Can the Nordic model survive the backlash to immigration?
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
well, theres a penalty for unskilled labor
Skilled labor does just fine
Early waves of refugees from Syria and Iraq included doctors, accountants and other professionals. Language training allowed them to resume their careers. The people arriving later tended to have little education. Many had suffered trauma, requiring mental health counseling.
...
Roughly one-fifth of Filipstad’s nearly 11,000 inhabitants are now foreign-born. Among the 750 working-age people, 500 have received less than a high school education. Two hundred are illiterate.
“The state keeps saying we need to prepare people to get jobs fast,” Mr. Fellsman says. “That’s impossible. You have to educate them.”
Preparing lower-skilled refugees for work would be a challenge anywhere. In Sweden it is uniquely difficult, given how the economy is centered on highly skilled, highly paid pursuits. It has been engineered to minimize the sorts of low-paying service sector jobs that consign people in other countries to the ranks of the working poor.
Some argue that Sweden must allow lower-wage service sector jobs to emerge, enabling immigrants to secure a hold in the economy by cleaning homes or taking care of children — ideally with a government subsidy.
But unions are hostile, seeing this as a dangerous precedent that could expose Sweden to the forces of downward mobility at work in other countries. Until recently, Swedes were not accustomed to hiring people for menial work, typically preferring to clean their own homes.
Yet absent some fresh approach to increasing employment, an alarming divide seems certain to widen.
The unemployment rate was only 3.8 percent among the Swedish-born populace last year, but 15 percent among foreign-born, notes Marika Lindgren Asbrink, a researcher at LO, Sweden’s largest labor union. Roughly half of all jobless people in Sweden were foreign-born.
It's strange because he's the children of immigrants his damn self.
He's the very thing he rails against.
