I rented
a room in a private flat in Södervärn, racially one of the most mixed areas of
Malmö, in one of the many municipal apartment blocks. I was told later that
Malmö’s apartment blocks have a reputation for being gerrybuilt—it was the
first time I had ever heard that accusation made against the meticulous
Swedes—but I could not fault mine. It was comfortable, warm, spotlessly clean
and green, with a little wall plaque outside detailing its energy usage and
“environmental impact.” But Södervärn, I soon found out, is one of the least
desirable downtown addresses. The main problem was security. I needed to
negotiate three locks to get from the street to my digs. “Homeless people try
the doors,” my landlady said. “Don’t leave windows open, at any time.” A neighbour
had lost a computer, and another had come home and found somebody under the
bed.
Malmö is
now home to well over 100 ethnicities. Most numerous are the Iraqis, at over
ten thousand, though several other groups are of similar size. Overall, the
immigrant population of Malmö is overwhelmingly Middle Eastern—Arabs, Turks,
Kurds and Iranians—and Muslim, with a large number of Bosnians adding a
European contingent to the mosque congregations. There are also Africans,
Afghans, Greeks and Russians, though few Indians, Pakistanis or East Asians.
Södervärn, where I was, reflected this mix.
It wasn’t
exactly run down—nowhere in Sweden is—but it wasn’t a place to linger in
either. When Malmö was a manufacturing city, this was a working-class
residential area of solid, turn-of-the-century tenement blocks. Now you find
jobcentres and welfare offices, Arab cafés, pokey bazaars and discount
supermarkets, and a charmless neither-here-nor-there atmosphere. It had a lot
of down-and-outs. Every day, you saw old, homeless Swedes lounging drunkenly on
benches, rummaging through bins or begging by cashpoints, while Roma squatted
here and there with their hands out. I was astonished that there could actually
be homelessness in Sweden, a nation with more space, money and cheap
construction timber than it knows what to do with. One reason, I found out
later, is the pressure on housing caused by open-door immigration. There is now
talk in the alternative media that local authorities are considering
appropriating and housing refugees in some of the country’s half-a-million stuga summerhouses, cabins in the woods
which are dear to all Swedish hearts and form a pillar of Sweden’s culture of
the outdoors.
It would
fair to say I spent most of my days drifting. Private freelance translation
work took up a few hours each morning, and after that I would go out into the
streets, sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes to print stuff or do
some heavy computing, sometimes just following my nose. Downstairs from my room
was a café, run by a pair of Iranians, where I would begin the day with rolls,
cheese, eggs and tomatoes, the only “Swedish” food I ate during my stay. The
place opened at six-thirty in the morning to catch the bus commuters. The owner
did the preparation and the wife the serving. She had been in Sweden for four
years, she said, having been brought over by her husband, who had started the
business. She had very little Swedish, but a warm smile that lit the whole
place up on dark mornings. Here, or at another café a few doors down, I would
eat and sample the press, while Malmö went to work outside the plate glass
window.
Initially,
I posed as a “newly landed Swede” myself. I became a regular at the local
Medborgarcentrum (citizen’s centre), where I could work with a good internet
connection. At the centre, immigrants got jobseeking and welfare guidance, and
help in filling out paperwork. Few had good Swedish or English. Staff tried to
communicate in Swedish only, but when things broke down, they resorted to
English, and if that failed, an interpreter occasionally appeared from a
back-office. The staff were patient, but had a permanently jaded air and a
tendency to talk in baby-Swedish that rapidly became annoying even to
eavesdrop. “Har du fått
anmälningsblanketten? Har - du - fått
– anmälningsblanketten? Anmälningsblanketten? Re-gis-tration form? Did you get it?” This went on all morning. It
wasn’t their fault—they had to talk like this, to communicate at all, but
inevitably they sounded condescending. In addition to incoherent immigrants,
they also had to deal with sometimes obnoxious Swedish drunks and homeless men.
Of the
more than 1.7 million people granted permanent residency since 1980, only
35,000, a little more than 2%, were refugees seeking asylum by the United
Nations definition, and more than 700,000 were dependents. Some came in under a
new category invented by Sweden, “övrig
skyddsbehövande,” or “otherwise in need of protection,” which covers those
who do not meet the UN criteria, including those affected by “environmental”
disasters. In 2012, 43,887 people applied for asylum, up 48% from 2011. The
figures have continued to rise. During 2015, up to 94,000 people are expected
to seek asylum in Sweden.
“In
Malmö, asylum seekers start out at camps outside the city,” said Lars. He was
an elderly volunteer helper at a nearby charity café for workless migrants and
others. “They get a two-year permission to stay and then they can go on to a
permanent residence permit. After a few more years they can begin the citizenship
application process. And, once accepted, they can bring their spouses here too.
But if you lack asylum status, it’s not at all easy to get here from the Third
World.” A Cambodian he had been helping was sent back home after his tourist
visa had run out, he said. Lars, who referred to Cambodia by its Khmer Rouge
name of Kampuchea, had gone back with him to petition the Swedish Embassy in
Phnom Penh .. “But the best way to get into Sweden, you know, is to come
without papers and without passport. Just turn up, and then you go into the
asylum camp, and that gets the ball rolling.”
“In other
words, people throw away their papers?”
“I
wouldn’t know about that.”
According to the writer Julia
Caesar, to whom I am grateful for much statistical detail, 95% of foreigners
who seek asylum in Sweden never present any ID document; the government
basically has no idea who it is letting in. Of 54,259 foreigners who sought
asylum in Sweden in 2013, only about 4,880 presented ID.
“Are
those without papers ever sent back?”
“I
couldn’t say.”
After a
moment, he went on: “Asylum seekers get everything for free here, and that
includes accommodation, whether it takes them three months or three years to
get a job. It’s not easy to get a flat here unless you’re an asylum seeker.”
“And yet
there’s a two-year waiting list for council flats, with homeless on the streets
and youth unemployment high?”
“Yes,
about 20 percent, I would guess.”
“Do you
think that’s fair?”
“These
are people who need help.”
In the
reception area hung a large portrait of Olof Palme. On my way out, I stopped to
look at it. Palme was the outspoken socialist leader who ushered in
multiracialism in Sweden and who later fell victim to an assassin’s bullet in a
Stockholm street—a murder that remains unsolved.
“Landsfadren,” said Lars, with a smile.
The father of the country.
I asked
to see an advisor at one of the many official employment consultancies around
town. I was referred to a middle-aged lady tapping away at a laptop. She did
not look up at first, and spoke very slowly, as if to a child, in thick skånska, the heavy dialect with
back-rolled ‘r’ that is characteristic of this län (province), and which I found quite hard to follow. She was
clearly used to dealing with foreigners. I told her I was a migrant from
Britain, looking for work in Sweden, and gave her some personal details.
“Frankly,”
she said, “as a 54-year-old, you have very little chance of finding work here,
regardless of background or qualification. Even if you can speak Swedish.”
What was
the job market like generally?
“Employers
are tired of immigrants,” she said. I had not expected such candour from a
government employee. “They want Swedish people who can understand the language
properly. Very few European Union nationals come to Sweden to seek work. You
are unusual. Immigrants usually come from the other side of the world and they
are nearly always people escaping conflicts, war and crisis. And there are many
cultural problems.”
I had
haircut later at an Iraqi barbers’ near my flat. The other waiting customer was
also an Iraqi. We got talking as the barber worked.
“I came
here as a student,” he told me in good Swedish. “I learnt the language, so my
experience was not typical. But it’s really difficult for most immigrants. If
you end up in a factory, you get stuck there. They just tell you hämta det, gör så här (get this, do that). You don’t really learn proper
Swedish and you can’t really form relationships with people.”
The restaurant
and personal-service sectors were the only real options for most newly-landed
Swedes, he said. My barber was a case in point. He had very little Swedish. He
had moved here from Denmark, he said, having got himself a Danish passport. It
turned out the other customer had too. Both came to Sweden because competition
for accommodation in Copenhagen was tough. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of
immigrants had one foot in either country like this, they said. The customer
said he preferred living in Sweden, because there were fewer people around. The
barber said he had preferred living in Copenhagen, because there were more
people around.
It was a
good haircut, but I came out of there looking like a poster boy for the Hitler
Youth. For some reason, while I had been yacking away, he had been quietly
giving me a 1940s-style comb-over with the parting a few centimeters above my
left ear. He had wanted to put pomade on. I stopped him just in time, but still
he got to my quiff, and I could smell my hair for the next twelve hours.
Taken from the free downloadable book Kebabville & Zone: Click HERE
