red tape. "Let managers manage" and "let users vote with their feet" were two typical slogans for this management type. Like the Egalitarian Way, it is designed to have considerable space bottom-up flexibility. Vouchers or procurement could be used where the public sector bought services from professional service deliverers, and users would then pick the provider they felt most comfortable with. Thus, users have power over service delivery.<br />
<br />
It's good at presenting users with more than one type of service, and can work when there are plenty of service delivery producers who compete with each other for the user's favour. It doesn't work well when in-depth cooperation is needed, however, because the competitive nature of the model undermines stable networking.<br />
<h3>
What's the point of all this?</h3>
<div>
What, indeed, is the point of this theory? There are a couple of points, really. First, organizational theory scholars (the research field where this typology was developed) have shown that there is only a limited number of models that have been used to organize public agencies and what they do in history. There's just so many ways of doing things, in other words. Second, every organizational type has its strengths and weaknesses. There are good ways and bad ways of doing things, but there is no silver bullet, no magical formula, no one-size-fits-all solution. They are good at some things and bad at others, and the public management literature has a lot of material about when they succeed and fail. The difficulty, when implementing a policy, is to know which type of organization that actually can have a hope of delivering the desired outcome. Choosing a screw-driver when you need a hammer will set you up for failure. It's the same thing in politics. Unfortunately, very few pundits, activists or politicians seem to be aware of this - or at the very least they neglect to discuss how they want to achieve their goals.</div>
<br />
In future posts, I will use these four types to evaluate political platforms on the left and the right in terms of what they imply about public administration and thus what effects they would have if carried out as actual politics.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-44540466707934221052015-12-02T14:26:00.000-07:002015-12-02T14:27:28.370-07:00Sweden's government implements the most restrictive migration policy in agesThe social democratic and Green party government coalition in Sweden made a U-turn on migration policy last week, introducing the most restrictive such in at least my lifetime. As more and more countries in the EU moves towards closing their borders, Sweden's remained relatively open and more than 140 000 refugees have gone there to seek asylum this year. That is just under twice as many as last year. Municipalities and the National Migration Board have argued that they are overwhelmed by the numbers, with overworked staff. The government argues that the new policy is set in place to:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Reduce the number of claimants so that the administrations gain some breathing room,</li>
<li>Send a signal to other EU-countries that it's time for them to step up to the plate.</li>
</ul>
<div>
Let's assess that. The proposal is available <a href="http://www.regeringen.se/artiklar/2015/11/regeringen-foreslar-atgarder-for-att-skapa-andrum-for-svenskt-flyktingmottagande/">here</a> (in Swedish).</div>
<h3>
The proposed changes to migration policy</h3>
<h4>
Temporary residency permits for every asylum seeker except quota refugees</h4>
<div>
This is a suggestion that will not necessarily impact the number of people seeking asylum in Sweden. However, it will make integration and settlement harder. The majority of asylum seekers will no longer be able to settle and build a future for themselves. To successfully settle, newcomers need to build economic, social and cultural capital in the new country. A person who loses residency will have to start that process all over again, destroying much of the assets built over the years. Moreover, the Migration Board will have to assess each asylum claimant twice, once to approve the temporary residence permit, and then a second time when it expires to see if the claimant can get permanent residency. That actually increases the administrative burden on the Migration Board over the long term.</div>
<h4>
Limit the right to family reunification for people with temporary residency</h4>
<div>
See above. It also means that newcomers have to apply as asylum seekers from scratch, which means that they will not be able to build on the economic, social and cultural capital that family members who arrived earlier might have created. Also, this will mean that people who could have been given expedient approval through family reunification will have to go through the asylum approval process, so this could potentially actually make processing times even longer.</div>
<h4>
Raised demands on families to support family class immigrants</h4>
<div>
Canada has demands like these already instituted. It is a barrier for immigrants, to be sure. Not sure how it will affect processing times, though. Also, this type of criterion does not necessarily mean decreasing the inflow of migrants. The result will depend greatly on community capacity.</div>
<h4>
<b>A category of refugee grounds is replaced by a more restrictive one</b><b><br /></b></h4>
<div>
This is where the Swedish government essentially says that Sweden will only accept quota refugees from now on. That is as close to closing the border that the Swedish government can push policy without violating important EU treaties and UN commitments.</div>
<h4>
Moreover</h4>
<div>
In addition to the detrimental effects mentioned above, the police are now conducting ID checks to all travelers using collective means of travel (trains, buses, planes, ships) arriving in Sweden. Instead of having police devoted to pursuing suspects of crime that actually hurt Swedish citizens, they are patrolling the borders to check the IDs of travellers, meaning that they need more resources, not less, to fulfill their core tasks.</div>
<h3>
Conclusions</h3>
<div>
I don't think anything good can come of this. The impact on asylum seeker inflow is dubious. It is unlikely to encourage any other European countries to open their doors more. On the contrary, so far Denmark and Norway seem to be following suit. The measures will increase public expenditures, not lower them, and also make integration for those who do receive permanent residency much harder. It will also close one more possible safe haven for refugees, even as they continue to die in the Mediterranean because of the Fortress Europe border policy. Finally, it will impact Swedish domestic policies negatively. At the moment, there are only two parties opposing the measures outright, the increasingly libertarian Centre Party and the radical Left Party. It's a far cry from the political consensus of September, when just about all parties except the Sweden Democrats still spoke warmly about international solidarity and a generous refugee policy.<br />
<br />
<br />
Just today, the Swedish news agencies are reporting that since the implementation of the new border restrictions, refugee smuggling is on the rise, and the first case of refugees crossing the Baltic in a rubber dingy has been reported. I am deeply concerned and fear that we might see a development where refugees risk their lives, and lose them, trying to reach Sweden. That is what often happens when a state restricts border crossing.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-10722327976836667782015-09-30T09:40:00.001-06:002015-09-30T09:40:19.452-06:00Immigration myths: Cultural arguments for closed borders<h3>
<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">This post deals with common culture-based arguments people use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. Much of the anxiety involved here, I believe, stems from a lack of understanding for how cultures work. That has been explored in-depth in both sociology and anthropology, but the findings have apparently not been disseminated successfully.</span></h3>
<h3>
<b>Culture arguments</b></h3>
<b>"Refugees/immigrants are too different from 'our own' people, if they get to enter the country, our society will suffer from this difference."</b><br />
<br />
First of all, research shows that migrants, regardless of "cultural distance" (whatever that means) can settle just fine in the host society. <a href="http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_53.htm">A conservative think tank </a>has published the "assimilation index" (which seems to be really about integration, not assimilation) showing that migrants from countries like Vietnam and the Philippines do very well in terms of labour force participation, income levels and military service. This has not gone down with increased immigration, but rather the opposite. There is also<a href="http://immigrationimpact.com/2015/09/22/immigrants-integrating-as-well-if-not-better-than-previous-generations-report-finds/"> this report </a>that says roughly the same thing.<br />
<br />
Second, the argument assumes that difference is bad. It thus builds on a long tradition of "us vs. them" that has been fueled by the idea that the "nation has to be ethnically homogeneous". That idea is a relatively recent one, emerging primarily in the 1800s. It argues that the state should be the vehicle for the self-determination of "the nation", and thus that borders should be created between nations, so that each nation gets its own state. See here an overview of nationalism as an ideology:<br />
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The problem is that nationalism idealizes the "magic line in the dirt", i.e. border-making. In reality, it's impossible to draw borders that creates homogeneous nation-states. Attempts to do so have led to disaster (see the ethnic cleansing during the wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia).<br />
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Also, a culture does not stop where the line on the map is drawn. I used to do an exercise where I challenged my students to name a country that was ethnically homogeneous. Just about any country that people usually think of as nation-states actually have a demographic reality that conflicts with the image of the ethnically homogeneous nation. A contemporary case in point is France, framed as a nation-state (some might say the original nation-state). Historically, the nation-state project was strong there, with heavy centralization from Paris. Just recently, the people in the Catalan region in Spain voted for separatist parties. Notably, the region with Catalan culture extends into France, but the way the borders have been drawn, the nationalist would expect that the Catalans of Southern France have more culturally in common with the Alsatians in Eastern France than they do with the Catalans in Northern Spain.<br />
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Japan also comes up often in this context, as it is a country many perceive as homogeneous, mostly because the Japanese government maintains this image to avoid acknowledging the ethnic minorities that do exist in the country. These include indigenous peoples in both the north and on Okinawa, as well as guest workers from China, Korea and the Philippines. Notably, the country's very restrictive border policies continues to block its economic development - the demographic challenge of an aging population that confronts all rich countries is most severe here, and as a consequence it experiences significant labour shortages. That could be solved if it opened up the borders to more immigration. So far, Japanese governments have refused, because of the strong pressure in the political culture to maintain the myth of nation-state homogeneity. Thus, the problem persists.<br />
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The most recent incarnation of the idea that difference is bad is Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", which argues that the defining conflict in the post-Cold War era will be one between Western and other civilizations, particularly the Muslim world. This theoretical framework has been thoroughly picked apart. I even used to pick it apart together with my students to demonstrate the inconsistencies in Huntington's conceptualization of "civilization", but that's a subject for a blog post on its own. Suffice to say is that many politicians and pundits seem to have found Huntington to be deeply inspirational and keep using "Clash of Civilization"-style framing to argue that some cultures are "incompatible with others" and use that as a rationale to close borders.<br />
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Conflicts, instead, flare up when ethnic difference are politicized. That has happened in many places in the past, but in that case, bigotry is to blame, not ethnic difference in itself. Consider the Chinese, Korean or Japanese communities in the US. I would say that racism from the mainstream population have been a bigger barrier in their settlement than their "cultural difference". Conflict on a societal scale only tends to emerge when political leaders work hard to make them happen by blaming an ethnic group for things that go wrong in society (i.e. scapegoating). We could see that in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, and so on. In that sense, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, difference will lead to conflict when someone makes it a problem.<br />
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<b>"They will destroy our culture/We have the right to preserve our national identity/values"</b><br />
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This argument is closely related to the previous one, but focuses more on the maintenance of "us as similar" rather than on "them as different". It is based on the idea that sameness is inherently good, which can be contested. Also, it assumes that culture is something static, and that it has always been there and somehow was more "pure" in the olden days, before we "mixed with others". This view is called primordealism and has problems. The idea that culture was "pure" once assumes that people didn't mix back in the day, but they did. People have always moved and cultures have always changed over time. This is most easily identifiable in how languages change: English today is not what it was 1 000 years ago, or 500 years ago or even a century ago.<br />
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Those governments that tried to stop cultural change have done poorly. Governments in both Imperial China and Japan tried to isolate those countries from the rest of the world precisely based on this idea - both felt that their own cultures were superior to all other cultures in the world. China implemented that policy in the early 1400s, at a time when China was the global superpower in just about every sense of the word - culturally, economically, technologically, militarily. 400 years later, the Chinese government discovered the consequences of the policy the hard way when it found how the Western European countries had passed it by entirely. Loss of innovation is the price of isolation. The Chinese population has paid a high price for that policy over the last couple of centuries and are only now, when the Chinese government has opened up the Chinese economy, starting to recover from it.<br />
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To take an opposite example, the United States accepted many migrants from diverse countries in the late 19th century. That did not destroy American culture, but rather contributed to the country's economic and cultural success in the 20th century.<br />
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Such examples call to mind research on group-think done on organizations. Such studies show how organizations that are too internally homogeneous lose the capacity to innovate, because there are too few perspectives, too few ways to challenging what is taken for granted. I don't think such experiences should be dismissed in this context.<br />
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Interestingly, when this "preserving our values"-argument comes up, it proves very difficult for its advocates to present a comprehensive overview of what those values are. Now, this is not to argue that ethnic identities do not exist, they do. A Swedish person does not have the same outlook on the world as someone from China or Brazil. Rather, cultures are diffuse, and also internally heterogeneous, and thus they resist attempts at codifying them for the purposes of legislation. For example, when the government of the UK tried to put together a document intended to demonstrate "British values"for immigrants, it ended up turning to the European Charter of Humans Rights. The European Charter of Human Rights is, of course, European, not specifically British. Also, Human Rights are not even specifically European, but much more universal. That's how it usually goes - the document becomes something very vague along the lines of democracy and human rights are important. They are, but they are not values that are unique for any particular nation-state, but rather shared by people globally.<br />
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<b>"Their culture is primitive/backwards/heathen"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>This is another argument inspired by a Huntingtonian worldview. Instead of saying "difference is bad" or "sameness is good", it says "we are better than those people in particular", which is a classic driver behind the racialization of ethnic groups. Notably, the hierarchy still is colour-coded. On top can always be found the "whitest" peoples, who are framed as "more civilized", and as we descend through the ranking, the peoples are increasingly coloured, where the bottom of the hierarchy is "the most primitive". Essentially, it creates a hierarchy of "good people" vs. "bad people", repeating the statements made by racial biologists a century ago, only, now it frames the ranking in terms of culture instead of race.<br />
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In Sweden, that ranking would have ethnic Swedes on top, as "the most enlightened, democratic, civilized and developed". After that come peoples from neighbouring areas, with Norwegians and Danes first, Finns and Sapmi last (they've always been at the bottom of the Nordic rankings). Then come other Western, Central Europeans and Anglo-Saxons, with Protestants higher and Catholics lower. Then comes the Mediterranean peoples and Eastern Europeans. After that come Latin Americans, followed by Asians and then Middle Eastern peoples. Africans come last, particularly Somalis. This hierarchy is not just a matter of perception, but so entrenched that it is found in the labour market. Swedes have the highest employment numbers, Somalis the lowest.<br />
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<b>"Immigrants may bring homophobia, sexism or other bigotry"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>Yet another way of invoking Huntington's "Clash of Civilization"-argument. This is a spin of the former argument, and equally targeted at racialized immigrants (mostly Muslims). Only, in this case it has been reframed and dressed with key values that most people in democracies will find anathema. The irony is that many nationalist parties tend to be weak when it comes to protecting the rights of non-ethnic subaltern groups. Their track records when it comes to women's rights, the protection of sexual minorities or those of disabled people are not impressive. Another irony is that the person who argues this effectively stereotypes a whole group of people, which is bigotry itself. Like all other categories of people, immigrants are diverse. Many migrants are actually moving because they have been persecuted by bigots and because they are pro-democracy and human rights activists.<br />
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Furthermore, if we are to take values like freedom of thought and freedom of speech seriously, this argument is impossible to sustain. You can't have a border control based on political opinion for a country that says that all citizens have the right to hold whatever political opinions they want. Notably, some countries have tried adopting policies that would "educate" newcomers about "acceptable values" in the host society, for instance the Netherlands and France. The data I've taken part indicates that integration outcomes for the Netherlands actually have taken a turn for the worse, so apparently the policy isn't working. That doesn't surprise me much, as the policy strongly signals that newcomers are not trusted. That is a poor way to welcome them.<br />
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<b>"We should treat them like we would be treated in their country"</b><br />
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I've seen this one with some regularity. It is often invoked when talking about people moving from particularly oppressive authoritarian states. The strange part about this is that the speaker somehow is holding a person who is oppressed by a dictatorship (a government without any democratic legitimacy) partially responsible for what that government is doing. Listen, you can't hold the citizens of Saudi-Arabia responsible for the fact that their government is prohibiting women from driving cars. The people have no say in the matter - it's a dictatorship! Also: are you really suggesting that the government of [insert the democratic country you live in] should start acting like a dictatorship? Surely, we prefer democracies precisely because they do not act like dictatorships. Stop advocating dictatorship!<br />
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<b>"They are radical and anti-democratic and will destroy our democracy and replace it with their totalitarian theocracy" </b><br />
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This one is usually used about Muslims who get stereotyped as radical fundamentalists. I'll let this man respond:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-70077642904219193782015-09-27T12:14:00.003-06:002015-09-27T12:14:47.882-06:00Immigration myths: Law and order arguments for closed borders<h3>
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<span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">This post deals with common law and arguments people use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. As the overview will show, these arguments are difficult to sustain on closer scrutiny. An examination exposes their weak foundation.</span></h3>
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Law and order arguments</h3>
<b>"Refugees and/or immigrants are criminals/terrorists and should be kept out of the country lest social unrest results"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>No. There is no research suggesting that crime rates are higher among immigrants than among the native born population that I am aware of. In fact, the opposite is often true. Now, consider what some are suggesting here: because a marginal fraction of immigrants might have committed criminal acts, everyone should be kept out. That's a form of collective punishment, seriously disproportionate to the problem at hand, and as such a severe infringement of human rights. A better approach would be to keep the borders open and then use regular law enforcement services to bring those who do commit crimes to justice - the way that is done with any native born.<br />
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New immigrants are expected to abide by the laws of the land, like everyone else. No one has argued that immigrants should be allowed to break the law. Designing a law that keeps people out because someone else has broken a law and "we think these people might break the law in the future" goes against some fundamental legal principles, like "presumed innocent until proven guilty".<br />
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<b>"Allowing immigrants in undermines social cohesion"</b><br />
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People who argue this often refer to Robert Putnam's famous study <i>E Pluribus Unum</i>, which found that local trust levels tend to go down when new immigrants settle in a neighbourhood. They tend to read that piece selectively, however, because the piece then goes on to explain how that can be remedied by building networks between newcomers and long time residents. In short, when people get to know each other, they develop trust. He also cites a number of organizations that have done well with an ethnically diverse workforce.<br />
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Also, note how political leaders who speak of how "multiculturalism has failed" and how it challenges "social cohesion" (like David Cameron) never manage to define social cohesion. It's one of those words that sound important but has no real meaning. That makes it particularly useful for xenophobic groups.<br />
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<b>"Immigrants bring disease"</b></h4>
During the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, this argument was used by some who wanted to close the borders for people from the affected areas. This, again, would be a form of collective punishment that is completely disproportionate to the health risks involved. See<a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26427-why-closing-borders-wont-stop-ebolas-rampage/"> this piece</a> for an elaboration on how destructive a border closure would have been. If it can't be sustained for a pandemic of that level of seriousness, I can't see how it could be sustained for other matters of health either.<br />
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Some would say that the concern is that migrants will burden the health care system. If that is so, a better solution would be to keep the borders open but say that immigrants who are not citizens do not get access to health care. That way, the immigrants would have a few rough first years, but eventually, would become naturalized. If I have to choose between closing the borders and keeping the borders open while deny newcomers health care services, I would go with the latter. Personally, I think that solution is excessive. There will there be some immigrants who need health services, but there will also be many who a) contribute with tax dollars to fund health services as they work and b) who either arrive with professional health care expertise and thus can work in the sector, or choose to become doctors or nurses after arrival.<br />
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<b>"Illegal immigrants should be deported because they entered the country unlawfully"</b><br />
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It is technically true that people who enter the country outside the auspices of the official channels do so unlawfully. Notice, however, how the remedy to this, for those who raise "the issue of illegal immigration" is always to deport people and close down borders. A more straightforward solution would be to change what is, ultimately, an expensive and inhumane law for everyone.<br />
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Let us probe a good example: Prohibition. That law was formulated with the best of intentions: to save people from the evils of alcohol abuse. The method chosen, banning alcohol, probed incredibly costly and inhumane. Governments had to spend incredible resources enforcing the law, the alcohol that was produced was less safe precisely because it was done on the black market, with little to no accountability, and organized crime flourished. The sensible solution was to repeal prohibition.<br />
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Notice the many parallels to closed borders: smugglers can line their pockets, migrants have to constantly worry about government law enforcement (which gives scrupulous employers ample opportunity to exploit them) and risk injury and death as they travel across borders in dangerous and remote areas. Alan Kurdi's fate is a case in point; the migrants dying on the Mediterranean do so because European governments have put up fences and closed the borders where it is safe to travel.<br />
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If the borders were, instead, open, travel would be without risk. Exploiting smugglers or employers would no longer be able to threaten migrants without documents with deportation, so they could get proper jobs, with proper labour protection and thus be as productive as anyone else in society. The migrants could send their children to school without fear of government persecution. Governments could save all that money that is currently plowed into control measures that create more problems than they solve.<br />
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Next time a politician suggests building walls to "protect the border", some should ask why that is a good idea when it would be so much easier and more beneficial to everyone to just re-write the law an open the borders. Today, we consider the prohibition of coffee in Sweden enacted periodically during the 18th and 19th century) outlandish and absurd. The ban on movement across borders is much more destructive.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-31251721651711447342015-09-26T14:03:00.002-06:002015-09-26T14:03:23.222-06:00Immigration myths: Economic arguments for closed borders<h3>
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This post deals with common economic arguments people use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. I should say that economics is not my research focus, but the overview will show that there is not much evidence from findings in that discipline, as far as I know, that would substantiate an economic rationale for closing the borders. If politics was genuinely driven by an ambition to do what benefits the economy, borders would be opened up, not closed down.</div>
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Economic arguments</h3>
<b>"Refugees don't need help, because they have cellphones so clearly they are well off"</b><br />
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Is that a reason to close the border? If they don't need our help, they won't use government services and can support themselves, so what is the problem with keeping the border open?<br />
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<b>"We should take care of our own people before we let new people in"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>This seems straight forward: "The pie in our country is limited. If more people get in, we all get a little less to get by." The problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn't take time into account. The pie actually grows over time. Most countries have experienced population growth over the past century, but in most cases, that did not result in lowered standards of living, but rather the opposite. Most of us are much better of today than our ancestors were a century ago. The number of jobs in modern democracies has increased together with population growth . It doesn't really matter if that growth is from fertility or immigration. As the population grows, so does the economy.<br />
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<b>"We need to protect our jobs so that outsiders don't take them away from us"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>This is related to the above argument and also frames the labour market as a zero-sum game, which means that it has the same weakness as the above. People who argue this apparently have such low confidence in the skills and productivity of your own compatriots that they want to use force to keep people out of the country. In fact, research shows that most immigrants a) do not compete for the same types of jobs as the native born do, because skill sets only partially match up and b) immigrants often create jobs over time that can end up employing the native born. See this overview, for example:<br />
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When South Africa was desegregated, a massive migration from remote areas to metropolitan centres started. If large numbers of migrants really do have negative effects on the economy, it should have happened. It didn't. Instead, average incomes rose by more than 50 %. White South Africans were not disadvantaged, their incomes rose by even more than average; 275 %.<br />
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Over time, immigrants contribute staggering numbers to the economy of their host countries, as well as to the public coffers. This has been consistently showed by the OECD and is a general consensus among economists, even economists who like closed borders.<br />
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<b>"We need to stop poor countries from losing their best and brightest to brain drain, and should therefore close the borders to help them develop"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>The brain drain issue arose as a concern in the 1980s and 90s and was given attention in the scholarship. It turns out that, over time, it wasn't much of an issue. Two things generally happened, sometimes both. 1) The migrants would send money to their relatives. This is known as remittances. These help the local economies in poor countries substantially, even more, some claim, than foreign aid. 2) The migrant gets professional expertise and education/training in the new country and then returns to the country of origin, bringing valuable experiences to benefit these economies. Closing the borders would hurt the economies of poor countries considerably.<br />
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It's quite cynical to say that armed guards should stop people from crossing the border "for their own good". One of the best policies any democratic government could adopt today to combat global poverty would be to open the borders for immigration to both refugees and others.<br />
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<b>"There are too many refugees, the system can't handle them/it will cost too much to let them all in"</b><br />
<b><br /></b>The problem with this assertion is that a) it is always made, regardless of how many refugees there actually are, and b) even when refugee streams peak, time is not taken into account (which seems like a theme for this category of concerns). Europe has confronted many periods when greater numbers of refugees emerged for one reason or another. One was in the aftermath of World War II, when millions of people were on the move, either going back home, or fleeing because they had been displaced by the changed borders. Another moment when refugee numbers rose was during the wars that developed as Yugoslavia collapsed.<br />
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Did these events create situations that were challenging to address for existing systems? Most likely. What happened over time? Answer: the refugees settled in, found work and became residents of those countries, many of them as naturalized citizens. It might have taken some months and sometimes even some years, but over time, problems dissipated. Twenty years later, nobody talks about Bosnian refugees as a problem group. The same thing happened to the Vietnamese refugees in the mid-70s, and the same will happen for the Syrians fleeing the war today if they are let in. They will form new communities, find work, start companies and settle in,<br />
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Also, refugee numbers have only limited effect on how well the post-migration situation develops. Instead, I propose paying more attention to the settlement bureaucracy. <a href="https://era.library.ualberta.ca/.../Hellstrom_Mikael_R_201412_PhD.pdf">In my dissertation</a>, I find that Sweden's poor integration outcomes are a result of a highly centralized bureaucracy that disempowers immigrants and pacifies them, effectively channeling them into permanent unemployment. But that is the system's fault, not the immigrants', and it is solved by less micro-management and by supporting decentralized services designed by immigrant communities, much as is being done in Canada and the United States. Thus, the greatest challenge for the successful integration of Syrian refugees, I would argue, will likely be government bureaucracies that make it difficult for them to settle.<br />
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Thus, most of the problems we are seeing now are created by the attempts of governments to close borders, not by people trying to move from one place to another. If the borders to Europe (and elsewhere) were open, people would be able to move and settle in new places without the tragic loss of life we currently see and with much lower economic costs to governments (those border policing and rescue efforts are not for free) and migrants. That lower cost would be translated into a quicker settlement and integration process. Everybody would win with less micro-management of borders.<br />
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<b>"They are abusing the system and enriching themselves on arrival"</b><br />
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This is the "social tourism"-argument. "Immigrants", it says "are only out to become welfare moochers and come to live on the tax dollars of hard working native born people". Again, no. The argument has been used by politicians in many countries to close borders. When the EU expanded to include the Eastern European countries in 2005, the Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson wanted to close the Swedish borders to migrants from the new EU countries using this argument as a rationale. He was defeated by parliament. Did the "mass invasion of welfare moochers" materialize? No. One reason is that access to social welfare occurs through a fairly complex regulatory framework which can be difficult enough for the native born to learn if they don't have to use it themselves, and even harder for migrants to learn about before arrival. Another is, simply, that migrants come to work. When they don't work, it's because governments have put regulations in place that prevent them from working. The primary outcome of Persson's play was to damage the government's relation to the Polish and other Easter European governments, whose citizens had just been stereotyped as lazy moochers. Meanwhile, the Poles went to the U.K. and Ireland, where there was work.<br />
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<b>"Accepting too many refugees/immigrants will destroy the welfare state"</b><br />
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This argument, like many above, also builds on the "the pie isn't big enough to open the borders"-argument. Unlike some of those above, this argument can be construed to have some support from Milton Friedman in the sense that he is on record saying that a state with a welfare state cannot have open borders. His argument is that the social entitlements and programs will become too costly when too many immigrants arrive. He concludes that new arrivals should not have access to social programs for an open border policy to work.<br />
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I believe Friedman is wrong in this case. Most immigrants are of a working age and in good health. They will thus work and pay taxes, and since they've already gone through education somewhere else, the host society has to pay lower costs for schooling the new arrivals than it has to for those who are native born.<br />
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That is, if they are allowed to work. Friedman does have an important point with his critique of the welfare state - the programs that are supposed to do good actually end up doing a lot of bad. A perfect case in point is social welfare, which locks people into poverty through humiliating means-testing. There's a comprehensive literature showing how paternalist and disempowering the programs are (but that topic deserves a separate blog post). If the bureaucratic systems channel immigrants to social welfare, then they will be blocked from the labour market. Like I mentioned above, my dissertation argues that this is a problem in Sweden. That problem, however, is one that is best remedied by reforming the welfare system for everyone, not by closing the borders for immigrants.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-34873693990252490852015-09-25T08:58:00.001-06:002015-09-25T08:58:20.189-06:00Immigration myths: introducing an overview of arguments for closed bordersBy now, the ongoing refugee crisis has been making headlines for quite a while. Political leaders in both Europe and North America have to address it. It has affected the Canadian election campaign as the Harper government is being challenged on its response to the developing situation.<br />
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A lot of people, both political leaders, pundits and citizens in general, have opinions about this. Alas, a lot of those opinions seem deeply misinformed about how migration (refugee and otherwise) and immigrant integration actually works. I will address a (somewhat random) selection of common statements that I have seen across the Internet over the past few weeks in three coming blog posts. They will be based on theme, the economic, law and order, and cultural rationales that people often use to defend the "we need to close our borders for immigration"-position. I originally planned to deal with them in just one blog post, but...well...it sort of grew a bit.<br />
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These "closed borders"-arguments are represented in just about all democracies. The most obvious such come from nationalist politicians, in Europe represented by parties like UKIP in the UK, Front National in France or the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, so the anti-immigration stance is often associated with the right-wing politics. However, it exists on the left, too. The US presents a good example of this, where Democrats want to close borders to "protect American jobs" and Republicans (the most glaring example being Trump) want to build a wall to Mexico "to keep the criminals out". The short reply to these politicians is that they are wrong. The scientific consensus is that immigration does not hurt the economy and that immigrants are not more criminal than the native born population.<br />
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Instead of thinking that the norm should be closed borders and asking how many immigrants can we accept, the norm should be to ask: What rights do governments have to set up barriers for the free movement of all humans?<br />
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Recommended sources</h3>
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There is a quite an extensive body of scientific literature on this topic which I'm not going to cite here. The list would simply be too long (and some of the material is behind the pay walls of academic journals). The below are accessible reads/videos that succinctly summarizes the state of the art in research:</div>
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<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/9/13/6135905/open-borders-bryan-caplan-interview-gdp-double">The Case for Open Borders</a><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtRmS7q9DlM">Myths about Immigration</a><br />
<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2013-12-16/let-people-go">Let the people go - a review of Paul Collier's argument for closing the borders</a><br />
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Oh, and:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-60742154697548714232015-07-07T09:59:00.001-06:002015-07-07T09:59:27.198-06:00Some notes on course design and assignmentsSince adopting <a href="http://3dgamelab.com/">3dgamelab</a> as a teaching tool, I have had the opportunity to think about assignment design. Below are some that turned out to be quite engaging for students:<br />
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<u>Design a midterm</u></h3>
This was inspired from a brainstorming session about student self-assessment. Only a person who has a strong grasp about the course material can design appropriately calibrated midterm questions. Such questions have to address core concepts and do so in a way that compels the test taker to use them. So I figured, why not give the students the task of designing a few midterm questions? I instruct them to do fourish multiple choice questions and two short answer questions. The assignment works really well - not a few students design better questions than I would have, and the exercise quickly reveals which students are still struggling with the material.<br />
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<u>Swapping papers</u></h3>
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One of the problems of academic paper writing exercises for students is to get the needed feedback to improve. One of the problems for instructors is to get papers with relatively elementary issues, like grammar, punctuation and the like - writing issues that are really on the secondary level of schooling. At post-secondary, instructors (in my experience) would prefer to deal with the structure of the paper, or the strength of the argument and research. </div>
<div>
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<div>
This assignment is designed to address both of the above problems. It has students switch papers with each other before handing in the draft to the instructor. They read a peer's paper and comment on it constructively - what was strong, what can be improved? For the student, it has the benefit of having them reflect on the writing process as a reader, so when they go back to their own paper they can use that perspective more effectively during editing. Also, they get some feedback from a peer who can hopefully catch the most glaring grammar issues. The instructor on average gets papers of higher quality.</div>
<h3>
<u>Flip the classroom</u></h3>
First, I decided to remove the planned lecture series from the course design. Since I was using a webtool to deliver the course assignments anyway, I felt that any material that would have been presented through a traditional lecture series could just as well be done through YouTube-videos. Thus I started my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MrMHellstrom">channel</a>. I upload all the lecture material there. In my experience, the material presented through the traditional 50 minute lecture can be presented through a 10-15 minute video just as well. The shorter time frame requires being more concentrated with the information and the fact that students can re-watch the video an infinite number of times effectively avoids the problem of wondering whether students will remember what you said in a lecture six weeks ago.<br />
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These videos become mini-assignments for students to watch and then I use the classroom time for exercises that compel the students to use the concepts introduced in the videos. The time saved through this method cannot be overestimated.<br />
<h3>
<u>The role-plays</u></h3>
And that's where the role-plays come in. These are design to provide a simulation of the institutions and political contexts the students are studying in the readings and are inspired by edu-larps (educational live action role-playing) and Model UN. In short, this is game-based learning. Students take the roles of politicians, journalists, civil servants or clients and act within the incentive structure of the institution in question. The debriefs they have to do after each simulation shows how effective the tool is. These are some of the models designed (there is more):<br />
<h4>
Introduction to Comparative politics</h4>
<ul>
<li>US Congress - pass a budget</li>
<li>UK House of Commons - Question Period</li>
<li>German Parliament - build a government coalition post-elections</li>
<li>French Unitary State - build a budget in the contest between regional, departmental and municipal governments who all want state funding</li>
</ul>
<h4>
Introduction to Canadian politics</h4>
<ul>
<li>First Minister Conference - interaction between federal and provincial governments re: Senate reform</li>
<li>The Newsroom - an exercise in media news triage</li>
<li>An election campaign - pitch your platform and then win the televised debate. Next time I do this one, I would like to broadcast the debate live through my YouTube-channel to give the students a group of voters, too.</li>
</ul>
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In my last incarnations of this, I took a cue from Sheldon's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MultiplayerClassroom">The Multiplayer Classroom</a>, and made the role-playing continuous. That is, students took the roles that they played through the entire term, from five different "character classes", like in computer games. For Comparative Politics, these were Politician, Civil Servant, Journalist, Activist, and Academic. The idea is for each of these to have their own motivations and goals, and together, the students create a story line that probes the concepts at hand. I will be exploring this model further in the future.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-50067846142476722502015-06-23T13:20:00.001-06:002015-06-23T13:20:35.452-06:00Race and demography in SwedenA debate about racial demography is developing in Sweden. This is the background - recently, the Swedish government decided to create a national institute against racism and extremist violence. This task has been assigned to Gothenburg University. It has drawn a range of criticism from scholars exploring racism.<br />
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Among other issues, critics <a href="http://www.gp.se/nyheter/debatt/1.2745091-nytt-centrum-mot-rasism-far-fel-vetenskaplig-inriktning">have</a> pointed <a href="http://m.gp.se/nyheter/debatt/1.2751766-forskningen-om-rasism-reduceras">out</a> that all the working group that has been appointed to develop the centre are all white and none of them have specialized in the study of racism. The critics argue the omission of non-whites and racism scholars is rather remarkable given the group's mission. They describe the appointment process as <a href="https://feministisktperspektiv.se/2015/06/12/columbusing-vita-forskares-excellens-i-rasismforskning/">columbusing</a>, i.e. where a group of power-holders "discover" something that was already known outside their own circle. The obvious comparison is, what would the reaction be if a centre was set up for the study of gender equality, but the working group to develop this centre were all males without any experience of gender studies?<br />
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There was an immediate reaction to this critique, particularly from professor Rothstein. For context, he is one of the most luminary Swedish political scientists, with a highly distinguished publishing record. It's not possible to get an undergraduate degree in political science in Sweden without reading some of his work. He <a href="http://www.gp.se/nyheter/debatt/1.2748138-ska-vi-registrera-gu-s-forskare-efter-ras-">considers </a>the critics' attention to the racial background of the appointees deeply troubling. He then turns to the time in the 1930s when the Swedish government asked the government of Nazi Germany to introduce the stamp "J" in the passports of its Jewish citizens. He argues that the attention anti-racists give to the racial or ethnic background of applicants or employees amounts to copying the Nazi German model.<br />
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Shortly afterwards, an influential editorial by Teodorescu (on the political right - these issues often become politically polarized quickly) <a href="http://www.gp.se/nyheter/ledare/ledarkronika/1.2751654-alice-teodorescu-varfor-legitimera-rasismens-logik-">came out </a>essentially repeating Rothstein's position. Her development of the argument essentially lands in the conclusion that we should stop speaking about racial or ethnic categories all together, because doing so reinforces racism and exclusion.<br />
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The argument is bizarre for anyone who has worked in the field of combating ethnic discrimination for any period of time. One of the primary tools for tracking processes of discrimination is to chart the demography of employees in the workforce. This is routinely being done in both private and public organizations in several countries, notably the United States and Canada.<br />
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A typical example of how such tools are implemented is <a href="http://ucsfhr.ucsf.edu/index.php/pubs/hrguidearticle/chapter-12-managing-diversity-in-the-workplace/">diversity management</a> (yes, it is loaded with controversy, but that goes beyond this post). A classic problem is that recruitment processes can be unintentionally discriminatory, when a homogeneous group sets up standards or criteria for recruitment, they might "rig the game" in a way that ends up excluding relevant competencies and experiences in such a way that the homogeneity is maintained. When that happens, there is a risk that the organization becomes characterized by group-think and develop blind-spots where important perspectives are missed. To prevent this, human resource departments can do internal surveys of applicants and employees to make sure that the demography of these groups is not too homogeneous. If it is, there is likely something wrong in the recruitment procedure. This is an example of such a survey, which is now a regular tool in the appointment of academic positions in the United States:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYGM03ULlbOPfq1OukYCNVKQGZQF0ne8zU0t7o2BFfAB9q5RWIMbgWUMboSKG0WEY8LRk-E7iB0YpayzrCwowpuDLU9ilKPPsv9aNc6H2R5rWxZpakNrwoW_qS47Futj_ckH4-pwGEFFc/s1600/Voluntary_Self-Identification.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYGM03ULlbOPfq1OukYCNVKQGZQF0ne8zU0t7o2BFfAB9q5RWIMbgWUMboSKG0WEY8LRk-E7iB0YpayzrCwowpuDLU9ilKPPsv9aNc6H2R5rWxZpakNrwoW_qS47Futj_ckH4-pwGEFFc/s640/Voluntary_Self-Identification.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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There is then a question for those who argue that all discussions on the charting of racial or ethnic demographics are problematic: How could anyone develop practical tools for preventing discrimination without being able to measure the outcomes of human resource practices? Is the survey above really racist, or an equivalent to Nazi German practices? I find that position difficult to sustain, and it becomes really troublesome when the logic leads to the position that talking about racism is racist.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-53762534286004663302015-06-13T11:04:00.000-06:002015-06-13T11:04:14.193-06:00Barriers to teaching innovation in post-secondary educationI recently went to the CPSA (Canadian Political Science Association) annual conference in Ottawa to present the paper "Gamifying Political Science", which describes my experiences of using game design tools to improve the learning experiences of my students. The method shows great promise and a mounting body of evidence suggests that it is a highly effective pedagogical tool. The paper ends with a discussion on the likelihood of game design tools being adopted in political science teaching more widely and identifies a series of barriers on both individual and institutional level that gives us little reason to expect its adoption any time soon.<br />
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Some of those barriers include a lack of familiarity with pedagogical techniques or technological tools among individual professors, as well as a shortage of time which prevents instructors from learning about how to use new pedagogical approaches. On the institutional level, departments rarely invest in structures to support teaching development, since they prioritize production - i.e. research - instead.<br />
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Importantly, the paper notes that teaching is not incentivized as part of the career path (indeed, one CPSA-panelist who remarked that devoting time to become a good teacher can be 'career suicide', which is quite revealing). I discuss some of the mechanisms in the paper and would like to add a couple of reflections here. These notes are based on experiences and observations from working in this field and should be seen as points of departure for further discussion.<br />
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The first concerns the lack of career incentives for good instructors in the academic world, or at least in my field - political science. Universities are, in the public debate, often said to have two core tasks, research and teaching. However, in my experience, teaching seems to be treated as a core task in name only. For example, as a graduate student, the most prestigious research awards (there is more than one) are set at about CAD 40 000. There was only one award for teaching excellence available to us, set at CAD 1 000, so the career infrastructure is made already at that stage. Tenure is, of course, a research position. Those who are passionate about teaching are confined to sessional positions, which pay much less and have no job security. There is no way to advance from there as an instructor. Also, institutions generally have few tools for evaluating teaching quality. The only one I've seen is the student course evaluations, which have been much criticized, but no one seems to be interested in using that critique to develop better tools. An institution that doesn't pay its instructors stable and sufficient salaries and doesn't even bother to evaluate whether the activity holds a high quality should hardly claim that activity as part of its core mission. The situation calls to mind <a href="http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A359261&dswid=5125">Brunsson's piece (</a>2003) <i>Organized hypocrisy, </i>where he describes how it is rational for organizations to say one thing and then do another to satisfy contradictory demands.<br />
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This institutional structure is reflected on the individual level. In my experience, academics seem oddly defensive about teaching methods. Common reactions have included comments like "...but I like lecturing". That is all well and good, but instructors are entering the classroom for the undergraduate students, and to do their duty by them. Instructors should thus do what research shows is effective and efficient to facilitate student learning. I have yet to find any study showing that the lecture series is the most optimal teaching tools. On the contrary, there is a growing body of evidence showing that other techniques are more effective, but that evidence seems to have little effect on practices.<br />
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Of note, the physicist Eric Mazur <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI">famously remarked </a>on how tenured Harvard professors, who certainly know everything about the scientific method when it comes to their research, for some reason discards that same scientific method entirely when it comes to teaching. As Donald Clark notes in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e4iFx2Gm0A">his keynote addres</a>s, "hardly anybody who teaches in a university believes in the application of the scientific method to teaching and learning". The situation is thus like this: the same profession that a) continuously and routinely exposes itself to critique through peer review and b) keeps emphasizing the importance of the scientific method to students, suddenly lets go of these principles entirely when it comes to how to design and deliver a course. That is quite problematic.<br />
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All is not doom and gloom, though. There are interesting initiatives out there. <a href="http://www.questu.ca/">Quest University </a>was literally built from scratch with the intention of providing undergraduate students with the best possible learning experience. It has small classes - max. 25 students and the very interesting block system for how courses as structured: students study one subject at a time, instead of several courses in parallel, which allows instructors more liberty in terms of how to dispose of their time. Also, no departments. Professor Helfand presents it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZQe73IXZtU">here</a>. The Teaching Professor network in the US is also interesting. It organizes <a href="http://www.magnapubs.com/teaching-professor-conference/">a conference </a>for disseminating best teaching practices.<br />
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Such initiatives are important, but more is needed to institutionalize substantive incentives for teaching excellence in the academic career track. I would argue that universities owe their undergraduates to commit to and make that change.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-5162332945374225672015-05-25T15:33:00.001-06:002015-05-25T15:34:50.854-06:00Gamification and game-based learningI mentioned in a previous post that I have had some interesting experiences with teaching methods over the last couple of years. I felt frustrations when I was using the design that is standard operating procedure for most post-secondary courses: a lecture series, possibly with discussion seminars graded based on participation and then a couple of exams and a graded paper. I did not feel that the assessment forms really were sufficient for optimizing the learnings for my students nor the model provided me with sufficient feedback to know how to facilitate their learning.<br />
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Then I discovered 3dgamelab, and everything changed. Since 2013, it is the design I use, and shown in this video<br />
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It has three main advantages, in my experience:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>formative assessment - This is different from summative assessment (i.e. a typical exam - write the exam, get a grade, move on). In formative assessment, the student will produce a learning artifact of some kind, but if it doesn't meet the requirements, I will send it back. Thus, the student learns through that feedback.</li>
<li>increased student engagement through active learning - I have dispensed with the lecture series (my lectures are now available on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS9cVufGN1MnxZUgA1ZRsbg">YouTube</a>), and use the classroom time for students to do labs or simulations, keeping them active.</li>
<li>increased student agency - students can choose from a smorgasbord of assignments and complete them at a time of their choice.</li>
</ul>
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The effects have been palpable, and it seems to me that the scholarship on teaching methods generally provide support for the veracity of the model. Next week, I'm presenting a paper on my experiences. Here is the abstract:<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i>Gamification consists of the
introducing game mechanics into activities to engage users with motivation
beyond what is normally expected. Properties include introducing points
accumulation, badges, levels, leaderboards, challenges or quests,
customization, economies, avatars, and role-play. When introduced into
education in the form of game-based learning, such elements can raise student
motivation as well as decision-making capacity and cognitive development as
students are given increased control over their learning path. In 2013, I
changed my political science course design using the learning platform
3dgamelab. The experience was transformative on many levels, including learning
achievements and the instructor-student relationship. This paper describes
those experiences for the purpose of demonstrating the utility of game-based
learning when teaching political science in higher education. It provides an
overview of the literature on game-based learning in education and the
significance of some integral components of a course design using 3dgamelab,
including elements like active learning, the flipped classroom and formative
grading. This literature provides important context for the experiences I have
made transforming a lecture based course design to a game-based one. Five
courses have now been delivered using this framework at the 200 and 300-level
in Comparative and Canadian politics, with class sizes varying between 8 and 75
students. The paper identifies opportunities for instructors as well as
potential sources of problems and how to re-think how political science
education can be delivered in a more engaging way.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-1290479609221820912015-05-24T11:45:00.000-06:002015-05-24T11:45:14.965-06:00New topicsI will be adding comments on two areas to this blog. One is about public administration. Most of the research on immigrant integration focuses on the human capital of the newcomers (what do they bring in terms of competence, education, experience), immigrant rights (how encompassing should they be), the size of the welfare state, or public policy (for example, does the host country have official multiculturalism or not). However, very little attention is given to how the programs that are supposed to facilitate immigrant integration are organized - who is doing what, with what mandate and funding? Those are all questions of public administration and management.<br />
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Secondly, I will add my reflections on teaching in political science on the post-secondary level. I taught my first course in 2010 and in 2013, I switched to gamification and game-based learning. That prompted me to think a lot about how teaching is done in this field. I'm presenting a paper on the subject at the coming annual CPSA Canadian Political Science Association in June in Ottawa. That will be quite exciting!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17720443196504889148noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-7976036566100835362015-05-24T11:07:00.001-06:002015-05-24T11:07:36.255-06:00Thesis: CompletedI am finally getting back to this blog. It is done - the thesis has been successfully defended. Here is a 1 minute synopsis of it:<br />
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Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-54483088905631530432012-06-01T10:24:00.001-06:002012-06-01T10:24:25.652-06:00Measuring discrimination with a questionnaire?A new <a href="http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175668949.pdf">report</a> from Timbro, the Swedish right-wing think tank, has caused some commentary. The author argues that discrimination does not explain why immigrants face challenges on the Swedish labour market. This argument rest on the observation that employers in other countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany) answer a question from World Value Survey concerning privileging native born job seekers over foreign born such more negatively than Swedish employers do.<br />
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While I have to admit that I was surprised that Canadian employers would be presenting such answers to the question, the report, in my opinion, has a fundamental methodological flaw, and that is its reliance on the World Value Survey for its conclusions. This survey is a quantitative survey of values, taken in from across the world (as the name implies). It could be argued the aggregate data of the Survey gives us some idea about cultural differences across the world (though it is possible to question that, too, to some extent - after all, how do you develop distinctly separate categories of "traditional" and "secular-rational" values?) but I'm not sure that it is a useful in a smaller sample studie like this. <br />
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More importantly, it is inherently quantative, and I'm not at all convinced that quantitative methods can reveal a whole lot about discrimination in practice. At best, the report manages to show that Swedish employers have a self-image of not being discriminatory, but from there, it's a bit of a leap to conclude that they will not act in a discriminatory fashion in practice. Indeed, unconscious discrimation, i.e. acts that are not intended as discriminatory, but result in discriminatory outcomes because of ignorare, or prejudice that is assumed to be common sense, cannot be easily probed using a questionnaire.<br />
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Qualitative methods, like in-depth interviews, participant observation and so on would be more appropriate, and every time such methods have been employed in Sweden, significant discriminatory behaviour has been observed.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-68638329144347332972012-05-28T15:26:00.001-06:002012-05-28T15:26:40.836-06:00Management by mistrustThe Swedish minister of integration recently <a href="http://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/nyanlanda-maste-flytta-dit-jobben-finns">announced </a>that immigrants who refuse to move to an offered job will received reduced welfare remuneration. As he says, "You have a responsibility to find a job and have to be prepared to move".<br />
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While this might seem fairly straight-forward to some, it is a continuation of a long series of policies of the last decade or so, which are united by a common theme. They all focus on compelling, or more accurately, coercing immigrants to 'take greater responsibility for their own integration', as the advocates of this regime would formulate it.<br />
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This regime is based on the underlying assumption that immigrants are not doing enough to settle in the new society (however this is defined). Thus, they need to be forced to do more to accomplish this. Several reservations can be raised:<br />
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1) I can't say that I've seen any research that would suggest that immigrants are unwilling to find jobs or settle in their new societies, or even that such attitudes, or inactivity on their part would be a significant factor in social exclusion or immigrant unemployment. Whatever these types of policies are based on, it is hardly the current state of migration research.<br />
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2) The regime itself lays the blame on failed integration on immigrants, and proposed more punishment or adjustments of them, for instance by "raising their competence" through vocational training programs by coercion. Doing so increases the "us" versus "them" divisions in society by finding "them" culpable for their own social exclusion. <br />
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At heart, then, this is just another proposal that is based on management by mistrust. I doubt it will have any positive effect, or make immigrants feel like they are treated with respect by the new country.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-34978540109529996692012-01-26T14:34:00.000-07:002012-01-26T14:34:36.621-07:00Preventing honour killingsCBC continues its coverage of these types of crimes. <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/TV_Shows/The_National/1233408557/ID=2189975969">This </a>feature discusses how a Muslim community centre acts to prevent such violence. It's not a large organization, <a href="http://mrcssi.com/about/staff/">its website </a>showing that it only has about six employees, and yet, I would not be surprised if it was quite succesful. The difference between this community group and a public agency is that precisely because it's a group developed from the community, of the community, it has a different understanding, different cultural capital and legitimacy for the community. In contrast, a public agency has the problem of its exercise of power. By virtue of being a public authority, it has a barrier to building trust within the community, and I believe that trust is key in the prevention of these crimes. That includes not only helping the people who would become victims, but also, effectively, reaching out to those who might become potential perpetrators and influencing them so that they don't. <br />
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I also found it interesting that the group is cooperating with an American group that seems completely unrelated - because how would, at face, honour killings have to do with gang violence among African American communities, be related. Well, judging from what is said in the feature, it is linked through the destructive status mechanisms that drives violence in both cases. Also, they both have in common that they are solutions that come from within the community. That gives the group itself power over the issue and a voice in public space.<br />
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I think that is imperative if such efforts are to succeed.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-43667053644559990102012-01-19T11:46:00.000-07:002012-01-19T11:46:23.443-07:00Honour related killings in Canada and SwedenThis topic is currently receiving some attention in both Canada and Sweden. In Canada, this is due to two cases currently in the legal system, the <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/shafia-trial/">Shafia trial </a>, where members of the Shafia family (orginally from Afghanistan) stand accused of killing four sisters, and the extradiction procedure of the mother and uncle of young woman accused of being involved in her murder in India. In Sweden, the attention stems largely from the rememberance of it being 10 years since the murder of <a href="http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/brister-i-stod-till-personer-utsatta-for-hedersbrott">Fadime Sahindal</a>, of Kurdish decent.<br />
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This is a very complex issue and one disclaimer needs to be made right away: I haven't studied these types of events or the processes behind as part of my work. I merely take part of what the ongoing public debate in public space and make reflections based on my experience stuyding ethnic relations.<br />
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Sometimes (and in my impression this is more explicitly so in Europe), the public debate is said to consist of two camps, one (predominantly to the left) arguing that honour killings are just another form of patriarchy, and one (arguably on the right) saying that it's an issue of culture, where some cultures condone and encourage such killings in the name of honour. What is particularly problematic is that both sides tend to mirepresent the other side's argument in an almost hyperbolic fashion. So the "culture as a cause" side argues that the other side are "cultural relativists" who would look away and even allow murder for the sake of "multiculturalism" or "respecting other people's culture" (and I've never actually heard anyone make any such arguments). Meanwhile, the "it's patriarchy side" wants to paint the other side as just another group of racists.<br />
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The reason I find it complex is that I don't think that either form of explanation is succifiently nuanced, but also that both sides seem to simplify the processes that might underly these phenomena to the point of misrepresenting them, which would also obstruct preventative work rather than facilitate it.<br />
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For those who want to explain this with culture, several questions immediately rise: how are the Kurdish, Afghan and Indian cultures similar? It's not the religion of Islam, clearly, since the Indians in question, it seems to me, are not Muslim, but Hindu (indeed, it was a marriage across caste-lines that was alledgedly the motive of the killing). Moreover, there are many, many people within each of these communities who are activists trying to combat these practices, including <a href="http://www.pelafadime.se/omoss.htm">Sara Mohammed </a>herself, the founder of the Swedish network above. Indeed, if I recall correctly, the Kurdish community organized a manifestation against these practices in connection to the murder, so it's fairly clear that it's difficult to assign this type of value to a culture in a wider, ethnic sense (unless someone wants to try and make the argument that Kurds who take exception to such practices are "less Kurdish" than those who condone them, which is an argument I would find absurd).<br />
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Yet, at the same time, there does seem to me some form of status mechanism involved - the perpetrators seem to share the "protection of the family honour" motive. Thus, there is some form of cultural capital that drives these processes. Exactly how that takes place, and what common denominators can be found, I could not say (since I have not studied these properly)*.<br />
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However, I am concerned with the public debate, because reductionism is not going to prevent more murders, and that goes both ways. Engaging in a rhetoric that paints an entire community of "others" as "potential honour murderers" is only going to exacerbate racialization and stigmatization. Likewise, denying that there are young men and women who, at the end of the day, risk their lives if they do not conform to a wider family's demands with regards to their love lives, is not going to help these victims.<br />
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Finally, the ways of addressing the issue seem to differ between the two countries. In Canada, it seems to be the immigrant communities themselves who address the issue. Many advocates I have heard speaking on the subject express their concern that these murders will increase prejudice against the own community, and also argue that these practices are not inherent in the culture and therefore police should be so concern with "respecting the culture" that they do not take firm action against such crimes. In Sweden, immigrant organizations are quite underfunded and hardly agents to speak of. Instead, it is the government agencies that own the issue, as described by Björling, a former member of a <a href="http://newsmill.se/artikel/2012/01/18/svensk-etnocentrism-sviker-ungdomar-i-fadimes-situation">women's centre</a>. The problem with that is that the predominantly ethnic Swedish civil servants have very limited insight into the communities and also lack competence in dealing with the issue. Indeed, the grassroot organizations seems to have been continuously sidelined by Swedish government officials, in a most destructive manner, according to Björling. It's a pattern I recognize.<br />
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My experience tells me that the Canadian model probably can be more succesful: it gives ownership to the issue to those closest concerned with it, including the advocates of victims, who are likely to be more knowledgeable about this. It would also avoid stereotyping and racialization. That said, I'm not aware of any study that has actually compared the two models.<br />
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*If I were to speculate, I would probably make a Bourdieusian analysis, thinking about cultural capital in fairly closed social network (Habitus) as one important driver. In that sense, the practice can be related to both culture and patriarchy, and distinct from some other patriarchal practices, but not cultural in an ethnic sense, since it seems like a phenomenon that exists within subsets of larger communities.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-31518551714522849362011-11-16T14:25:00.001-07:002011-11-16T14:45:50.428-07:00Swedish News comments Canadian immigration policyIt turns out that the Aktuellt, a Swedish equivalent of CBC's The National, visited my hometown of Edmonton recently, to do a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-HV2nj4fFRs">feature</a> on Canadian immigration policy (ironically, nobody had informed the journalists that I live here).<br />
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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).<br />
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That's certainly comforting for Swedish commentators, but it is also, alas, far too simplistic and ignores some important facts that need consideration: <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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).<br />
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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.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-11883695484119153772011-11-14T11:22:00.001-07:002011-11-14T11:46:21.650-07:00Ethnic discrimination and representationAfter 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 <a href="http://bambuser.com/channel/fores/broadcast/2110049">study</a> 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.<br />
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.<br />
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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. <a href="http://www.newsmill.se/artikel/2011/11/14/bra-om-polisen-f-r-bakl-xa-f-r-kvotering">Madon</a> 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.<br />
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Here in Canada, the news recently <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/TV_Shows/The_National/1233408557/ID=2166650336">noted</a> 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...". <br />
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Employers everywhere need to learn about these very concrete ways of conceptualizing competence if discrimination is to become a thing of the past.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-69807220143258180532011-11-05T10:51:00.001-06:002011-11-05T10:55:19.231-06:00Metropolis Conference DayI 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-48778888487552366562011-08-15T10:49:00.001-06:002011-08-15T10:49:58.135-06:00Sara Mohammed and the competence of the Swedish public sectorAndreas Johansson Heinö is <a href="http://andreasjohanssonheino.blogspot.com/2011/08/myter-om-mangkultur-svar-till-patricia.html">replying</a> to an interesting piece by <a href="http://hd.se/kultur/boken/2011/07/22/enfald-om-mangfald/">Lorenzi</a> 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 <a href="http://axess.se/magasin/default.aspx?article=928">piece</a> in the same number of Axess where he, himself participates.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 - <a href="http://www.pelafadime.se/english/">Never Forget Pela and Fadime</a>? 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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-52454502076764032082011-07-08T13:45:00.002-06:002011-07-08T13:58:01.750-06:00The discursive shift in the Swedish right wing....The Swedish magazine Axess had a <a href="http://axess.se/Tv/webbtv.aspx?id=2494">seminar</a> 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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).<br />
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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.<br />
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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):<br />
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+ Immigrants bring strange cultures that constitute a threat to social cohesion. <br />
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+ Immigrants do not assimilate sufficiently into Swedish norms and culture. <br />
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+ More patriotism is needed to rectify this.<br />
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+ Sweden is currently confronted by the threat of mass immigration, or an invasion of immigrants.<br />
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+ Multiculturalism is an elite project imposed on the Swedish people from above.<br />
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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 <a href="http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=1637&artikel=4589136">this</a> radio debate, Anders Lindberg does a decent job of exposing this discursive shift within the Swedish right. <br />
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As Isobel Hadley-Kamptz <a href="http://www.expressen.se/ledare/1.2486916/den-hogljutt-fobiska-hogern">states</a>, once upon a time, liberals used to discuss freedom.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-74799731872583022822011-06-23T08:02:00.001-06:002011-06-23T08:02:44.800-06:00We never had multiculturalism...is the headline of Johansson Heinö's latest piece in <a href="http://axess.se/magasin/default.aspx?article=927">Axess magazine</a>. 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-55318471748907824392011-06-14T09:36:00.002-06:002011-06-14T09:38:44.317-06:00Another report...Another report on the status of labour market integration in Sweden has been published, and I watched the <a href="http://www.eso.expertgrupp.se/Article.aspx?articleID=410">seminar</a>. The affair left me less than impressed, and apparently I'm not <a href="http://www.newsmill.se/artikel/2011/06/13/s-lyckas-arbetsmarknadsintegrationen">alone</a>.<br />
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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:<br />
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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.<br />
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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? <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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:<br />
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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.<br />
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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.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3094384571297263080.post-62309289567311995882011-06-13T11:11:00.000-06:002011-06-13T11:11:26.810-06:00Some notes of ideas about homogeneity and heterogeneityIt'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.<br />
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"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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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). <br />
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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.Mikael Hellströmhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05204010256269071314noreply@blogger.com0