Hvorfor er somaliske innvandrere blant de gruppene som integrerer seg fortest og ivrigst i det amerikanske samfunnet, men samtidig blant de med høyest arbeidsledighet i Norge? Dette er utgangspunktet til Gerhard Helskog i Innvandrernes supermakt, et tilskudd med friske ideer til en innestengt norsk innvandringsdebatt.

Problemet er neppe at amerikanerne får de flittige somalierne, og vi de late. Vi gjør bare en for dårlig jobb med å ta dem i mot.

USA er flinke på innvandring. De har tatt imot innvandrere i flere hundre år. De har forstått at det aller viktigste du kan gjøre for en innvandrer er å få dem ut i arbeidslivet. Selv en drittjobb gir mer verdighet enn å motta støtte, spesielt når du som nyinnflyttet ikke vet hvor du hører hjemme i ditt nye land.

Integreringsprosessen fullføres med barna deres. De lærer språket, og oppmuntres til å fullt ut utnytte mulighetene foreldrene deres har skaffet dem.

Det er lett for en som flytter til USA å bli amerikaner. Flytter du til Norge forblir du en innvandrer til din død, og dine barn blir andregenerasjons innvandrere. Ekte nordmenn er jo hvite. Alle andre bare bor her. Ikke rart somaliere heller vil til USA.

Helskog har tro på Norge, fordi vi har noen av de samme tradisjonene for likeverd og frivillig engasjement som brukes til å integrere innvandrere i USA. Men vi må slutte å tro at staten utgjør hele samfunnet, og at den beste gaven en innvandrer kan få er en solid trygdeordning.

Dette er løftet fra USAs “Declaration of independence” som ble stadfestet i 1776, med ordene:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalianable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Amerikanerne fortsetter å spre disse ideene, raskere enn noen gang. Gjennom internett som de skapte. Via den kritiske pressen som de perfeksjonerte. På verdens beste universiteter. I filmindustrien. Det utskjelte Hollywood, som i endeløse varianter forteller historier om mennesker som beseirer overmakten. Alle figurer fra Disney som forteller barn over hele verden at drømmer kan bli sanne. I kommunistdiktaturene kunne mennesker formelig kjenne smaken av frihet i en Cola.

Sendte de ikke mennesker til månen?

Det er noe med disse amerikanerne som har sittet i fattige bakevjer i USA og klimpret frem praktisk talt all ny musikk av betydning de siste hundre år: Gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, country, rock and roll, soul og rap. Sistnevnte er spesielt populært i diktaturer, som for eksempel Iran. USA har nyskapende ballett og fantastiske symfoniorkestre, men ikke noe kulturdepartement. Tenke seg til, verdens sterkeste kultur har blitt til uten statlige kulturbyråkrater.

- Gerhard Helskog, Innvandrernes supermakt

Sammenlig med kommentarene til mitt tidligere innlegg om kulturkampen mot FrP, hvor Martin Grüner Larsen hevdet at et bredt kulturliv aldri kan stå på egne ben, og holdt fram Michael Jackson som eksempel på hvor ille det står til med kommersiell kultur..

What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? What if we are prevented from catalyzing workable and vital cities because the practical steps needed to do so are in conflict with the practical steps demanded by erosion?

There is a silver lining to everything.

In that case we Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia: What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.

It is not hard to understand that the producing and consuming of automobiles might properly seem the purpose of life to the General Motors management, or that it might seem so to other men and women deeply committed economically or emotionally to this pursuit. If they so regard it, they should be commended rather than criticized for this remarkable identification of philosophy with daily duty. It is harder to understand, however, why the production and consumption of automobiles should be the purpose of life for this country.

Similarly, it is understandable that men who were young in the 1920′s were captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City, with the specious promise that it would be appropriate to an automobile age. [..] But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers.

- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

What is it that makes a city function? What makes one street interesting and another dull, or one park safe and another dangerous? Jane Jacobs asks these questions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), an attack on the urban planning theories of the mid-20th century.

Jacobs argued that urban renewal projects had misunderstood what it was that made cities interesting and safe. They tore down crowded “slums” and replaced them with monotonous garden cities full of open spaces, but these areas often became dull at best, and dangerous at worst.

Planners dreamt of village life, but what makes cities work is their density and diversity. The more people in a street, the more attractive and safe it is. The best streets are those that attract different people throughout the day and night. A park near such areas is a lovely place, but there’s nothing magical about a park itself. It’s the streets and the people that make the park work, not the other way around.

Jacobs vocalizes what I often feel when I observe my own city, Oslo, and try to understand why areas have the character that they do. City planning today is less dogmatic and anti-city than in 1961, thanks in part to Jacobs, but these theories left a legacy of myths behind that we’re still stuck with. This book doesn’t have all answers, but it helps us to look at the problem in the right way.

The present relationship between cities and automobiles represents, in short, one of those jokes that history sometimes plays on progress. The interval of the automobile’s development as every day transportation has corresponded precisely with the interval during which the ideal of the suburbanized anti-city was developed architecturally, sociologically, legislatively and financially.

But automobiles are hardly inherent destroyers of cities. If we would stop telling ourselves fairy tales about the suitability and charm of nineteenth-century streets for horse-and-buggy traffic, we would see that the internal combustion engine, as it came on the scene, was potentially an excellent instrument for abetting city intensity, and at the same time for liberating cities from one of their noxious liabilities.

Not only are automotive engines quieter and cleaner than horses but, even more important, fewer engines than horses can do a given amount of work. [..] At the turn of the century, railroads had already long demonstrated that iron horses are fine instruments for reconciling concentration and movement. Automobiles, including trucks, offered, for places railroads could not go, and for jobs railroads could not do, another means of cutting down the immemorial vehicular congestion of cities.

We went awry by replacing, in effect, each horse on the crowded city streets with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses.

- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

A word here about rats. This is one of the elementary evils that new housing is supposed to eliminate and the presence of old housing to perpetuate. But rats do not know that. Unless they are exterminated, when old rat-infested buildings are torn down, the rats simply move into the next inhabited area. [..]

Most cities have legal requirements that rats be exterminated in any building demolished; in New York, the going rate in 1960 for a lying certificate of extermination, paid by corrupt owners to corrupt exterminators, is $5. How public agencies, like the Housing Authority, evade the law I do not know, but to know that they do evade it one need only go look at the fearful rat festivals and exoduses at twilight from their sites in process of demolition.

New buildings do not get rid of rats. Only people get rid of rats. This can be done in old buildings about as easily as in new ones. Our building was overrun with rats – big ones – when we got it. It costs $48 a year to keep it thoroughly rid of them and all other vermin. A live man does it. The notion that buildings get rid of rats is worse than a delusion because it becomes an excuse for not exterminating rats. (“We are soon going to get rid of these rat-infested buildings.”)

We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.

- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities