REPLY. 480,300 people are unemployed in Sweden today. Unemployment is expected to reach the highest level in a decade with the exception of the pandemic. In a time of high unemployment, increased interest rates and inflation, one needs to think regarding the outcome, that is, who is primarily affected.
Among the native-born, unemployment amounted to 4.4 percent, while among the foreign-born, it amounted to 18.4 percent in 2023. If you break the numbers down even further, unemployment is worst among the groups who come from war zones, have a low educational background and limited language skills.
This is not an opinion, but pure fact. Poverty is higher among the foreign-born and without strong political efforts, class society will be strengthened, polarization will increase and a material basis for racism will be solidified.
There is already reluctance in the redistributive economic structure. Instead of a common welfare within schools, care and social care, two different welfare states are emerging in one and the same country.
read Hasan Ramic’s text
Operation of welfare
It concerns both the operation of welfare and private health insurance. If you look even more closely at which groups take out welfare insurance, it is no longer just high income earners, but also domestically born workers and healthy people.
When these groups disappear from the common welfare, the self-interest in solving its shortcomings and, by extension, the identity of a common society is weakened.
In fewer and fewer places in our country, rich and poor, domestic and foreign-born meet. Cohesion is currently at stake.
The Social Democrats’ time in opposition is regarding just this. The community idea has been countered by the weak parliamentary support for three decades and few social democratic budgets of their own.
Cooperation with the Liberals meant that the defense tax was abolished, cooperation with the Center Party made it impossible to resist the market school’s ultimate consequences. But it is good that more parties are now reconsidering their policies on central, and extremely crucial, issues for Sweden’s future.
Replicate the wrong report
Hasan Ramic’s article seems primarily to be regarding the consequences of the development of economic inequality.
Then it will be strange for me to replicate the text because it is the wrong report he is reading. The report that analyzed the neoliberalization of the Swedish economy, new public management, the privatization of welfare and the development of tax policy is from the working group “Community through increased justice and respect for those who support society” led by Member of Parliament Niklas Karlsson (S).
But they also describe what many welfare researchers can ascertain: that the high level of migration combined with a lack of integration has led to accelerating segregation and that this in itself has reduced support for economically redistributive welfare.
The working group I lead, on the other hand, looks at the linguistic community and does so with a clearly conscious class analysis. Language, demography, culture and issues of belonging are nothing new in the labor movement, least of all within social democracy.
It is based on the first party leader’s insight into preparing marginalized groups for the takeover of power. In the labor movement’s archives, you can find study guide lists of works of fiction, political science and economics for poorly literate members to go through with a sense of discipline and duty.
Language and education
Language and education are two fundamental tools for empowerment and the opportunity to influence life. If you give up the language, you will also give up the feeling of belonging in the society in which you live and work.
But the working group I lead does not stop there. We might have responded in our analysis to the extremely simple conclusion that Swedish education for new arrivals does not meet the current needs. But we have decided that language is a carrier of power and thus a socially decisive issue.
I am deeply angry at how Sweden looks today. We live not only economically segregated, but also linguistically.
In pre-school following pre-school in vulnerable areas, there are few, if any, pupils who speak Swedish as their mother tongue. The children have no Swedish-speaking playmates.
In some preschools, Heller staff cannot compensate for this and lack of language skills in Swedish. Barnens språk är inte Heller agersadekvat.
Swedish children of foreign-born parents in certain vulnerable areas start primary school with the same linguistic capital as 4-year-olds. How are they even going to catch up?
Natural for me to speak languages
Therefore, it is completely natural for me to talk regarding language, culture and belonging.
I can say hello from Elias Abdallah, an 82-year-old Syrian ferry captain who finds it strange to become a Swedish citizen without knowing Swedish.
Preschool teachers who want Swedish courses during working hours.
New arrivals who apply for language practice in order to get a job. Unemployed foreign-born people who ask me how to learn the language if you never meet a Swedish speaker in your everyday life?
Or perhaps most importantly – the young, like the writer Faysa Idle, who explicitly says that we live in parallel worlds in Sweden and that this is an existential threat to our togetherness.
This is what my and the working group’s intention is to both illuminate and forcefully do something regarding.
