In a wide-ranging article dealing with immigration, Stanley Kurtz looks at the Obama and Clinton family unification proposals against the backdrop of European experience. As for Norway, Kurtz says:
It turns out that Conservative-party politicians in Oslo are calling for a moratorium on immigrant-family reunification. (Norway’s Conservative party is fiscally conservative but socially liberal, so this is a novel development.) Oslo city council leader Erling Lae argues that out-of-control family reunification is the most important cause of unemployment, income disparities, and lack of assimilation in Norway’s capital. Pakistani Muslims are a key non-Western group in Norway, and apparently the seclusion of immigrant brides and other female relatives is at the root of Norway’s immigration-driven troubles.
So socially liberal Norway is turning against family reunification, at the very moment Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are moving to broaden the family-reunification provisions of America’s immigration bill. Even without
the Clinton and Obama amendments, the Senate bill is slated to speed up family reunification for the next eight years.
. . . No one realized what Norway was in for when a newly elected Christian-Democratic government in 1998 decided to pursue a more permissive immigration policy than the previous Labor government. Whereas Sweden and Denmark offered only temporary residence and no family reunification, Norway granted refugees both permanent residence and family reunification. As news of this liberalization spread across the immigrant grapevine, Norway saw a 1,300-percent increase in immigration — most of it from Pakistani Muslims and Iraqi Kurds — while Muslim immigration to Norway’s neighbors remained unchanged. Many of these immigrants forged documents, or otherwise disguised their identities, in order to gain entry as refugees. Once in Norway, many imported their extended families and proceeded to live off of Norway’s generous welfare system. There followed the usual raft of controversies over female seclusion, transnational forced marri\ages, and honor killings.
. . . Here’s the remarkable story of an Iraqi refugee who married his mother in an attempt to use marriage-unification laws to bring his family to Norway. An extreme case, to be sure, but also an indication of the ingenuity that goes into exploiting family unification.
As I said, Kurtz ranges far beyond Norway in this article, an article which makes a definite contribution to the current dialog over immigration here in the United States.