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”.
One comment
I think requiring language proficiency is a very reasonable requirement in a small country like Norway. For years before the country was besieged by asylum seekers and immigrants from parts of the world which currently, have been, and will be unstable, Norwegians were considered that English would supplant Norwegian. Norway as every right to ensure that its language is preserved and to make sure that immigrants on public benefits speak Norwegian well enough to theoretically (Norwegian employers were always give preference to native speakers) employable. If only the U.S had declared English the country’s official language, half of the jobs in Los Angeles could not require employees to bilingual in Spanish, Mandarin, Russian, Tagalog or Armenian and the ballots and other official government documents would not be in all of the above languages with English almost as a second thought. It is sad that Scandinavia was so naive in assuming the asylum seekers and immigrants would be so grateful to be in a stable, peaceful, prosperous democracy that they would eagerly learn Norwegian, learn Norwegian ways, and attempt to assimilate into Norwegian society by adopting the behavioral norms of Norway society. If only the PMs of Norway, Sweden and Denmark have taken a tour of central and south Los Angeles, they would have realized that their expectation of grateful immigrants who would make every effort to assimilate is looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, and that is an understatement. Then the Scandinavians would see that allowing an influx of low-skilled immigrants with very little education and then giving them generous public benefits is the best a way for a first world country to import third world poverty. The United Nations has predicted that Sweden will be a third wold country by 2050. The immigrants do not assimilate, they expect their new country to change to accommodate their culture, see e.g., the travesty of bilingual education in the Los Angeles School District. As much as the media tries to suppress the facts by never mentioning the race, ethnicity or the status of the immigrant’s residency in the US (the Los Angeles Times and local news now call illegal immigrants “undocumented) illegal immigrants bring violent crime, drugs, and gangs with them as shown by the LAPD statistic. The illegal immigrants (who do not pay income taxes, only sales and gasoline taxes) also will eventually bankrupt the City of Los Angeles, not the much larger County, which spent $1.3 billion on public benefits on illegal immigrants in only two years. Norway has woken up and realized that allowing a large number of low-skilled people with little education that have little or no ability to speak Norwegian and either lack the capacity or the desire to learn the language are a huge drain on the state and will remain a drain for generation after generation. I just hope Norway has acted in time to save itself because it not at all like the Norway of my childhood, just California is not the California of the 1980s anymore, but a third world hellhole with three times the amount of traffic.
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