Wednesday 29 September 2004

Pic of the day: The Sims are programmed to completely ignore skin color when they choose who to hang out with. So much for realism. (Then again, they are not asylum-seekers either. It's more like they come from there.)

I'm not a racist, but...

In certain parts of the world you really don't want to hear that phrase, because it means that yes, you are a racist by any other name. And ironically this seems to be more common in areas where people from different continents live together in the same towns. Perhaps not in the same neighborhoods... I guess that attitude may be hard to keep up if the strangely colored humans are your neighbors, although some people seem to manage that too.

My native Norway used to be one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. Admittedly we have the northern aboriginal Sami people, with a very different language and lifestyle, and it was not until a few decades ago that we stopped trying to make them into good Norwegians. After all, they didn't look very different from us. In fact most of them could not be distinguished from their Norwegian neighbors except by the clothes and their speech, and we tried to change those.

***

Then, when I was a small boy, the Norwegian government made some kind of deal with Pakistan. I don't know the details about it, but several thousand Pakistani workers came to Norway to work. I suppose there simply wasn't enough Norwegian workers, and especially in less glorious careers. Norway had a fairly high education level already, by the standards of that time. Today's standards are much higher, both here and worldwide, but Norway still has the most educated workforce in the world (at least by some measures, and those are the measures we like). There are still some types of work which most Norwegians prefer not to do. And there are still foreigners here doing it, but they no longer come from one particular country. And they are not "guest workers". Some come from the European Economic Area, which now includes most of Eastern Europe as well. And some are "asylum-seekers".

It would be cruel to say that Norwegian society is schizophrenic when it comes to immigration. After all, schizophrenia is a debilitating illness of the brain that causes massive breakdown of higher mental functions; it is not just a cute word for having two conflicting opinions or world views at the same time. But that last part describes the Norwegian attitude to immigration. On one hand, we make it clear that asylum-seekers have to have a really good reasons to come here (preferably they should be fleeing for their lives) and even then their stay is temporary and they should return as soon as they safely can. On the other hand, we expect them to integrate in the society. We request that they learn some Norwegian, and if they stay for a long period of time we expect them to work. Also if people stay here long enough they are usually given permission to stay for "humanitary reasons". These people make up a minor part of our workforce, but a large part of some types of work.

In short, foreigners who come here from developing countries have no idea whether they will be thrown out the next day or be allowed to stay here for the rest of their lives and eventually bring their family here. There is probably some pattern in what happens to who, but even most of us Norwegians can't see it except in the most obvious cases (false identities for instance).

***

We who can proudly call ourselves "ethnic Norwegians" have noticed two different traits in people who come from remote parts of the world. One, they look different from us -- different hair, different nose and even different skin color if they come from another continent. Two, they are more likely to commit serious crimes like rape, arson and murder. Especially murder... even though these people are still a fairly small minority, it has come so far that when we hear about a murder we expect that an immigrant has done it unless something else is said. In reality, of course, most of them are not even criminals. But that doesn't make people feel any safer when they see someone with an unusual skin color. After all, the risk is higher, even if it is still a very low. (The crime rates here in Scandinavia make the USA look like a country in the midst of civil war.)

So today, when some guy attacked the pilots on a small Norwegian plane during landing, it probably surprised no one that this was one of those "off-color" people. In this case it was an asylum-seeker from Algeria. He had been told that he was not welcome here, the same as most of them. He had been told to leave the country but not yet been forcibly evicted. So he decided to crash the plane, and he was 100 ft. from doing it by attacking the pilots with an axe. Two other passengers managed to haul him away, but not before he had wounded both of the pilots and one of the passengers.

Now, I'm not a racist or anything, but... I was not surprised either. Want to know why?

When someone has to run away from a country, you must expect them to be more impulsive than average (otherwise most of the citizens would have run away, after alle). And less likely to play well with others. If we thought only about the good of our own nation, we would return those who come here voluntarily and instead try to recruit people who didn't want to come here. Because the people who get along with their neighbors today, are the people who will get along with their neighbors tomorrow. Whether that is a genetic or cultural thing, I leave as an exercise for the reader... at least for now.