Hanif Bali—one of four Iranian-born politicians recently elected to Sweden’s national parliament—is particularly interested in the welfare of refugee children who are facing what he faced.
The 23-year-old native of Iran was born in 1987; he and his parents later fled to Iraq to escape political persecution. But when the US invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bali’s parents sent him to Sweden with human smugglers. The four-year-old arrived in Stockholm alone, and for the next 16 years lived with 13 different foster families, most of them Iranian.
Having a difficult childhood himself, growing up in an adoptive country, Bali grew determined to help people in similar situations.
In 2005, when Bali turned 18, he became a Swedish citizen. He exercised his right to vote for the first time the following year. Last year, he ran in the country’s general election as a candidate for the center-right Moderate Party, whose youth wing he had joined as a 16-year-old.
As he had promised, Bali wasted no time pushing for a better deal for unaccompanied refugee children. Some 1,250 such children were granted asylum in Sweden just last year, most of them from Afghanistan and Somalia.
“We have to stop taking care of these children on an industrial basis. Putting them in institutional homes is not the way to integrate them into society,” he told the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
“The best thing we can offer the children is placement in a family, where they can build strong social ties. We also have to realize that taking care of a refugee child could be a full-time task, and the financial compensation has to reflect that,” he told the UNHCR.
When party colleagues in southern Sweden’s Vellinge municipality refused in late 2009 to receive refugee children, Bali said, “I don’t believe in forcing municipalities to take refugees, but the situation for unaccompanied refugee children is acute and we need more municipalities to take responsibility.”
The newly elected MP for Stockholm’s Solna constituency said immigrant integration should no longer be treated as a separate policy area in Sweden. He said integration failed in municipalities where policies in key areas such as education and employment were weak.
“A good option is to use the same model for natives and immigrants, like in Solna,” he said, adding that “functioning integration policies are possible, but politicians need to understand what works.”
Bali said his dream is for refugees to come to Sweden not only to escape persecution and war in their native countries, but to create a future for themselves. As for Bali, while his relatives still live in Iran and Iraq, he has created a life for himself in Sweden.
Bali was elected for the first time last September, one of four Iranian-born politicians to be voted into Sweden’s parliament. Two of the Iranians were reelected then, while the other two won election for the first time. Unlike Bali, the other three are all women and all members of opposition parties.
Amineh Kakabaveh, 40, was re-elected after serving in parliament since 2008. Maryam Yazdanfar, 30, was also re-elected after first being first elected in 2006. Shadiye Heydari, 43, was elected to the parliament for the first time. Heydari serves on the City Council in Goteborg. The other three were all elected from the Stockholm area.