Nima Sanandaji tells An Immigrant’s Tale:
Back in Iran my brother and I went to school six days a week and wrote our homework about two hours each day. A lot of our spare time was spent at the local library. My father worked full-time and my mother had worked first as a teacher and later as a vice president in the kindergartens that we had attended. Later she became a housewife. In the refugee camp nobody did anything. Nobody learned how to speak Swedish. Nobody was integrated in the Swedish society and nobody was allowed to get a job. The strong work ethic that we had brought from our home countries simpered away and we became used to the idea that social security was responsible for our lives.
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Our dependency on social security continued even after we got a permanent residency and later became Swedish citizens. Although my mother got several jobs, we concluded that this really didn’t improve our family’s economy. A low pay job meant a couple of thousands Kronors more each month. However, income isn’t everything. When our mother didn’t work she could take better care of us. She could save money by buying the cheapest groceries from the shop on the other side of town and it was more economical to always be able to eat at home. Also, social security usually gave us more money than we were supposed to get. This was usually not due to cheating from our side, but rather because the social security secretaries wanted to be generous and helpful. During the sixteen years we have been in Sweden, my mother has in total worked less than one year.One thing that my up growing has shown me is that there is little incentive to work and educate yourself in the Swedish welfare system. According to the Institute for Labour Policies the average salary of a person who has studied at a university for three years is only five percent higher of somebody who is uneducated. Most Swedish families would have higher income if they lived off government and made some money working in the black market.