Who is an Immigrant?
The newspapers are full of people who are called immigrants. It´s often hard to tell if this refers to people who have just come to Sweden or if they are people who have lived here for 30 years.
Mannan Mridha is a researcher in medical technology at the technical institute in Stockholm. He is tired of being reduced to a label: "the immigrant," "the immigrant teacher," "the immigrant researcher."
"I came to Sweden in 1981. I have my whole life in this country. My job, my children, my home. I´m not planning to migrate anywhere," he says.
He defines himself as a Swede with an Indian background, but above all else, as a man with a global focus. This is visible even in his research, which deals with how ultramodern technology can be used in environmental work in developing nations. Had Manna Mridha lived in the US instead, he believes it would have been self-evident for him to say "we Americans."
Once in a while he tries a "we Swedes" among his colleagues and students. It falls flat.
The term "immigrant" has been hotly debated in recent years. The authorities´ and politicians´ use of the word have been particularly criticized. Even the media´s continuing classification of people into the categories of immigrants and Swedes is being questioned.
The critics are zeroing in on the fact that the word lumps people together in a misleading way. "Immigrants" in Sweden are people who have a background in over 100 countries. Here are farmers and brain surgeons, atheists and believers of every religion. Criminals as well as pearls.
Both the people who have just touched down at Arlanda and said "asylum" and Ilmar Reepalu, the municipal commissioner in Malmö, who came to Sweden from Estonia as a child, are thrown together under the same title.
The statistic for the number of immigrants who live in Sweden includes children who are born in Sweden but have a parent from another country.
Instead of the word "immigrant" one could in many cases use the term "ethnic minority."
Hair splitting and pc fuss about terminology? No, fundamentally it is about respect for people, to hold them in high esteem rather than the opposite.
This spring the central labour organization TCO [the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees] put out a publication called the Black List. The publication is supposed to work both as a dictionary of multi-ethnic words and as a thought provoker.
Target audience: journalists and those active in unions.
The Black List categorizes different terms under "Okay," "Warning," and "Watch out!". To watch out for are, according to the editors, words like "Turkish Kurds," "Arabic looking," - and "immigrants."
"But if we swap a word with another word - who cares? We tried that with cleaners, who became building caretakers. That doesn´t change how we look at the people," says Lotta Bolin, a journalist with the paper Immigrants & Minorities.
Abraham Staifo, the Chair of the Assyrian Youth Organization, supports that point of view: "The word itself has no negative connotation for me. There is a paranoia surrounding the question among some Swedish journalists and politicians who want to switch it for the term "new Swedes" or something. But the problem does not lie in which word one uses, but in th fact that society regards us as though we don´t belong here."
Abraham Staifo believes in a future for the Assyrians in Sweden. He points to Södertälje as an example of how an old culture will not be eradicated in Sweden. About 15,000 of the city´s population have an Assyrian/Syrian background. One of the city´s members of parliament is Assyrian/Syrian and Södertälje is the Bishop´s Seat for the Syrian-Orthodox Church. The city´s pride, the soccer team "Assyrians," plays in Division 1 of the league.
Such a reality puts the strange division of the real world into, on the one hand "immigrants" and on the other hand Swedes, to the test.
So what happens with that growing group - Swedish-Arabs, Swedish- Turks or Swedish-Assyrians - who aren´t either? Not in the Swedish majority, not from the national minority groups such as Sami or Tornedalings, and not "immigrants."
From immigrants to new minorities?