This whole thing is a bit of a mindfuck for me because I can't find any logical reason for what Sweden has done. I think the government has actually acted out of pure humanity and accepted so many refugees without thinking through any of it and now they're paying the price.
Compare that with Canada who picks and chooses their immigrants and has a 100-year outlook on the future of their demography.
I hope you don't think they're that stupid. nobody is, they did it and they keep doing it to make more "liberal Muslims", who are just like most Christians today, atheists who don't care really about anything related to the religion itself, they just keep repeating their prayers because they find peace in it, not because they care about God or his commandments or going to heaven.
It is just that later groups were different. Not that certain ones like Vietnamese haven't integrated well enough without too many issues.
Worth noting that Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson is female and has been in power since 2021; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalena_Andersson
It was Olof Palme, a famously leftist prime minister that facilitated refugee immigration – but Sweden also had much more “aggressive” integration policies. There was more effort put into training to get immigrants into the labor market, housing was less segregated… a lot of that ended and it will continue to get worse as the country turns right wing.
But it’s going to happen with other staples of Swedish society. Give it just a year or two until there’s a “is Swedish welfare unsustainable?” and the answer will be the same: No, the right is just strangling it.
There is a point where the left needs to wake up, smell the coffee and realize that not all people are alike, not all groups are alike.
The idea that you can absorb any culture into any culture is completely absurd on its face, and now we have a proof of that not just in Sweden but in basically any Western country that tried to do the same thing (and in fact non-Western countries too, although in their cases they rarely welcomed mass immigration of people from different cultures on purpose, it's generally more a series of unfortunate incidents of history, because everyone has known for ages that it was generally a bad thing).
But that’s it. And refugees take up land and social services, so they should be required to give back (if only because refugee programs simply won’t work otherwise, and countries will try to block or pass on refugees. Exactly what the US/Europe are doing and have been doing the last few years).
I see no issue in:
- Relocating refugees to another developed country (not Libya, not Turkey, maybe Greece)
- Requiring able-bodied refugees to work (in decent conditions, not back-breaking labor, but still in manufacturing or service or IT if they’re capable. Again, because there’s literally no other alternative to pay for these refugees)
- Swiftly deporting refugees when they commit crimes (with a fair trial and evidence beyond considerable doubt, but given these people are being videotaped that should be pretty easy)
- Cracking down on protests like these and making it very clear that refugees can keep their own religion and culture, but can’t enforce it on others, who also can burn books and say whatever they want.
- Tracking and monitoring refugees, at least for a couple years, for the sake of security and to assure people they aren’t terrorists.
Sweden’s approach of just letting in refugees is too liberal. Nationalism and flat-out anti-refugee rhetoric like Trump and Marine Le Pen is too conservative. The bottom line is: give refugees space, essentials, freedom, and refuge, but require them to behave and give back.
Refugees fleeing the war in Syria – let's agree they had the right to go somewhere safe, and the rest of the world had a duty to provide them with somewhere safe to go – but does a refugee have a right to refuge in a developed country in particular? Especially when the country from which they came wasn't, prior to the start of the war/conflict, generally counted as "developed"?
The idea that refugees from a conflict should primarily be hosted by neighbouring countries, who are likely to have much greater cultural/linguistic similarity, rather than by substantially more distant countries with far less cultural commonality, doesn't seem unreasonable. If a country is developing/middle income, and so are most of its neighbours – you can understand why refugees might greatly prefer to seek refuge in a much richer country much further away, rather than its economically more similar immediate neighbours – but are we obliged to honour that preference?
Given the majority of Syrian refugees were Muslim – why didn't the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation take the lead in resettling them in Muslim-majority countries? Or similarly – given Syria is part of the Arab world, why didn't the Arab League resettle them in other Arab states?
> - Relocating refugees to another developed country (not Libya, not Turkey, maybe Greece)
Yes of course -- Greece. Why is it necessary to move these people to certain countries. Why not Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco or any number of other countries. No of course it has to be Sweden, France, England, etc.
> Nationalism and flat-out anti-refugee rhetoric like Trump and Marine Le Pen is too conservative.
Importing endless amounts of refugees is bad for citizens -- the people the government is supposed to work to protect and serve.
Neoliberal politics doesn't work with integration, but sure let's just use all the xenophobic and antisemitic dog whistles
