Mohamsson says integration needs more than money

Liberal Party leader Simona Mohamsson says Sweden’s integration policy should be based on facts and effective governance, after the Sweden Democrats said they wanted to spend nothing on integration, SVT reported.

Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson said in an interview with P1 Morgon earlier this week that his party did not want to allocate any money to integration.

Mohamsson said she had changed an integration policy that she described as previously based on gut feelings, anxiety and pure guesswork.

“I think we should have effective integration based on facts. That is something we have agreed on in the government. Then, not everything is about money. It is about governance,” she said.

Asked whether it was a problem that the Sweden Democrats did not want to invest any money in integration, Mohamsson said the question should be put to them. She said the government parties had agreed to change integration policy and accused the interviewer of trying to create a conflict between the Liberals and the Sweden Democrats.

“The conflict is not between the Liberals and the Sweden Democrats. It is between the Liberals and the left-wing parties on this issue,” she said.

A World Values Survey report presented on Friday and commissioned by the government found differences in values between migrants and people born in Sweden. Among other findings, it said that one in five migrants who had lived in Sweden for more than 20 years had never been in employment.

Mohamsson said the differences were the result of Sweden having had an integration policy without sufficient requirements for a long time. She wants Swedish for immigrants classes to include more education about values.

“It is of course important to learn how to construct a sentence in Swedish, but values are even more important,” she said. “We need to consider how to sharpen the education we already have and ensure that it is more focused on reducing the values gap.”