A policy change on language training - perhaps not well thought through?

 In the anthology Race and Whiteness in Sweden (ras och vithet i Sverige) one of the authors describes how language have come to work as a race-barrier in contemporary Sweden. According to the author Swedes have a perception of the Swedish language as essential for a Swedish identity and as a skill that are hard for non-swedes to acquire. For the past years similar tendencies have been showed in the migration debate, were foreigners lack of language skills have led to social and economic stagnation within the group. 

It is therefore little surprising that the Swedish government have procclaimed the need to reform the national program "Swedish for immigrants" (SFI). Statistics have showed that a majority of the students dropout with having a degree and that this have led to extensive segregation in the labour market, since companies view skills in Swedish language as essential for becoming hired. As a result a new programme for SFI was presented this morning, which aims to increase the amount of students that finishes the course by limiting the time-frame for the studies to three years. A solution that however is not fully satisfactory in my view.

In my doctoral dissertation I showed that one of the reasons for the faulty integration politics in Sweden were the perception of immigrants as a homogenous collective. Thereby, the social intervention on the group did not match the challenges that the group actually met. In the case of time limitation of SFI it becomes interesting to think about why a shortened time-frame is suggested, since it silencies other possible solutions. 

I am only briefly acquainted with SFI but in my view the curriculum seems to not meet the individuality of the group. Instead it is a one size fits all kind of concept, with a strongly multi cultural participant-base. The key question here is for instance if refugees from ukraine have the same education need as immigrants from the global south. Another solution, that would not be as cost-effective, would therefore be to have a more individually appropriete approach where the curriculum actually equals the participants need rather than societies conceived needs of the socially constructed immigrants. 

Another question I must ask is if the portrayal of language as essential for adapting to the Swedish labor-market really is correct. Could we perhaps instead utilize the labour-markets need with on-site language training by government founding? This was a method that were utilized in the 1970's where immigrants first got an employment, and then relevant language training for the job, thus creating a connection between the actually needs and the language education. 

Lastly, we must perhaps also like in critical policy discussions ask ourselves if the for granted presumptions on language is entirely correct. Should we perhaps not try to support parts of the labourmarket that employs without regard to language? And should really the labour-market be the main point of departure, or should we instead discuss it from more social perspectives? The governments proposal invokes more questions than it solves.

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