The Immigrant Song

"We all stand together now". Well........

The tragic event has put the issue of immigration into a perspective again.

I speak as both a son of an immigrant and an emigrant and an immigrant.

My parents moved 400 km from the west of Norway to the east of Norway just before I was born. The cultural differences within Norway makes me in fact an immigrant son. There has been a lot of immigration and emigration within Norway itself. People from the north of Norway, from beyond the Arctic Circle, had the same status in Oslo as muslims have today in Oslo. They were discriminated against (only low skilled jobs and hardly any good housing) and was verbally abused. The culturual differences were highlighted in media and in newspapers on a regular basis. These Norwegians were not wanted in Norway. This discrimination continued up to the beginning of the 1980s. Oh yes, we Norwegian is such a liberal, tolerant society.

Even I, with my parents from the west of Norway, was treated like a semi-immigrant. My loyality to the area were questioned. I was meant to feel that I did not fit in. Then I moved to Scotland back in 1996 and I settled in far better here than I as an immigrant son settled in the east of Norway.

I have made a point of settling into the life of Great Britain to the best of my abilities. I have no contact with any other Norwegians here and I do not live in a Norwegian ghetto within Glasgow.

Here is the core of the issue with immigration in Norway. We as Norwegians let the immigrants settle in without inviting them in to becoming a part of the Norwegian socieity. We never offered them an ownership of Norway. Instead, we let them sort themselves out. The result was several parallell societies within the small country called Norway. You got ghettos and you got Norwegian citizens who cannot speak a word Norwegian. You also got a male youth culture where Norwegian girls are regarded as whores and morally acceptable to rape. This is un-islamic, but it still happened and it does happens. In short; you get parallell societies within a small geographic area, let's say ten square kilometers, with totally different moral codes and values which lives parallell to each other within one law system; the Norwegian laws.

In this type of society, 59 % of the Norwegians believe there is far too much immigration to Norway.

And these types of parallell societies is not multi-culturalism. It is mono-culturalism. And there is far too few multi-cultural immigrants and Norwegians in Norway.

In my view, there should be no parallell societies and no mono-culturalism in small countries like Scotland, Norway and Northern Ireland. The whole 30 years bloodshed in Northern Ireland was due to mono-culturalism where the two tribes isolated themselves in ghettos and shot and bombed each other from within these walls. The solution in Northern Ireland is multi culturalism as the solution in Norway too is multi-culturalism. Only then, we can protect ourselves against evil, against bomb and against bullets.

Multi-culturalism has not failed. Mono-culturalism though has failed.

(this piece was originally published in my regional newspaper in August 2011)