Employment among foreign-born in Sweden

[Pat]

Well you also have people at The Local who say they don't see any reason to learn the language because all Swedes know english anyway. Well, we might know good English but it's still our second language and we don't master it nearly as well as our mother tongue. Unless the daily dealings at the place of work are conducted in english you're going to be severely disadvantaged if you don't speak the language. Because you can not expect the langauge of daily dealings to be changed or people translating everything for you all the time.

That is one thread which has a lot of discussion right now started by one Norwegian guy. And a lot of the replies are people slamming him.
You far more often see people moaning about their lessons going badly and how they really wish they could speak Swedish.

I understood him to be an American who'd lived in Norway and learnt some Norwegian ("Hispanics don't learn English in Florida, why'd I have to learn Swedish in Sweden?" ). But yeah I don't really doubt most anglophone immigrants who come to live here permanently will want to adjust and at least try to learn the language. And once they've learned Swedish I don't think they'll have a problem finding a job, even if their Swedish is less than perfect (an anglophone immigrant would be cut some more slack in this regard than immigrants from elsewhere since the gaps can easily be filled in with English, and most Swedes would appreciate a native english-speaker making an effort of learning the language (even if a Swede can not always be depended on to tell you that he appreciates it))

[Palisadoes]

Why are you taking in Iraqis and Somalis?  There are probably millions of hardworking, law-abiding, and skilled Chinese workers who will do anything for a chance to live and work in Sweden.

An excellent question.

I can only speculate as to the answer, and I know better than to speculate here.

There are, in fact, plenty of well adjusted immigrants in Sweden, and it would certainly be better to give them the opportunity than to import another batch of a few tens of thousands of completely worthless somalis.

I saw Vancouver was listed third in the world after Zürich and Geneva in one of these "nice cities"-rankings. And apparently a majority of Vancouvers population is born outside Canada (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong). Which shows you can get immigration to work very well, even in the first generation, as long as you take in the right immigrants.

I had a lecture in which Vancouver was mentioned. I really don't get how Vancouver can be up there. It has a massive homelessness problem apparently (can't remember the statistics though).