Posts like this show a poor attempt, with entirely subjective observations, to justify some of these attitudes. What's particularly scary is how the poster tries to disguise his views with a belief in socialist politics.
There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse. "
I don't know the author, but this sounds like it belongs in a Pegida handbook.
Can't really blame them, and to be sure crime and social costs are higher as a result of immigration. That said, there is every reason to believe that these effects will diminish over time as immigrants start to integrate, even some beneficial effects are already showing.
The problem is that 'integration' takes generations, and a very large influx jeopardizes this process. So the adverse effects remain very visible and most people are too short-sighted to take the long view. At the same time Europeans are so hypersensitive about 'racism' that the topic can't even be discussed in polite company (which leaves it to actual racists to even talk about the issues).
Indeed, it's alsmost the same that we hear from nationalists in Germany, France, etc.
Sweden is not a paradise, we know that, but it's not kicking out the "blackies" that you will solve the long-term problem of keeping a social-democratic country running. Full-on fascism and full-on "freemarketism" are easier to run, of course, but they come with greater drawbacks.
Of course the right wing will gain popularity, and while I'm not sympathetic, its very understandable.
[citation needed]
For example: http://economics.handels.gu.se/digitalAssets/1455/1455743_fr... directly contradicts your claim.
I don't know enough to claim you're wrong. But the claim is rather extraordinary and sounds very much like common right-wing propaganda from other countries. So a good study would help.
Really? Then how come I get the impression that politicians and newspapers are full of talk about the topic?
Sweden currently spends half their health care budget on immigration costs.
On the national level [1]:
47 billion SEK spent on migration and foreign aid.
63 billion SEK spent on health care.
Note: most of the health care in Sweden is financed on the regional level; a rough approximation of total amount spent on spent on health care based on [2] would be about 260 billion SEK.
[1]: http://www.regeringen.se/artiklar/2015/04/statens-budget-201...
[2]: http://www.ekonomifakta.se/sv/Fakta/Offentlig-ekonomi/Offent...
I have not seen any rise in fascism. Xenophobia, maybe. By the definition of the word it is the irrational fear of the foreign. The fear is often very rational as immigrants are over-represented in crime, unemployment etc. However people work with generalizations so it is not unlikely that some of the fears might be irrational.
(I'm from and live in Sweden)
Any time anyone dares to complain about the influence of ultra-reactionary immigrants on the quality and safety of public life, they are immediately branded "nationalist", "xenophobic" or "fascist".
Many of us, like myself, are from immigrant backgrounds. There is a world of difference between how our predecessors treated the country they immigrated to and what the recent waves of reactionary Islamists are doing.
People who aggressively and violently oppose the liberal values of our nations are not immigrants, they are invaders. And people of all races and political believes are getting tired of this shit.
Stop blaming the victims. We are not the aggressors, we are not the homophobic, antisemitic, anti-women criminal trash that terrorises public life.
We were once safe and progressive nations, and wanting to take that back does not make us fascist.
You guys should've done more to keep the Sweden Democrats out of the country then, I guess. ;)
Also, wanting life to be better doesn't make you fascist. But deciding that the only thing between you and a mythical past of glory is a tiny fraction of the population that needs to "defeated" is certainly goose-stepping in that direction. See Robert Paxton's 2004 book for more.
There are no races in the human species.
> Many of us, like myself, are from immigrant backgrounds.
So when do you plan to go back to your own country? What, you think that with the new designated enemy we forgot about you?
I thought he was stating the opposite, he comes across as very right wing, hates Obama (that bizarre ending), blames the leftist govt of the 60s onward for depleting abundant resources and blames liberals for overspending.
According to Wikipedia, It's a student town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trondheim#Student_culture) with over 20% of the population being students. Why don't you blame them as easily as the gypsies?
I live in Malmö; the "problem area" you're talking about is a couple of blocks by Seved, where one company (Postnord) won't deliver _large_ packages due to the possibility of theft. That's not "the police can't go there". That's not "DHL can't guarantee worker safety". I've walked these streets hundreds of times; they're no different than thousands of other streets in thousands of other cities. They're not especially dangerous. They are in fact probably safer than large parts of other cities.
According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident.
And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2]
[1] http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ [2] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapor...
Source: http://www.nptd.gov.sg/portals/0/homepage/highlights/populat...
Additionally, my understanding of Singapore's immigration laws (I looked into migrating there myself a few years ago) is that it's difficult to do so for anything other than economic reasons - you have to prove you have a job offer or can contribute substantially to Singapore's economy.
Needless to say, this one-dimensional measure of a person's "worth" unfortunately attracts exactly the sort of pompous ass that everyone dislikes.
Edit: I re-read my post and realized it could be misconstrued to mean that you are not welcome. I apologize if this was your interpretation. I meant to say, using "economic indicators" as a basis for assessing whether an immigrant is "worthy" to join the tribe is misguided.
How many of these are out of work and lives on public welfare?
a) a tourist, b) a spouse of a Singaporean, c) a student enrolled in a Singapore school, d) gainfully employed by a Singapore-registered business
Chances are pretty good you are an illegal immigrant. So to answer your question, foreigners who are out of work are deported to their country of origin at the earliest opportunity.
But that's not the problem. The growing problem is that the immigrants do not assimilate well, form their own enclaves and are hiring their own countrymen at the expense of locals. Recently there was a report where the IT and HR departments of a Singapore firm, being run by predominantly foreigners, colluded to bring in their own countrymen and discriminated against Singaporean job applicants. They received kickbacks but got caught because the Singaporean owner, being IT savvy, had been monitoring the situation and thought something was amiss in the low number of Singaporean applicants.
I was born in Sweden and can trace my direct Swedish ancestry back at least 400 years and I still fall into that 26.8%.
If you want to help the poor outside of your country, you should help them elevate themselves, not lower your own country to the global average.
The political correctness trumps everything in Sweden. You can't discuss the violence of Islam without being called a racist (even if Islam is not a race).
it's a tricky situation... there is more people trying to come here in europe than there is sustainable place (economically wise) to be absorbed into. we have quite a bit of an economical crisis going on here, which doesn't help. so basically masses march in, we have no job for them, meaning they don't contribute to our society, just consume.
on the other side, they often come from horrible places, have to endure the travel with real chances of dying. that should tell you a bit how desperate they are.
In ideal world, we should focus our resources on improving state of their home countries, so they don't have to run away in first place.
In real world... since many screwed countries are results of US (CIA, military) meddling with their internals and failing spectacularly (or succeeding greatly, depending on what the real objectives were), I say forward a large portion of them there. After first 100.000, let's talk :)
It's full of subsidies and welfare in many aspects of life and society, not sure what you're talking about.
It's very liberal in some senses, but calling it a completely liberal society is silly.
But let us not forget what Scandinavia was like (and still is) without the mass immigration of 'those brown people', it was an Aryan wet dream with everything for us and none for you. In many ways the modern Scandinavia is a hugely successful human accomplishment. While some people have less (of material things) many have had their lives improved enormously. For every "svarte neger" that hits the headlines as a rapist, 10000+ or more no longer have to live in poverty, in a war zone, under an oppressive regime. Shed a tear for the leftists who saw a way to make the world a better place one life at a time, made that happen with their country's wealth even at the expense (in limited financial terms) of some, and have created a positive liberal society striving to reach a worthwhile ideal. The old Sweden is dead, long live Sweden!
What the blogger fails to address (and I haven't read more than that one post) is how any of this affects him, why this means he has to go back to the US and why any of us should give a shit about his tabloid fueled opinion.
Americans are fond of reverting long-standing European political conventions "just because". Historical Liberalism was all about free trade and low taxes? Let's use the term for the party that supports higher taxes and regulations. Red is for socialists, blue for conservatives? Let's swap them! How fun!
(Not that it matters anyway, the entire European discourse is a million miles to the left of anything being discussed in the Land of the Free. The world is so weird.)
I do, however, think that it's wrong to say that Stefan Löfven is a 'corrupt yokel'. He's been in a very hard situation politically, where he's been forced to rule as a minority. The opposition is doing everything they can to make sure that he looks incompetent as a leader, as it's basically ensuring their next election victory. He's only been in office since september, so it's not actually that weird that not too much has been done.
The whole post is filled with overstatements like this – and I'm kind of amused about the idea of escaping sweden because it left some of it's socialist ideals in the 60's to go to a country who despises socialism.
I left Sweden 5 years ago and I more or less agree with the post. It seems to have some undertones i don't entirely appreciate but on the whole it should serve as a necessary reality check if taken with a pinch of salt. It brings up many points that are worth discussing at length but which are essentially verboten in Swedish society. Even if it does overstate or sensationalize somewhat.
I doubt he is leaving specifically because it has abandoned some socialist ideals. For me it has more to do with not wanting to be part of the mass delusion, not wanting to constantly fit your opinions to an ever narrowing hallway of acceptable ideas and speech (not because they couldn't but because they shouldn't have to). At least when you don't live there you don't have to see and live it day in and day out. If anything I have grown more fond of Sweden and the ideals it represents since moving, because I am not forced to come to terms with its realities on a daily basis.
But, free health care, free education, almost no religious zealots what so ever, zero religious impact on lawmaking, a relatively inclusive society, etc, makes Sweden one of the better places to live in the world, imho. Obviously, I'm biased.
I too find it rather weird that someone who yearns for more socialism would move from Sweden to the US. :)
Please note that I enforce a zero-tolerance policy towards racism, violence and extremist comments.
Judging other people by the color of their skin is manifestly absurd. So please don’t submit such comments here
Edit: removed some sarcasm
"Jihadist Trojan horses are flowing through the porous border along with the tens of thousands ID-less refugees. But what makes me the most pessimistic about Sweden’s future is how the social fabric itself has been undermined."
If the "social fabric" of a country amounts to it's prior ethnic homogeneity, then decrying it's unraveling amounts to being scared of people coming from the outside. People which, in the case of Sweden, also tend to have a darker skin tone than the average citizen 50 years ago. This, in conjunction with the suggestion that Muslim immigrants tend to be "Jihadist Trojan horses" makes it a very thinly veiled Islamophobic piece.
Too many immigrants, they are taking our jobs/benefits, we're letting the jihadis in, and so forth?
Eventually enough people will flag it or start commenting that it'll drop anyway (a mistake in the algorithm if you ask me, as it makes flags 'super-downvotes') but in the mean time...
Everybody speaks English and is willing to help.
Some swedes that were mingling with some of this horrible immigrants the blogger was talking about where kind enough, to invite me to their place to sleep.
Don't guide yourself by anything on this article, I'm surprised it got so far.
Go to Sweden and enjoy that amazing country.
Better than the Italians, not as good as the Japanese basically.
It's "crumbling" because the system has been split up into smaller companies with some parts having been contracted out to private companies all of which now fight over whose responsibility it is to fix certain parts of the infrastructure.
I'm horrified at what Hacker News can become...
Did this article really gratify your intellectual curiosity?
I thought he could almost be talking about London. Diversity is not integration. Lack of integration creates polarisation. A single example: different nationalities have different levels of education, therefore different incomes, therefore different social status, and different accommodation budgets, therefore geographic limitations, and common solutions. In my area, watching east africans try to steal phones off tables in coffee shops is so run of the mill it's boring. Same nationalities, same activities - community effects. Some places in London try to resolve such a situation by mixing up affordable housing with higher-income housing. The situation is then exacerbated, as the higher income people then have to live with what is in their culture unpleasant behaviour. Of course, everything just gets dismissed as racism, when it's in fact about culture, not race, and not applicable to all cultures. The dismissal resolves nothing. If we were talking about moving into the amazon, people would be outraged at the displacement of the locals, but somehow western cultures don't matter, or some sort of penance has to be paid for sins of some previous generations. Until the liberals learn to have a discussion instead of flippant dismissals and name calling, nothing will be resolved, and europe's moving to the right shows that their is something that needs to be resolved.
"Yes, there was a heavy blanket of socialism and collectivist values covering everything, but there was a core of pragmatism beneath the redness."
I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.
Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems.
tl;dr: Protectionism is bad. Sweden should be protectionist and homogenous.
... if the rest of the article is like this I'm not sure of the value of it.
Voting with your feet > voting with your wallet > voting though a ballot box every 5 years (you should still do that though as it costs you nothing!)
what a pile of crap
I don't know of the situation in Sweden, but I kept wondering if the post was satire. It seemed too one-sided to be totally honest.
And then things like "most of the west had a housing crash" don't increase your confidence in the writing.
I live in Stockholm and try very hard to have a nuanced view. Unfortunately, more and more, I see the pessimists view. It isn't as bad as the worst pessimists are saying, but it's also far from as good as the optimists are claiming. Sweden is a 2/3 parts tenderizing frog that's ignoring that the temperature is rising and 1/3 that's boiling.
If we see past the actual issues, which are complex and multifaceted, there's a number of trends in Sweden that's deeply disturbing
1) The level of discourse is only getting worse and more polarized. Populism, emotions and who can make most noise wins over any rational nuanced debate.
2) The quality of politicians are becoming more corrupt and separated from their voters, while resorting to pandering to whatever gives them votes, money and power. It's frightening to see the lack of competence in any party right now.
3) A naive sense of security and refusal of many Swedes to believe things are getting worse and that we are facing real problems. We don't seem to value what we always had and can't conceive we'll ever lose it. Even though education, pensions and care is going down the drain and crime rates rapidly rising.
Someone will twist or focus on some minor facet to state that's not the case at all. Everyone will like and tweet that article clinging to the feeling that we're still great.
4) Inability to treat root causes rather than symptoms.
5) A toxic media climate dominated by "feel good" articles and vicious attacks on any dissidents.
6) Exaggerating and focusing on the wrong topics. We can have a turbulent feminist debate in all the newspapers about manspreading in the subway, while ignoring issues like cultural violence against women, because it isn't "political correct" to even discuss that topic.
Sweden's problems are not only Sweden's... but symptomatic of the problems we're facing in general in Europe and the world: Inability to deal with rampant complexity and globalization, a financial system predicated on unsustainable expansion, booming population and third-world poverty meeting first world abundance.
We just want to feel like good people in a world where it's more and more everyone for themselves... Just saying all this makes me depressed, think I'll go back to believing we're awesome.
[1] Really? Not even an article about a particularly delicious meal of köttbullar?