Re: However, Canada, AU and Sweden have similar systems and have a greater diversity of people....
Check again:
The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Paperback)
by Gwenda Tavan
amazon.com
Book Description
The history of the racist immigration policy that was Australia’s guiding light for the majority of the 20th century is examined in this work. Beginning with the policy’s introduction in 1901, this analysis traces the policy’s gradual transformation as successive governments reluctantly gave ground on barring non-Europeans from Australia. Originally intended to ensure an ethnic and cultural link to the mother country, the policy hurt Australia’s relations with Asia and had harsh consequences for non-Europeans residing in the country. The policy’s demise in the early 1970s was initially celebrated as a watershed moment when Australia came into its own as an independent and culturally diverse modern nation. Continued public support for preserving Australia’s white, Anglo-Celtic culture, however, begs the question of whether the White Australia policy really died or was buried alive by bureaucrats and politicians eager to present a new face of Australia to the world.
About the Author
Gwenda Tavan teaches politics at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia.
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A Swedish Dilemma
From the February 28, 2005 issue: Immigration and the welfare state.
by Christopher Caldwell
02/28/2005, Volume 010, Issue 22
[...]
But in a country where, as the sociologist Åke Daun puts it, "people like being like each other," there is evidence of profound exhaustion with immigration, whether the reasons for this exhaustion are rationally well-founded or not. In the moral-superpower context, it is the equivalent of "imperial overstretch." Swedes tell pollsters they want no more asylum-seekers. (A common complaint is that prospective arrivals have figured out how to "game" the rules of asylum applications, and that the best way to render one's story unchallengeable under the law is to destroy one's identity papers.) A very low rate of mixed marriage is an indication that Swedes may not have been crazy about this immigration in the first place.
There are some signs of integration--Sweden has an Assyrian Christian minister of schools; the soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, born in Rosengård to Bosnian Croat parents, is a national hero. But one much more often hears stories of increasing segregation. One actually hears the word "segregation" used. A person who stuck to central Stockholm would find none of the clues of heavy minority presence that a visitor to central Amsterdam or Paris or London gets. "Sweden is a special country," says Nalin Pekgul, director of the Social Democrats' women's group in Stockholm. "It wasn't a colonial power--it had no experience with immigrants."
"Many of us," says Masoud Kamali, an Iranian-born professor of ethnic studies at the University of Uppsala, "saw Sweden as the homeland of tolerance, solidarity, and democracy, based on the image of Sweden abroad." Yet foreigners find that the longer they live in Sweden, the more foreign they feel. Kamali, who directs studies on xenophobia and social exclusion for both the E.U. and the Swedish government, says, "Integration is a complete failure: No one can deny it." Kamali, a radical and controversial figure, speculates that a fear of getting segregated out of the society may be the reason that immigrants have shown themselves overwhelmingly in favor of European Union membership, both at the ballot box and in opinion polls. "They think: 'You are not going to be a Swede--or, at least, it's not you who's going to decide if you are a Swede.' But perhaps you can choose to be a European."
SWEDES HAVE LATELY GROWN ATTENTIVE to their neighbors' policies on immigration. They note that Finland's tight immigration policies have resulted in lower social burdens. But ever since the Öresund bridge brought Malmö within commuting distance of Copenhagen, it is to Denmark that Swedes have looked with most anxiety. There, the rise of the anti-immigration Danish People's party--which has never entered government but has thoroughly spooked the other parties of left and right--has succeeded in winning passage of Europe's most stringent laws on immigration. Denmark now restricts asylum admissions, welfare payments, and citizenship and residency permits for reasons of family unification. Danes under 25 who marry foreigners no longer have the right to bring their spouses into the country. Many such half-Danish couples now live in Malmö.
[...]
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