Taiwanese Immigrants’ Perception of the Ethnic Hierarchy in Sweden

Abstract

Ethnic hierarchy tends to exist in a multi-ethnic society. Sweden has a long history of receiving immigrants (Bentsen, 2021; Törngren, 2020). According to the Central Statistics Bureau of Sweden’s (SCB) statistics at the end of 2021, foreign-born immigrants (excluding those from Nordic countries) account for nearly 18% of the total population in Sweden. This high percentage and the diversity of immigrants in the total population raise the importance of ethnic hierarchy in Sweden. This research explores how the ethnic hierarchy looks like in Sweden from Taiwanese immigrants’ perspective. As a small ethnic group with allegedly privileged backgrounds, how they see the ethnic hierarchy in Sweden and how they think about how the Swedes see the ethnic hierarchy are the focus of this research. Moreover, how they position themselves in the ethnic hierarchy is also included. Meanwhile, why they perceive the ethnic hierarchy in a particular way may relate to their intergroup contact experience, political climate, and how they think about the role of ‘blending in’ in Swedish society. According to empirical findings from semi-structured interviews, the Taiwanese informants tend to put Swedes, Europeans, and white people in the upper part of the hierarchy, then put Asians in the middle, black people, Middle Easterners, and refugees at the bottom. To explain the ethnic hierarchy, the informants commonly use several indicators related to differences between groups or ethnicities and stereotypes of specific groups.