President Donald Trump’s immigration policy has been called hard-line, zero-tolerance, and even cruel. Norwegian journalist Mathias Ask has a different name for it — Nordic.
In a panel discussion at New York’s Scandinavia House, Ask said that immigration policies in the U.S. and in Scandinavian countries have mirrored one another “in a very weird way.” Ask, who works for Norway’s TV2, shared the panel with other Nordic journalists who cover U.S. immigration.
Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have become the destination of large numbers of migrants, many of whom are seeking asylum. As vocal right-wing nationalist parties have gained greater sway within their respective governments, immigration laws have tightened. During the panel discussion, Danish journalist Sandra Brovall said that immigration policy in Scandinavian countries has become a “competition of who could be the strictest.”
Brovall, who works for the Danish newspaper Politiken, added that the goal in Denmark has shifted: from assimilation to deportation. In December, the Danish government made plans to build an immigration center for asylum seekers on a remote island off the Danish coast, to make it clear that they were not welcome. She added that covering U.S. immigration for a Danish audience was challenging, because of their lack of interest in “brown people.”
Finnish reporter Mari Karppinen, who recently produced a documentary called Trump’s America: A Nation Divided, said that she often receives hate-mail from people in Finland about her work covering U.S. immigration. The morning of the panel discussion, she received an email telling her that she “should jump off a roof.” According to her, the language in these messages has gotten more crude and misogynistic overtime. She said that most of the hate-mail she recieves is from men.
Karppinen, who works for Finland’s largest commercial TV network, MTV3 News, described Finland’s immigration debate as “crazy.” She said that many Finnish people believe that the country has too many immigrants, which, combined with negative media representations of immigrants, leads to a “very nasty conversation.”
Swedish journalist Fernando Arias said that he, too, receives hate-mail for his work at the Swedish National Public Radio, mainly from Swedish Trump supporters. Arias, who was born in Guatemala but raised in Sweden, believes that Swedes who are against immigration see Trump as “symbolic” of what they believe in. Sweden tightened its asylum laws after 2015, and the growing concerns about immigration provided an opening for the Sweden Democrats, a far-right, historically neo-Nazi party, to gain a foothold in parliament.
Besides the negative feedback from audiences in their home countries, these foreign correspondents also found talking to Americans challenging. The journalists said that people in the U.S. tend to have wildly incorrect ideas about life in the Nordic countries. Arias said that the U.S. understanding of Sweden varies; there are Americans who see it as an “immigration mecca” and those who idolize Sweden’s health care and education system. Ask said that people who talk to him assume that Norway is “all white,” and Karppinen said that people in the U.S. simply don’t know where Finland is.
Brovall and Karppinen said that U.S. news was more polarized, and more opinionated, than the news in Scandinavia. In Denmark, Brovall says that changing news channels will not present the viewer with a completely different set of facts, as it does in the U.S. Karppinen added that, in Scandinavia, it is uncommon for news anchors to offer opinions about the news.
In spite of increasingly strict policies, there are still things about the U.S. approach to immigration that these journalists admire. Arias praised the U.S. for having small ethnic communities in which immigrants can live, rather than demanding that they assimilate, as Sweden does. Brovall added that, Danes are “very quick to judge people on stereotypes,” and she believes that this is less prevalent in the U.S.
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