Inte har dom gjort mej nåt : En studie av ungdomars attityder till invandrare och flyktingar i två mindre svenska lokalsamhällen

The main purpose of this dissertation was to analyse and compare the attitudes of young people who lived in two different local contexts towards foreigners and immigrants. In the main study 36 teenagers, 17 from Bruksort and 19 from Industriort, were interviewed. Both local societies are rather small and dominated by one major industry, and a large number of the inhabitants are workers. Prospects for the future differed – in Bruksort people did not believe they had a future in the community because of the lack of jobs, while the people in Industriort felt a certain optimism in this respect, as the major industry was doing well. While Industriort had a long tradition and experience of immigration, Bruksort did not. Refugee camps were established in both societies in the early 1990s. The interviews brought up questions of attitude towards foreigners and immigrants. The analysis is also in part based on two pilot studies and an analysis of articles and letters to the editor in the local press, Industriort News and Bruksort Times during 1991-99. Two different discourses were analysed in the main study: the discourse of refugees, immigration, racism and anti-racism in the local press, and discourse of the young people´s discussions of those subjects. These two ways of talking were compared in order to discover possible patterns and changes in underlying thought figures in each town. The importance of the locality was demonstrated in the study. Young people are affected by political decisions, by demands made by adults and by the media. However young people are also being brought up in an active way by their own local society. The inhabitants of Bruksort were suspicious of strangers and of “the other”. However, in Industriort this sort of suspicion was only temporarily acted out towards the refugees in the camp and quickly dissipated because the refugees were integrated into the society. Also, a number of the young inhabitants in Industriort had an immigrant background themselves. The gender difference is notable; girls and boys narrated divergent versions of the events that had taken place involving the inhabitants and the refugees. The girls had a more emphatic way of reasoning about refugees and of the situation immigrants´ of than the boys. Boys on the other hand had been in conflict with the people from the refugee-camp and present juridical and economic arguments about Swedish immigration policies. It is concluded that creating meeting places where people from different ethnic backgrounds can get together and learn to know each other is of crucial importance. Also, the fact that young people seemed to be unaware of the anti-racist projects arranged by the school in Bruksort and the youth centre in Industriort a few years prior to the interviews, and that most of the teenagers interviewed felt that school had done too little, if anything, regarding the discussion of such matters as refugees, immigration and racism, emphasises the importance of more deliberate and longterm strategies as opposed to short term projects