Jonas Gahr Store Quotes
I think integration in Norway is, by all standards, going relatively well. People are working, taking education, learning the language.
Støre, Jonas Gahr. Interview following the July 22 Attacks. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of Norway, 2011.
Although Jefferson was a strong immigration enthusiast, he and others were concerned about the ghettoization. The early German immigrants did not universally adopt English, just as today’s immigrants do not all. This was a concern of Americans since the first immigrations. Yet it has always occurred despite concerns about it. However, the second and third generations all become fluent and literate in English.
This is a complaint similar to that made by anti-immigrant Americans. France, like most other countries of the world, has never had the large scale immigration of today, nor have they had such a large proportion of the same ethnicity at once—in this case, Muslim North Africans. There were never, before the last decades, enough immigrants of any ethnicity in France to have a choice of maintaining their traditional languages and culture and not learning French or otherwise assimilating. America, in contrast, had large immigrations of different ethnicities, and despite the erroneous beliefs of immigration opponents, these blocs of immigrants have wherever there was sufficient density—usually cities, they maintained their old language and other customs. However, their children and the next generation in almost all cases have abandoned the language and many of the customs of the old country. This was true of the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the European Jews, the Russian Jews, the Scandinavians’, and the Hispanics with their different cultures.
Most immigration reformers want to open immigration more widely. Ward wanted immigration restricted to certain ethnicities and limited. Essentially, this was code for anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. The immigrants that he described as not being “helpful” have made some of the greatest contributions to America. One element of the immigration debate that is illustrated by this quotation is whether the United State should be homogeneous or heterogeneous. It has been the latter and that has brought the best of cultures of the world to the United States which has constantly been shaped by its immigrants even as it shaped and assimilated the immigrants.
Jonas Gahr Støre is a Norwegian politician serving as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition since 2014. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2012 and as Minister of Health and Care Services from 2012 to 2013. He has been a member of the Storting since 2009, and was deputy chair of the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs from 2013 until being elected party leader in 2014. He is currently a member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence.
