“I whispered promises of bringing her back to Sweden with me.”
I write this from sunny Florida, where I’ve been for four weeks. This wasn’t a planned trip; I made it due to an emergency medical situation with my mother who has been seriously ill.
With my mom in such horrible circumstances, I whispered promises of bringing her back to Sweden with me. My mother whispered back, “Jennifer wants Janie to live in Sweden. Janie wants to live in Sweden with Jennifer.” Tears running down my face, I said over and over again, “That’s right.”
I had looked into the possibility of moving my mom to Sweden in the past, and even though I knew the prospect was unlikely, her current situation made me believe that it had to be possible.
There was no way Sweden, this country I love, could possibly deny my mom the opportunity to be with me. Who could see her clutching the side of the hospital bed, eyes wild, scared, and deny her succor?
In the US, there’s a lot of rhetoric about families being important. In Sweden, they don’t just say that family is important, they prove it. When a child is born or adopted, each parent gets 280 days of paid parental leave. That’s 280 days for the mom and 280 days for the dad. Child care is subsidised. School is free. School lunches are free. It’s hard to find a country that tops Sweden when it comes to kids.
Recently I wrote how Sweden made me feel pride in a country again. As the US had its July 4th celebration recently, I can’t help but reflect on the idea of patriotism. In the Southern US, it is common to hold the opinion that if you criticise the country of your birth, you can’t possibly love it. But in my mind it is nationalism, not patriotism, that forbids dissent.
“Give me your tired, your poor…”
How I’ve longed again for those blissful days of ignorance where I truly believed that those words from the Statue of Liberty represented the way of the world. The idea that all doors were open to everyone, that we all had the right to pursue happiness as equals.
“Give me your tired, your poor…”
When I moved to Sweden, I was enthralled by its open policies towards immigration, refugees, and those seeking asylum. Sweden seemed the beacon that the US had once pretended to be. I was entering a country whose previous prime minister, Stefan Löfven, had once said, “My Sweden does not build walls.” My own country was, and still is, full of people unafraid to chant, “Build the wall!”
While I was able to gain citizenship in Sweden, my mother probably never will as Sweden has no clear pathway for parents to move to children. The Swedish migration site states that they allow this only to happen in “exceptional” cases. Why is this?
This seems to be the case for most countries of the European Union. In order for parents to become a citizen, or permanent resident, the child must have been supporting their parents financially for a long period of time. Part of me understands the social reasoning behind withholding social support from a person who never worked here and hasn’t paid into the system.
”In my mind it is nationalism, not patriotism, that forbids dissent.”
However, my mother receives social security from the States and would continue to do so, even living in Sweden. That money would be injected directly into the Swedish economy if she were to live here.
All this doesn’t make me love this country any less. Through my research, however, I have become much more aware of the context of others’ immigration and integration stories.
The war my mother is running from is not one in her country, but one in her body. As Sweden’s right-wing government tightens its strings on immigration, I mourn the people we are turning our collective back on. The tired. The poor. The sick.
This text is a column and the views are the author's own.