Why mandating Swedish values won’t help integration

My heart sank when we wrote this week about how the Moderate Party plans to put Swedish “values” at the core of its election campaign next year. 

“When different perspectives clash with one another then it should be the values we have in Sweden and our view which should be the ones that dictate the result,” Sweden’s Migration Minister Johan Forssell, told TT about the campaign plan. 

A proposal to the party congress this weekend is for Sweden’s anti-discrimination law to be rewritten so that it does not work against Swedish values by defending men who refuse to shake women’s hands at work for religious reasons.

This comes a week after Ebba Busch, leader of the Christian Democrats, said she wanted a total ban on the burqa and niqab – two forms of Islamic headdress that cover the entire face of the wearer. 

“You should be able to meet for real if you are on the street, if you are shopping in the square, in the Ica store or taking the children to the health centre. I don’t want to meet someone who has covered their entire face,” she said. 

The first thing that irritates me about this is the assumption that these practices are widespread. I live in Malmö, where roughly half the population has a foreign background, most from Arab countries, and I cannot remember once seeing someone wearing a burqa or niqab. 

Is it really worth making the 800,000 or so people in Sweden with a Muslim background feel unwelcome to micro-manage the behaviour of a few hundred religious extremists? 

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The second thing is that this is simply the wrong way to go about promoting Swedish values.

I agree absolutely that Sweden has done too little to communicate Swedish values and Swedish culture to immigrants coming to the country, mainly because for most of the time I’ve been living here the consensus opinion has been that there are no Swedish values and there is no Swedish culture.

But you don’t promote culture and values by banning people from expressing their own, or by forcing them to sign humiliating documents stating they “agree with equality, not blaming others and striving for consensus” as if that will do anything to influence actual behaviour. 

By all means promote gender equality, the rights of sexual minorities and trans people. Swedish schools already do this. Hold education events in immigrant suburbs. Even the Swedish canon is, I think, a  positive and welcoming gesture, a way of saying to newcomers, “here are the works of Swedish culture we think are worth you experiencing”. 

But what the Moderate Party is proposing is, I suspect, not aimed at immigrants at all. It’s aimed at ethnic Swedish voters. It’s a way of pointing out differences. It’s the politics of us and them. And that is hardly going to help people integrate. 

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What’s the latest immigration news?

We’ve been writing a lot recently about how people with EU Long Term Residence permits (LTR) in Sweden will have their permanent residence revoked under the government’s proposed new rules and on Monday, I finally got statistics from the Migration Agency giving some detail on which people have permanent residency through LTR.   

There was also a new forecast from the Migration Agency which further downgraded its estimate of how many citizenship cases it will complete in 2025, meaning it is now set to handle only half the number it forecast before the government announced new security checks in January. 

Finally, we told the story of yet another Brexit casualty, the British South-African Roy Bowden, who has been asked to leave Sweden or risk a Schengen ban. 

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What else have we been writing about? 

The most heart-warming story this week was Becky’s interview with the mayor of Götene, Johan Månsson, after he made headlines by selling off plots of land for just one krona. Becky had interviewed him then and wanted to find out how things have gone. It turned out he credited The Local with helping the story go viral globally, leading to an interview on CNN and a huge amount in interest in the plots. It was, he said, “like a fairytale”.  

Another fun story was the appointment of the former Chelsea manager Graham Potter as the manager of Sweden’s national football team, and in particular his decision to start his thank you speech with nearly a minute of surprisingly decent Swedish. We got our in-house Swedish teacher Jenny Crowther to assess his level, and she reckoned he was at least at upper-intermediate. 

We got the result of our survey asking for readers’ views of Swedes reputation for sexual liberation, with the majority saying Swedes were quite sexually liberated, or at least had an uncomplicated approach, but perhaps less so than people thought before they came here. 

Our freelancer Amélie Reichmuth put together a list of everything you can do for free during Sweden’s autumn höstlov break, and also looked at which certificate was the best way of demonstrating your Swedish level: Tisus, Swedex or SVA3. She also listed the best Swedish series to binge on. 

I also dug deeply into how the Swedish personal number follows people in Sweden from cradle to grave. It is issued minutes after you are born and deregistered on death. The final piece of data attached to it is where you are buried. 

We’re doing a new reader survey on people’s experience of divorce. Please fill it in if you have split up in Sweden or are in the middle of doing so. 

Our latest crossword is now out. We are looking at the latest news and everything Swedish! Can you solve it, play here!