Prime Minister Erna Solberg has announced stricter measures for welfare eligibility, the newspaper Nettavisen reported. In 2017, the Norwegian state already disbursed a massive NOK 6.6 billion in social assistance.
Half of all welfare recipients are migrants and 86 percent of them arrived in Norway from Africa and the Middle East. According to Statistics Norway, there are over 130 000 recipients of social benefits in a country of 5.2 million. In 2017, there were over 880 000 people of foreign background in Norway, which is around 17 percent of the population.
“Immigrants are over-represented in social assistance. Often, their command of the Norwegian language is too poor to get by in the workplace”, Solberg told Nettavisen.
According to Solberg an “activity requirement” should incentivize those under the age of 30 to seek employment, and the “language requirement” serves a similar goal.
Solberg said not working was no longer an option. “You must remember the mechanism that get triggered when you spend a long time on social assistance. You lose confidence and inspiration to do something about your life”, she said. Learning the language would change that, she argued.
Demands on foreigners to speak Norwegian will be implemented as from 2020 with assistance provided for child-rearing. “One must work on integration from day one. Teaching Norwegian is actually the top priority”, Solberg said.
The number of unemployed immigrants have been rising. “I am worried that too many immigrants are out of work and are passive welfare recipients. This cannot be good either for the individual or for society”, Labour and Social Affairs Minister Anniken Hauglie told the Aftenposten daily newspaper recently.
Socialist Left Party immigration spokesman Karin Andersen complained however that Solberg’s administration has crossed “yet another limits of rule of law and decency”.