A few weeks ago Fabio in Brazil contacted me as he had stumble over this blog while looking at working possibilities in Sweden. He liked the kind of life possibilities in Ulricehamn I portray in this blog and had read about our project of getting Dutch people to emigrate to this region. Fabio is a dentist with a family who already has working permits for both the US and Ireland but who is still looking at what kind of life you can get in different countries. Today I read an article in our local paper warning us all of the great costs of immigration. According to the writer we are in for a great surprise if we do not stop immigration quickly. I would state the opposite!
We live in a global world where most of our companies would not be able to exist if they did not have the chance to export and import goods from all over the world. We need each other! All great innovations and achievements of mankind has occurred when people from different backgrounds, from different cultures and with different knowledge fields have met and looked at challenges from different points of view. Many people in Sweden still live in the notion that Europe is the centre of great achievements and that Sweden is a knowledge country. Obviously Sweden is great country, father of many inventions, with little poverty and a well functioning social structure. However, we are also a country with fairly low wages for high skilled workers and high wages for low skilled workers, with a negative spiral of the number of new started companies, with very low school results compared to the rest of the world (and yes, you can obviously ask the question what do we measure when we talk about school results) where we now see innovation companies leaving Sweden to set up their businesses in India or China instead. In the 60s we saw how the manufacturing industry left Sweden for lower wages in Asia. Now we see Swedish high skilled workers and researchers leaving Sweden for greater opportunities abroad. India and China are the greatest investors in Africa today. In Europe we do not see the same potential in Africa but maybe we are wrong? Why do we assume that people who come to Sweden, weather they are refugees from a country at war or economic immigrants, do not have any skills or anything of interest to us? Who are the once starting new businesses – the immigrants!
We need to improve and extend our service sector in order to survive on the global market and in order to do so we need the expertise from abroad. There are always costs of immigration just as there are costs for a society when people drop out of school, go on parental leave or get sick. However, there are also possibilities in these situations. Immigration brings new ideas and innovation to a country. It helps us fill the gaps when there is a shortage of personal such as in the medical sector or get staff for tasks few people are willing to do, such as cleaning. By taking in high skilled workers, maybe on temporary contracts, we get a more flexible labour market and I think we need to look at flexibility as a factor of success if Sweden is not going to fall further behind. Sweden is a fantastic country with lots of possibilities but if we want to continue to develop and increase our market shares we should not close our doors. We should open them, encourage a European blue-card for high skilled workers and stay a humane country that helps people in need!
Another interesting aspect of immigration is the current situation in Norway where most of the staff in hotels, in shops and in the tourism sector is Swedish. In the shops in the Danish capital of Copenhagen it is getting more and more rare that you see Danish staff. Most of the staff is Swedish. If we see many opportunities abroad maybe we should be open to others seeing opportunities in Sweden?
And, if Fabio learns Swedish and gets his dentist accreditation to work in Sweden I hope he will consider living in Ulricehamn!
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