{"id":360,"date":"2004-04-20T23:31:37","date_gmt":"2004-04-21T06:31:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=360"},"modified":"2004-04-20T23:31:37","modified_gmt":"2004-04-21T06:31:37","slug":"when-gridlock-is-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2004\/04\/when-gridlock-is-good\/","title":{"rendered":"When gridlock is good"},"content":{"rendered":"

It now seems likely that Sweden will be the only EU member not to have immigration controls<\/a> [Swedish] in place when 10 new members join the union May 1Yes, May 1, day of international labor solidarity, when workers of the world, er, unite.<\/span>. This excellent outcome is not due to enlightened government action, however: the Social Democrats and Folkpartiet did not want to budge on their respective versions of restrictions, while the remaining parties were against either proposal. No proposal has a parliamentary majority, so nothing happens.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Persson says he will consider tabling other measures later this summer or fall. Of course, by then, we will see two things happening: 1) There will be no “social tourists” (though the few that do make it will be amply covered by the press); 2) Those immigrants that do come will be a wave of the most-motivated and hardest-working Eastern Europeans there are, and Sweden will have them all to itself. It is a brilliant policy, and nobody can even take credit for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It now seems likely that Sweden will be the only EU member not to have immigration controls [Swedish] in place when 10 new members join the union May 1Yes, May 1, day of international labor solidarity, when workers of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-economics","category-sweden"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-5O","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}