Since when is it OK that you keep us unemployed?

BY GORANA OGNJENOVIC

The shocking information has been served to us in the media not so long ago. Most Norwegians are OK with the fact that immigrants are not able to get work.

Some days afterwards on the front page of Morgenbladet the nightmare was continued by someone who argued the following pity: Everything seen so far implies that immigrants do want to work.

Some weeks later again, Morgenbladet serves the story of how: It does not pay off to work.

In Aftenposten, today (16 June), to top it all off, there is a big headline: Immigrants – social clients, where they claim that every second social client is not of Western origin. Conveniently, at the bottom of the page they add how “Nine out of ten people living in Oslo today are immigrants.”so that you can draw the conclusion yourself.

At this point I cannot quite make up my mind about which one of these statements listed above is more patronizing. When I think about it for a while, it seems very clear that if I walked out on the street every day taking all of them seriously I would have more than clinically diagnosed paranoia. And still I feel so lucky since the colour of my skin is neither black nor yellow, so if I keep my mouth shut I might even get somewhere!

Is that what everyone thinks about me when they hear that I am not one of them? Do they think that I have nothing better to do with my life than to sit at home and receive their social benefits? All this reminds me of the situation in the US where whites all the time claim how blacks are the ones who just collect social benefits, while in reality the white collectors of social benefits are the ones who are leading the statistics.

Of course the absurdity reaches the climax when you discover how the immigrants’ role has been reduced to the role of toilet and floor cleaners. No one is talking about highly educated immigrants who are sitting without a job on their hands. Here especially, I have in mind immigrants who have received their education here in Norway. Where do they fit into the statistics? Oh yes I remember, they are of course not included since no one wants to admit that not all immigrants only have a low level of education, that not all of them do not know the language well enough and therefore that not all of them are here to wash public toilets.

Well, on the other hand, we cannot really say that there is no place left for people of colour in our current government or our high society in general.

So, people, where is this coming from?

Psychologists all over the world claim that the source of racism is individual feelings of insufficiency and very low self-esteem, a need to put down the weaker one in order to enhance one’s own feeling of self worth.

Is that what we are talking about here?

What is it in people’s heads that makes them feel so much better than others just because the others are not exactly alike themselves?

We can just keep on guessing…

Since when is it OK that you keep us unemployed?

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