OSLO, Feb 6: Norway’s biggest opposition party announced plans this week to tighten rules for immigrants from non-Western countries and to link access to the Scandinavian state’s generous benefits to their integration into society.

The Progress Party, Norway’s increasingly popular anti-immigration and anti-establishment voice, believes many immigrants from Muslim developing countries are failing to integrate with Norwegian society and adopt commonly held values.

To foster integration and stem more dangerous problems, such as those that France or Britain face with their large minority populations, the party wants immigrants to learn Norwegian or forfeit welfare benefits.

It also seeks to ban immigration to Oslo, Norway’s capital and biggest city, where one in five residents was born abroad.

“We want to impose far more conditions to enable one to receive public support,” party founder and former leader Carl Hagen told a gathering of party faithful in Oslo.

“We will no longer accept the development of ghettos and that children are born in Norway and cannot speak Norwegian.”

The Progress Party, which critics say exploits people’s fears, is supported by about 30 per cent of Norwegians, according to recent opinion surveys. Polls show it is neck-and-neck with the ruling Labour Party and, for the first time ever, has a shot at winning the next general election, due in 2009.

Norway, which has only 4.6 million people, has for decades been open to asylum seekers from Africa and Asia but the latest, wave of immigrants has come from Poland and other post-communist states after they joined the European Union.

As many as 120,000 workers from poorer EU countries have found work in Norway since May 2004, boosting the country's economy and moderating wage growth.

Per-Willy Amundsen, the party’s spokesman on immigration, believes the new wave of EU migrants largely share “Norwegian values,” which he said were democracy, freedom and equality, including western-style gender relations.—Reuters