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.