Norway more skeptical about refugees than other Scandinavian countries

Afghan refugee Basir Shirzad giving an interview for the article. He believes Norway has been very welcoming to him.

Lots of numbers from an article here from nrk.no about a survey showing Norway to be the most skeptical about immigration out of the other Scandinavian nations - Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. The article is in Norwegian and you can see it automatically translated by Google here, but it's not always the best translation - when it says that it will "double the number of hours for the Norwegian immigrants who have to stay in the country" for example it's actually talking about doubling the number of hours immigrants have to learn Norwegian from 300 to 600 hours, and introducing a mandatory test to make sure that the language has been learned well instead of just getting through a course. There is also an interview entirely in English with a refugee from Afghanistan in Norway, the second video in the article.

Some numbers from the article:

Do you believe the country takes in too many, too few, or just the right amount of refugees?

	Norway	Sweden	Denmark	Finland
too many refugees	42%	32%	23%	29%
too few refugees	12%	11%	25%	12%
an appropriate number of refugees	46%	57%	53%	59%

As for the actual numbers, there were 3805 people seeking asylum in Norway in the first quarter of the year, a 54% increase over the same period last year. Last year Norway had 14,430 asylum seekers, compared to 24,350 for Sweden. The actual numbers that they took in 2008 were 4617 for Norway, 1323 for Finland, 11,237 for Sweden, and 1441 for Denmark.

Regionally there's more opposition to refugees in the country in more rural parts of the city and less opposition in large cities so no surprise there, but the numbers on age and gender are particularly interesting:

	Sex		Age
	Men	Women	Under 30	30-39	40-40	50+
too many refugees	42%	41%	42%	37%	35%	46%
too few refugees	11%	13%	9%	15%	15%	11%
the right amount	47%	46%	49%	48%	50%	43%

I've made a quick chart of the numbers related to age. The green line at the bottom are those that feel there are too few, the dark red line are those that feel there are too many, the sky-blue line are those that are satisfied with the current numbers, and the half-transparent thick line is those that feel there are too many minus those that feel there are too few, so that's the line that gives the general opposition to refugees by age. So even though younger people are still more likely than those over 50 to be satisfied with the current numbers, there's still a much larger number of them that believe there are too many refugees than those in their 30s and 40s.


Finally, the survey interviewed 1000 people per country, and was conducted by the company Norstat.