How is your part of the world doing (both current and future prospects) compared to how it was 30/40 years ago? Please say where you are in the world.
Edit- Thank you everyone for commenting. It has been very interesting for me and hopefully for others. If you are just coming to this post please still comment I am still reading them.
And thanks for your great reply. I really find this fascinating. I am glad you think it is fixable, hopefully it will turn around here soon without too much pain. If you will permit me one more question. What does integration mean to you? Like do they need to become more Swedish, do the Swedes need to just their culture to accommodate the immigrants. Or more of a live and let live thing where you can be neighbors but not really integrate. As far as I know immigration is always a net positive for a society, but that doesn’t make it easy.
It’s a really delicate question.
I think the major failings have been that we have allowed a large part of the immigrants to move into neighborhoods with exclusively other immigrants, thus not being exposed to Swedish culture or values. This ties in with learning Swedish, which obviously is central to integration. This has become a vicious circle where entire suburbs can consist of immigrants. An example is where teachers in kindergarten speak poor Swedish and the kids also have poor Swedish. In many cases they don’t share a mother tounge and the result isn’t great. I get that you want to live with other people who speak your language, but the divide is too big in my opinion.
Then there’s the discussion about cultural values which I don’t think I know enough about to speak much about. But we can see that there are several groups that don’t want to be a real part of society, and that’s clearly a problem.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful replies. I could ask your questions about this till you run away, but I will leave it for now.
Let me just leave you with this though. Looking at other counties that have a longer history of large immigration. It seems to take 2 to 3 generations for immigrants to feel native. Maybe a little unconditional acceptance and patience will help this along.
I hope the best for you and your country.
Thank you!
We have several groups who have assimilated: Iranians, Finns, Baltics. Thank you for the hopeful words :)