The immigrants were arriving on children’s bicycles and sometimes even in wheelchairs. According to Norwegian law, immigrants couldn’t cross the border by foot. So, in 2015, they were traveling from Russia to the far north of Norway on any conveyance they could find.
It was an odd choice of a place to cross into the West. Norway and Russia share a border way up north in the Arctic Circle. The 5,500 asylum-seekers were not Russians. They came from far away to the south: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, along with 43 other countries. What were they doing in this cold, remote part of the world?
The Norwegians were suspicious. Some of the new arrivals spoke Russian and had been living in Russia for some time. The Police Security Service (PST) had several theories. It believed that the Russians were using the immigrants as a wedge to disrupt Norwegian society by adding strain to the welfare state. Then there was the political angle. Norway’s far-right Progress Party, opposed to immigration from the Global South, could benefit from the crisis, disrupting the Scandinavian reputation for tolerance and complicating Norway’s relationship to the European Union. Given how integrated some of the migrants had been in …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
