Columnist Paula Dubbink has always felt that Sweden welcomed her with open arms. Why has she considered this as self-evident?
High tempers in the Facebook group “Belgians & Dutchies living in Sweden” last month. One of the members discovered that radicalized Swedes travelling to Syria don’t get arrested when they return to Sweden. They can even enjoy free health care if they happen to get wounded! This fact triggers another group member to write:
“In Sweden they are even more naïve than in the Netherlands. Anyone who has moved to Sweden to avoid the abundance of allochtonen, has chosen the wrong country.”
The word allochtoon is a Dutch pejorative, meaning as much as “originating from another place, having parents that weren’t born here”. Ironically, according to this definition, the Dutch guy who wrote it is himself an allochtoon in Sweden, and so are his children.
And I’m an allochtoon here too. Or, if you think that’s too hard to pronounce, you can call me an EU-migrant: I come from an EU-country and I have migrated here, after all? But for some reason, nobody has ever called me a migrant, much less an immigrant. That terminology seems to be reserved for the Romanian beggars on the street. Or for Africans travelling to Europe in capsizing boats, coming here to escape poverty and hopelessness. Fortune seekers, they are being called. For those fleeing the war in Syria we have some understanding, but all these profiteers… they just come here to get a better standard of living. And we really can’t accept all of them here in Sweden – or anywhere else in this part of Europe.
I guess Sweden doesn’t realize it, but I’m a profiteer too. I have been enjoying free education for more than five terms, paid from Swedish tax money, which my parents never contributed to. I have received a free HPV-vaccination, which at home would have cost me hundreds of euros. And in my furnished student room, I take up a space that could have been inhabited by a Swedish student instead. Yeah, I’m a pretty good fortune seeker.
But nobody seems to mind. Because I am white, high-educated and from a Western culture that doesn’t look too foreign. For that reason, I would never be called an allochtoon, even if the word existed in Swedish. For me, the phrase “international student” is reserved, and possibly in the future “expat”. Or “emigrant”, which I am now sometimes called at the Dutch side.
Emigrant. A word that represents the other side of the immigrant or allochtoon coin, but for some reason looks a lot shinier. It is reminiscent of the masses of Europeans, including my grandfather’s sister, who in the 1950s left to the United States and Australia. So adventurous, they were! They travelled to the new world to seek…fortune and a better standard of living?
In any case, I am welcome here. And the fact that I write this only now, shows that I’ve taken this for granted until recently.
