Immigration myths: Cultural arguments for closed borders

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.

Culture arguments

"Refugees/immigrants are too different from 'our own' people, if they get to enter the country, our society will suffer from this difference."

First of all, research shows that migrants, regardless of "cultural distance" (whatever that means) can settle just fine in the host society. A conservative think tank 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 this report that says roughly the same thing.

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:

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

"They will destroy our culture/We have the right to preserve our national identity/values"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Their culture is primitive/backwards/heathen"

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.

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.

"Immigrants may bring homophobia, sexism or other bigotry"

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.

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.

"We should treat them like we would be treated in their country"

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!

"They are radical and anti-democratic and will destroy our democracy and replace it with their totalitarian theocracy" 

This one is usually used about Muslims who get stereotyped as radical fundamentalists. I'll let this man respond:

Immigration myths: Law and order arguments for closed borders

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.

Law and order arguments

"Refugees and/or immigrants are criminals/terrorists and should be kept out of the country lest social unrest results"

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.

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".

"Allowing immigrants in undermines social cohesion"

People who argue this often refer to Robert Putnam's famous study E Pluribus Unum, 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.

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.

"Immigrants bring disease"

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 this piece 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.

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.

"Illegal immigrants should be deported because they entered the country unlawfully"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Immigration myths: Economic arguments for closed borders

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.

Economic arguments

"Refugees don't need help, because they have cellphones so clearly they are well off"

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?

"We should take care of our own people before we let new people in"

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.

"We need to protect our jobs so that outsiders don't take them away from us"

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:

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 %.

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.

"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"

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.

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.

"There are too many refugees, the system can't handle them/it will cost too much to let them all in"

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.

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,

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. In my dissertation, 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.

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.

"They are abusing the system and enriching themselves on arrival"

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.

"Accepting too many refugees/immigrants will destroy the welfare state"

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.

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.

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.

Immigration myths: introducing an overview of arguments for closed borders

By 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.

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.

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.

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?

Recommended sources

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:

The Case for Open Borders
Myths about Immigration
Let the people go - a review of Paul Collier's argument for closing the borders


Oh, and:

Management by mistrust

The Swedish minister of integration recently announced 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".

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

The discursive shift in the Swedish right wing....

The Swedish magazine Axess had a seminar recently with the above title. It featured liberal commentators Paulina Neuding, Adam Cwejman and Tino Sanandaji. The frame of the seminar was criticizing multiculturalism, which is the popular activity of the centre-right of the past six months. The speakers, not very surprisingly, spent a great amount of time assigning blame for the failure of integration policies on multiculturalism along now-familiar lines of argumentation.

What particularly gave me pause in this presentation was the number of logical inconsistency in the argumentation by each speaker. Neuding argued that one cannot assume that people coming from authoritarian countries (and she was really refering to dictatorships in the Middle East and Magreb region - i.e. warning people about supposed the danger of Middle Eastern Muslim immigration) are fleeing to the West because they want to enjoy freedom...and then goes on to make the opposite assumption that these refugees should be assumed to be carriers of authoritarian values, which she identifies as the greatest integration problem of the day. This assumption, of course, is at least as unfounded as the one she is arguing against. Indeed, her entire speechs was informed by a highly essentialist conceptualization of immigrant and immigrant cultures, particularly directed against Middle Eastern groups.

Cwejman argued that the problem is that Sweden lacks a patriotic citizenship ideal (a strange argument, seeing as it is hardly a lack of patriotism that leads to high unemployment levels and poverty rates). Generally speaking, he seemed take the same position as others who fear that social cohesion will be undermined by people coming in from the outside bringing other cultures or at least lacking loyalty to the new community. He then said that France and the US are the ideals that should be embraced because these countries do have this strong patriotic citizenship that he longs for.

The problem with this argument is that France has had huge issues with the troubles in the banlieues, which he seemed to have forgotten entirely. I.e. France has hardly been very succesful at managing integration and ethnic relations, something that the Front National is doing its level best to leverage into political mobilization against immigration. The US, on the other hand, actually does permit multiple loyalties, as evidenced by Little Italies, Chinatowns and hyphenated belonging (e.g. Italian-American).

Sanandaji starts his speech by saying that multiculturalism "is dead", citing the speeches by Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy, as well as the terror attack in Spain as examples of this. The problem with that is, of course, that neither France, Germany or Spain were ever countries that embraced Multiculturalism as an official policy. He then talks about the importance of increased Swedish "cultural self-confidence" (whatever that is) and says that Swedes have been too kind towards immigrants. He then states that it's not a matter of immigrants erasing their pasts or not loving their countries of origin anymore...except it is, because they can't expect to keep their norms when entering Sweden. Like Cwejman, he refers to the US as a good example, and like Cwejman, he seems to forget that multiple identities are quite common in that country.

Between the three of these speakers, it is evident that the nationalist populist discourse of a party like the Sweden Democrats have really taken hold among the Swedish centre right intellectuals. It's evident in the following reasoning (the speakers didn't use these precise words, but this was the gist of their arguments):

+ Immigrants bring strange cultures that constitute a threat to social cohesion.

+ Immigrants do not assimilate sufficiently into Swedish norms and culture.

+ More patriotism is needed to rectify this.

+ Sweden is currently confronted by the threat of mass immigration, or an invasion of immigrants.

+ Multiculturalism is an elite project imposed on the Swedish people from above.

This is pretty much the very same series of speaking points that nationalist populists are employing all over Europe, and it's disquieting to see people who call themselves liberals buy in to the same agenda in such a whole-sale fashion. In this radio debate, Anders Lindberg does a decent job of exposing this discursive shift within the Swedish right.

As Isobel Hadley-Kamptz states, once upon a time, liberals used to discuss freedom.

Another report...

Another report on the status of labour market integration in Sweden has been published, and I watched the seminar. The affair left me less than impressed, and apparently I'm not alone.

I have a range of questions and observations, with all due respect to the two authors who did a fairly good job of summarizing the state of the art:

1) Summarizing the state of the art reveals that the art still hasn't moved beyond the problem formulation stage. In other words, the Swedish discourse is standing pretty much in the same place as it did in 1996 when Björn Rosengren's Crown Commission report was published -  the observed problems were the same. It's quite remarkable that the labour market segregation hasn't budged at all in 20 years.

2) The researchers presented a graph showing labour market developed. It only contained three indicators - being full time unemployed, having at some point had some form of employment, or having left the pool of statistics (death or emigration). My question is: why is there an assumptionthat getting any type of job, for any type of timeperiod, considered an indicator of success in the labour market?

Think about the logic of this, now. A person who has a Ph.D. degree and manages to land a job as a janitor for about a month and then falls back into unemployment is, according to this rationale, considered succesfully integrated in the labour market. A better indicator would be "has full time employment at the own level of competence". I think one reason the authors didn't use that definition, though, is that Swedish labour market statistics simply lacks data on this. The Employment Service doesn't measure. Thus the degree of under-employment in the country remains quite inadequately explored. This reflects the poverty of the Swedish measurement tools, and the fact that nobody has even reflected on this in the public debate is quite alarming, frankly.

3) The authors do mention that discrimination "exists", but the studying the labour market in terms of the ethnic hierarchy that I recall as quite entrenched was not done. All the studies that I took part of between 1996 and 2005 showed very clearly that an ethnic hierarchy existed on the labour market, where racialized minorities, and Africans in particular, were persistently on the bottom of the ladder. But this huge indicator of discrimination seems to have been forgotten in the public discourse since 2005.

In the UK and Canada, there is a continuous effort to track the socio-economic status of "visible minorities", which isn't the best category conceivable, but at least it captures an important dimension of the problem. The Swedish public debate seems incapable of handling this parameter, and the appeals to stop talking about ethnicity will likely simply result on obfuscating this very serious problem, but hardly make it go away. Again, an indicator of the lack of sophistication in the measurement toolbox. In the post-presentation debate, Nima Senandaji touched upon this briefly, but it was not explored by the panel at all.

4) The authors state that the tools for succeeding at labour market integration exist, and see no real reason to make any major changes to the toolset (i.e. the public agencies). This is probably based on the considerable amounts that are, traditionally, assigned to an active labour market policy, and SFI (Swedish For Immigrants). But look at the amounts spent for labour market policy. Do we know if the Employment Service is a competent public agency that actually succesfully assist any unemployed person to jobs, immigrant or not? All the audits I have seen says the exact opposite, and the substantial critique levied against SFI during the past decade seems to have been unaddressed entirely. Is this because macroeconomists, concerned mostly macro-scale statistics, simply have left issues of organizational theory oustide the study? And why would you do that? There is little public management literature that would support such complacency.

What's really interesting is that the authors themselves seem to acknowledge that they actually do not know how the implementation of the existing policies work (did they miss all those audits? How?), but if so, how can they be so sure that we should feel confident that no major reforms of the toolsets are needed? Spending levels alone are very poor indicators of outcomes, and the outcomes - 20 years of clear and present labour market segregation, leave little reason to feel confident about this.

5) The authors argued in favour of better validation of foreign credentials. It's interesting, because it is a problem in other countries as well, including Canada. Only, here, the discussion concerns credential recognition, which is a slightly different, and more precise, perspective. I.e. it's about recognizing foreign experience, not validating it. The authors' suggested solution is a classic Swedish one - institute another public agency to do the work. Given that huge sums have already been invested in "systems" like that, I'm not sure why we should feel confident that another hierarchical and bureaucratic solution would work this time.

Besides, an important part of the problem is likely to be recruitment procedures, so maybe it would be better to raise the awareness among employers about how to make sure that recruitment procedures identify relevant competencies and do not discriminate people with foreign experience. There's a host of such methods to employ from other countries, and this was a topic discussed extensively in the early 00s, but for some reason it's been forgotten now.

6) The authors argue that more "experiments" are need to develop best practices. This is rather remarkable, since experiments and method development have been done for the past 15 years, funded by the EU through the European Social Fund. This is both for labour market policy practices in general, but a certain amount has always been devoted to immigrants as a special target group. If the authors are unaware of these experiments (I'm going to have to assume that this is the case), then why have these efforts passed into oblivion? Where are the reports? Who reads them? Hundreds of projects have been started up and finished. Have any been succesful (I know some have, though most might not have been). Why has the knowledge transfer been so poorly done that these experiments haven't even made a dent in the public discourse for a decade and a half?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that the reason is simple: the Employment Service is the biggest single national adminstration in the country. It has a huge budget, and obviously a vested interest in keeping keeping the status quo. The well-being of the clients is, most likely, a very secondary concern in that context. And that leads me to the next question:

7) Why are there no practitioners present at the seminar? No frontline civil servants or client representatives were present. There is, seemingly, no connection between the macro-scale economics and the experiences of the people who are outside the labour market, the very people these statistics are supposed to represent, and that will likely affect not only how the problem is formulated, but the ability present solutions that actually address client needs adequately. To do that, the clients of these interventions would need to have power to at least make their voices heard, or even better, the capacity to influence the agenda. That still doesn't exist in the Swedish debate.

The host asked if the consensus of the room reflected the consensus of the public discourse or simply reflected the panel being skewed. The answer, in my opinion, is: both. It does reflect the current state of the Swedish public discourse, and that public discourse is quite skewed, dominated by the perspective of macroeconomists (sociologists need not apply, it seems, and there is currently a grand total of one political scientist who make repeated appearances in the public spotlight). In short, it seems to me that it suffers from a high degree of tunnelvision which incapacitates it, stalls it, makes it incapable of moving forward or absorbing impulses from outside, and given how often speakers repeated that things are not very alarming, the reaction to this seems to be one dominated by complacency. That's both quite frustrating and quite alarming.

Some notes of ideas about homogeneity and heterogeneity

It's quite common, in debates about multiculturalism, immigration and integration, to hear comments about demographic change in populations, where the assumption is that these changes have had significance for "social cohesion" or the integration between populations in some respect. This is also common in comparisons. One common sentiment is that the conditions for immigration will be different in, for instance, Sweden than it will be in Canada because "Sweden is a homogenous nation while Canada is an immigrant nation". However, such comments might say more about contemporary perceptions about ethnocultural similarity and difference than they say about actual historical change. Let me explain.

"Race", "ethnicity" or "culture" are not biological "things" but rather social "things". I think that is a fairly straightforward statement, but it has some important implications for how these matters are discussed. From the above statement, it might seem like people in the early 1900s might have talk about the "homogenous peoples of Sweden", and the "heterogenous peoples in North America", but that was not the case. Rather, people in the those days discussed difference between populations, just as we are today, and they did  both in Canada and Sweden.

At the time, the great concern was that of "race", based on Gobineau and the theories of "racial biology" and the assumption was that in the early times, human races were "pure", and mixing them would dilute that "purity". That was particularly detrimental, so it was argued, for the "more developed races", i.e. the blond, blue eyed "Aryans". If this seems familiar (think about Nazi race doctrine), it's no coincidence - Gobineau and the "scientific discipline" of racial biology was a great source of inspiration for German Nazi policy, but that movement was hardly the founder of the theory. Rather, those thoughts were accepted as common sense by mainstream politics at the time to a, forthe modern viewer, shockingly great extent.

In Canada, it manifested in the immigration laws. The country's first Prime Minister, Sir John A MacDonald, explicitly embarked on a programme of building a homogenous British nation-state. For that purpose, he only wanted to allow "British Aryans" to immigrate. He never met with much success in this because there weren't enough English immigrants to satisfy the needs for new settlers, and thus the government slowly expanded the number of "races" that were acceptable as immigrants, based on ideas of "compatibility" with the "English race": Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, French, Eastern Europeans, Italians, etc. Meanwhile, people of Chinese and African heritage were actively discouraged from entering the country.

In Sweden, the parliament created one of the most significant centre for racial biological studies in Europe and conducted a great many studies to categorize phenotypical difference between people living in Sweden, categorizing them into the "most developed race", i.e. people of Swedish ethnicity, which were compared to "less developed races", like Finns, Sami or Roma populations. It's interesting to note that the forced sterilization programme that was implemented after WWII was often implemented on people who belonged to these "less developed races", like the Roma.

A historical study of the treatment of "us" and "them" in public space thus clearly shows there was a great deal of worry about "them" a century ago, too. So, when I hear people talking about demographic changes today, I have to say that I'm less than convinced that these changes are particularly significant for segregation. What has happened, rather, is that the label for who is "them" and who is "us" has moved. In Sweden, "we" used to be a fairly narrowly defined category of ethnic Swedes, and "them" were Jews, Finns, Russians, Sami and Roma. In Canada, "us" were the English, and "them" were Chinese and Africans, but also, to some extent, Eastern Europeans (who were very "otherized" during WWI).

This is the legacy and historical background one has to take into consideration when issues like "social cohesion" and "cultural compatibility"is discussed in public space. The term "race" might have (for good reason) become outdated, but the basic logic seems to be the same: people who are "like us" are "not a problem", but "they", "the different ones" are. This is also why I'm so concerned with the current focus on blaming multiculturalism for segregation and the "lack of social cohesion" as the cause of social problems associated with immigration. Like in the early 1900s, this discourse lays blame on "the others" for today's dilemmas, and, also like in those days, it advocates some form of assimilation as the solution. This is highly problematic, because it distracts attention from the power relations between mainstream populations and racialized minorities who are often marginalized on the political arena.

Timbro-seminar 2: Subsidy, the road to work?

The second Timbro seminar I watched concerned the significant discrepancy in employment between immigrants and the native born population. This discrepancy is hardly new, but has persisted for at least as long as I've been actively studying the field (i.e. since 1998). To the best of my knowledge, it started sometime in the mid 80s. All the same, it is good to give it continuous attention, since it is a solid indicator of segregation.

Von Bahr, the author of the report presented in the seminar, discusses different explanatory variables that have been addressed in the public debate. She argues that discrimination is hardly a convincing such, since a survey conducted for the report showed that Swedes are more tolerant than many other populations (including, for instance, the Norwegians). Nor is there a lack of interventions. In fact, Sweden is known for spending heavily on programmes and training to integrate newcomers into the labour market. Rather, one should look to general labour market policies, like wage levels and work security. Since these are both very high, internationally speaking, there are some signifcant thresolds for immigrants to get over before they can enter the labour market. I.e, the entry level sustenance jobs that are found in many other countries (including Canada) do not really exist in Sweden, which creates an impediment for labour market integration.

In short, Timbro is saying pretty much the same as it has been saying for the past decades - reform work security legislation and lower pay roll taxes, and integration will improve.

Now, there is some truth to these arguments, I'd say. For instance, in a labour market where "the last one in, the first one out" is a regulatory regime at lay offs, new people (i.e. immigrants, youth and possibly women returning from maternity leave) in the labour market will, on a structural basis, find it harder to get entrenched there. This much I can agree with.

However, there are several problems with the presentation, as well (again, I have yet to get around to read the full report):

1) Discounting discrimination as problem is difficult to do based on the presented material. Opinion surveys, it seems to me, are probably a weak instrument at best to capture prevalence of discriminatory practices on the ground. This was wisely commented on by one of the commentators on the report, Ardalan Shekarabi, who pointed out that if you ask people if they are tolerant, they'll likely answer "yes", which says little about how they will actually conduct themselves when confronted with a situation where stereotypes and essentialist ideas about "others" come into play. This is probably particularly true in Sweden, where being tolerant is very much a deeply entrenched part of the Swedish self-image. What is needed, instead, is participatory observation and situational testing, and I'm not aware that anyone has conducted such studies in a comparative fashion between countries. Those that have been carried out in Sweden during the past decade consistently show that discriminatory behaviour does exist, both in employment situations, as well as when seeking housing, for instance.

2) Large sums of money are devoted to providing newcomers with language training and labour market interventions, this much is true, but being satisfied with this assumes that outcomes can be directly correlated to spending levels, and I'm not aware of any public management literature who would find this assumption convincing. In fact, the Swedish public administration has been consistently criticized for not knowing if the labour market policy administration delivers any measurable outcomes at all, both for the population in general and for immigrants. The past decade has even seen a lot of critique directed towards Swedish as a Second Language courses. I even believe that Timbro as sometime was part of that choir. It's strange that this dimension seems to have been left out in the report.

3) Entry level jobs are often a necessary first step for newcomers, this is true. But Swedish labour market statistics seem to stop measuring labour market success at that point, seemingly content as long as an immigrant has gotten a job, any job, regardless of the immigrant's previous work experience or educational level. That is hardly very satisfactory. If a great number of highly skilled people are doing work below their levels of competence, there is still a significant integration problem, and I'm not at all convinced that this would be addressed by simply lowering the payroll taxes.

Timbro-seminar 1: Who should be able to become a Swedish citizen

Timbro, the Swedish equivalent of the Canadian Frasier Institute (i.e. a right-wing think tank), is holding a series of seminars on integration, presenting reports they have solicitied on the subject. Dr. Johansson Heinö was the first presenter (followers of this blog will recall that he also presented on the Axess seminar).  This was a follow up on his previous report "Integration or Assimilation".

This time, Johansson Heinö presented a proposal to improve integration, through addressing the status of citizenship. Sweden has, by international standards, a very low requirement for citizenship. In practice, all you need to do is to fulfill a certain period of residence. There are no tests, nor any oath of allegiance. This, evidently, has some concerned about the social cohesion of the country, arguing that this devalues the status of citizenship and undermines pride and a sense of belonging. At this point, I can't recall that I've seen any research to support that claim.

Johansson Heinö's remedy is to introduce a language test and make citizenship dependent on the applicant being fluent in Swedish.

While I'm not as opposed to this proposal as some others might be, there are still a number of reservations that should be brought up (note that this is based on watching the webcast seminar, I'll have to read Johansson Heinö's report to make further commentary):

1) The connection to improved integration is not very well established. MIPEX ranks Sweden as very succesful in the field of integrating immigrants (which I take exception to because it only studies formal processes) and does so specifically because citizenship is so easy to access. By this rationale, if citizenship is harder to attain, the integration process will actually become impeded. Since research shows that the level of integration is correlated to processes of naturalization, this is actually quite a convincing argument.

2) The connection between how difficult the citizenship is to attain and the sense of belonging is also not established. From what I recall from other studies, sense of belonging tends to be more correlated to immigrants' experience of how just society is in terms of equal opportunities and protection from discrimination as well as accumulated social capital within immigrant communities, so this suggestion might simply be addressing the wrong dimension of the process.

3) What do to with elderly immigrants? I seem to recall that older people have a harder time learning a new language, and it's quite established that many elderly immigrants never learn the language of the new country at all. This suggestion might very well become a barrier for that category of people.

4) Why addressing language, particularly? I'm asking, because the citizenship test in Canada is based on learning civics and history, which seems more conducive to creating the capacity to orient in the new country, including topics like how to vote and the basics of the democratic system, which are functions a citizen will need to know about to be able to participate fully in civic life. Learning about the common points of reference of the host society just seems, on an intuitive level, more conducive to increasing a sense of belonging than a test of grammar. Note that the Canadian test is written in one of the two official languages, so some level of linguistic ability is implicit, but testing history knowledge is quite different from testing vocabulary.

Integration or assimilation

Dr Johansson Heinö made an interesting contribution to the debate about immigrant integration in Sweden recently. He rightly observes that the word "integration" very often is used meaning assimilation in the debate in Western Europe. Sweden is no exception. The seminar presentation of his report contained one of the more sophisticated discussions on integration in Sweden that I can recall.

I agree with Johansson Heinö: it would make the public debate more sophisticated, nuanced and to the point if politicians used the word assimilation when they present assimilatory policies. When the word "integration" is used instead, it is misleading, and muddles the concept until it becomes essentially without meaning. Of coruse the reason it continues to be used is that it is much less controversial than "assimilation", and also that "integration" is often much less well defined, making it easier to make policy without having to be accountable for it.

Note: both the report and the seminar are in Swedish.

Stop speaking about "immigrants"?

The discussion on the debate site Newsmill continues, today with a piece by Nima Gholam Ali Pour. He argues that the Swedish discourse has been focused on solutions that assume that immigrants is a homogenous collective that can be integrated through collectivist policy measures, for instance the "Sweden contract" proposed by the conservative party wherein immigrants would promise to follow Swedish laws (as if people residing in Sweden were not obliged to do so anyway). He goes on to state that a fundamental flaw of the discourse is a lack of definition of the term "integration" itself, and this is of course an important observation: if the end goal of a policy has not been properly defined, then how can it ever be achieved?

However, his own piece also lacks clarity in this regard. For instance, he notes that there are many reasons for why "people have not become integrated". The sentence structure itself is quite revealing. The people he is talking about - immigrants - are to "become integrated". By whom? Who is doing the active work? Strictly speaking, integration is a process of negotiation whereby two (or more) bodies, institutions or systems unite, wherein all the concerned parties are subjects and contribute. Agency is available and required for all parties for integration to succeed, otherwise it is probably more appropriate to speak about assmiliation, where one dominant party defines the terms and conditions to which the weaker party has to adjust.

Finally, he reaches goes on to state that Sweden has become divided into "Swedes" and "immigrants"  as a result of the collectivist approaches and policies that lay the burden of adaption on "immigrants", and concludes that it is time to stop speaking about "immigrants". While it is true that terms like "immigrant" can easily become loaded with negative meanings and lead to collectivist treatment of ethnic "others", the solution is hardly to do away with the term itself. This denies the rich and often formative experience that is a part of changing country of residence. I can't see any reason why the people who went through this process should be denied the possibility of drawing upon this experience as they enter public space. Moreover, only in a social context that views difference as something negative can this experience be seen as problematic or even threatening the collective identity of the community.

It seems to me that it would be more prudent to pursue a policy framework where difference is accepted and respected, instead of trying to ban terms like "immigrant" from the public discourse.

Swedish views on integration

The Swedish political right and left have entered into polemics on the debate site Newsmill. Nisha Besara is concerned about the direction the political right seems to be taking, noting that making demands on immigrants to adjust (i.e. assimilate) is becoming increasing acceptable in this camp. Her main concern is that the politics of integration will become a battering ram for dismantling the Swedish welfare state.

This causes Markus Uvell, of the right-wing think tank Timbro, to retort that the political left is more concern with maintaing outdated welfare systems than finding real solutions to integration issues.

Both make some interesting points. Beshara points out that the notion that the majority is always right (and thus immigrants, always in the minority, has to assimilate without any quibbles) is hardly a very liberal stance. This is a good point, but then the political right also consists of many conservatives, for whom this kind of collectivism is hardly incosistent with core ideological commitments.

Uvell's points that the entrenched last-employed-first-laid-off rule does have significance for the exclusion of new arrivals on the labour market (i.e. newcoming immigrants) also has some potency.

Both sides also have one fundamental weakness to their argument, as well. Both discuss immigrants as objects for the, albeit well-meaning, attention of primarily Swedish public actors. In neither the right wing or the left wing discourse are the immigrants entrusted agency or competence of their own.

Indeed, the only policy solution that might address this is the one proposed by then-integration Minister Nyamko Sabuni (replaced after the election by Erik Ullenhag) by in late 2009, where the civil society will get an increased role during the introduction to the labour market. Its outcome will, of course, depend greatly on how it's actually implemented but it is noteworthy that its potential have been quite overlooked in the Swedish public debate, which remains quite state-centred.

The assault on Multiculturalism continues

It seems Dilsa Demirbag-Sten has decided to make Multiculturalism her target in the debate on integration in Sweden. In her piece in DN she argues that this "-ism" focuses on differences rather than similarities and thus risks segregating society rather than integrating it. This effect, she goes on, comes from the "isms" way of essentializing immigrants as different from Swedes, forcing them to become group represenatives rather than individuals.

This is almost verbatim the same type of argument that Neil Bissoondath launched against Multiculturalism in Canada about 15 years ago, which should allow Demirbag-Sten, and others interested in the tension of identities to look to Canada to see whether these kinds of fears are actually warranted.

My answer would be: no. Canada might also negotiate identities in public space, but the fears of fragmentation that Demirbag-Sten voices are, as far as I can tell, widely overstated. And there are some problems with her arguments: first of all - what is her alternative? Assimilation? In any given contemporary society today, people of a plurality of ethincities coexist in some fashion, and this is constantly evident in public space, not only in terms of languages and religions that people speak, but even in so trivial things as food. Is the Chinese restaurant on the corner, with the storefront sign in Chinese, a threat to Swedish commonality? While this might seem like a banal example, it does underline that there is more than one ethnicity in Sweden.

I think Demirbag-Sten and others who worry about the potential for individuals to reach their full potential in society should rather be concerned with processes of racialization; Why are immigrants treated as a homogenous group in Swedish public space? Why is an individual reduced to a group identity? And more importantly, why does this group identity obfuscate the capacity and competency of the individual (who might very well be proud over this identity, and don't want to deny it, but might also wants to be seen as more than just that identity)? These are all questions that can be answered by studying how identities are constructed in public space, and how the images of those identities becomes guiding for public policy and political action, and manifests as discrimination, potentially on a structural level.

Attacking Multiculturalism will likely draw attention away from these questions and therefore do more harm than good...

Currently watching the quite long video from Fores' presentation of its project on how immigration can be succesfully managed, with cases from the UK, Germany, Canada and Sweden. The whole report is of quite some interest for my work, but this is particularly of the reports from Canada and Sweden. So far, it seems to me that the researchers are looking at this issue with too much focus on systems issues, i.e. to what extent does public policy choices affect outcomes. As often is the case, there is little attention paid to issues of social capital, agency and how the administration of public policy is organized. Still, interesting material for anyone who pays attention these questions...

Paternalism is the problem, not the solution

Today's article in the Swedish major daily DN discusses the unrest in Herrgården in the distrcit Rosengården in the city of Malmö, Sweden. The area is closely follows the pattern that is familiar in discussions about social exclusion and have also grabbed the spotlight in the national media because of the violent outburts of disaffected youth. The article discusses the counter measures taken by the seemingly desperate public decision-makers, primarly in the form of an increased police presence.

What really caught my eye was the suggestions made by Dr Carlbom, anthropoligist. He solution to the segregation is to "...stop the in-migration of immigrants to Malmö." For some reason, he does not agree with the dominant analysis which suggests that uneployment is a prime cause, saying only that he has difficulties seeing that as a cause: "There are many unemployed, but very few who throws rocks".


His solution is highly problematic, though.


While stopping immigration might go some way to address the rise in the rate of overcrowded apartments, a phenomenon that is generally associated with the area, but it will hardly address the reasons for such overcrowding, which, it seems to me must be attributed precisely to the high very unemployment rates that Carlbom discounts as relevant. To put it bluntly, I believe that people don't live in cramped up spaces because it is fun, but because they can't afford anything else.


More importantly, however, stopping immigration is questionable since the measure would constitute a highly paternalist approach to integration. It basically entails adopting the principle that certain people in society (namely immigrants) don't have the freedom of movement that everybody else has. That is, if anything, highly disempowering. If there already is a siege-mentality (and the article certainly suggests this), then it will only be strengthed by such quite draconic measures, further fuelling frustration and antagonistic us vs. them feelings.


It seems to me that in a situation where disempowerment and social exclusion is so prevalent, such paternalist measures will only make things worse.