Interesting how the immigration policies are the biggest contributing factor to this situation. At least now that the centre-right took the government and is trying to fight against the outcome of those policies, the opposition agrees with their proposed measures.
Meanwhile in other countries (e.g. Spain) the left don't want to face the very same issues (although we don't have that many fireguns related crimes, in our case the weapons of choice are usually machetes, knives, etc...)
> Interesting how the immigration policies are the biggest contributing factor to this situation.
If you listen to the PM, yes. Another major factor (actually the biggest?) is Sweden's among European countries relatively unique hardline and boneheaded stance on recreational drugs including cannabis, which has contributed to growth and strengthening of criminal gangs who fund themselves and maintain territory by drug trade, simultaneously silently pushing otherwise law-abiding citizens into the criminal sphere, furthering the split into parallel societies. Basically the opposite of the Portugal approach. There are arguments that the law on sex work (buying sexual services is a crime; selling is not) has been having similar effect.
If you believe it was naivete behind the open immigration policy, well, you could still say the same here.
I am pretty sure that even in France, getting caught with possession of <1g of cannabis while nowhere near a vehicle won't be very likely to get you detained, fined 1000s of EUR-equivalent and having your drivers license restricted pending you showing up for regular urine samples.
This is roughly what you should expect if you get busted carrying one joint in Sweden.
Source: Some people around my social circle smoked back in uni.
The main issue is integration, not immigration. City planning and free school choice plays a big part imo. If most immigrants from poor countries end up living in the same areas and having their kids go to the same schools as each other, then you'll inevitably end up with situations like this.
And I'm sure the archaic drug legislation and a few details about the court system play a part too.
> immigrants from poor countries end up living in the same areas
how can this ever be changed? it's a free country so these people have freedom of movement and of course they will choose to live next to their friends and relatives. Unless you propose to forcibly disperse them away from each other?
Except Singapore does not really allow "immigration" from non vetted people via the employment pass system. Additionally the permanent residence process is heavily controlled with a huge bias (documented via govt stats just in case people are curious) to south east asian immigrants. So the situation is quite different
Singapore has strict immigration policies based on what some see as borderline eugenic criteria. The immigrants that fuel criminal gangs in Sweden would never be allowed to live there.
Increased resettlement of migrants and refugees in regional Australia has been an on-going focus of the policies of successive governments.
One recent regional resettlement experience, initiated at the local level, has yielded significant outcomes for a small regional community and the refugees involved.
Can you point to any place where integration between widly different cultures worked on the long term? One place where mass immigration didn't result in the erosion of social trust, safety concerns and political divide through ethnic lines?
It's pretty interesting, if you read through the Federalist papers, where they were discussing how to set up the US states/government, they were seriously debating and worried about whether a state full of people from England could coexist next to a state full of people from France. They were seriously worried that even people that similar, from almost the same place and culture, would eventually fracture on their differences and go to war with each other. What a world we live in today in comparison.
Except that was an academic discussion and eventually there were no problems between people of English and French descent, whereas what we're dealing with now is a very real issue and I don't think the so-called cultural differences are the main problem here.
30 years after showing up most of them were speaking English and generally living in roughly the same culture (be it Catholic or Protestant) with roughly similar expectations. As opposed to Muslim, East Asian, Aztec, etc.
Like my people were French huguenots (protestants) and rapidly turned into any other VA tobacco farmers
The US was always the melting pot model, where immigrants assimilated into the general American culture. The second generation spoke 'Merican just like the locals. Italians, Germans, Poles, all became standard USians.
And it continues to this very day. Your average latino American or Asian american just about can't assimilate quickly enough most of the time, and within one generation most fully identify as Americans without rejecting the fundamentals of their origin culture. One can wish and wash about racism in U.S. society in many ways but compared to many countries, the country is remarkably effective at assimilating people from extremely diverse places and making them feel like they belong to its society. Canada does a decent job of it too but I've never quite seem any country pull it off as well as the U.S., maybe because it has such a specifically charismatic cultural image from decades of overwhelmingly, globally popular cinema, pop culture and etc.
well, arguably the USofA seems to be doing a relatively decent job managing a multitude of cultures over a few centuries... given that at some point, almost everyone was an immigrant (after a number of violent events removed almost all of the locals)
The US was over 80% white, often over 90% white, for the vast majority of its existence [0]. It was relatively unified in race and culture for the last 400 years. Only since the 1960s/1970s was the immigration floodgates truly opened and the demographics significantly changed. If anything, the way things have been falling apart in the last 50 years is directly contrary to increased diversity of culture being beneficial.
Italians, Jews and even Irish were not considered 'white', which was reserved for descendants of British immigrants, due to the general racial theories that dominated the pre-WW2 era.
> It was relatively unified in race and culture for the last 400 years. Only since the 1960s/1970s was the immigration floodgates truly opened and the demographics significantly changed. If anything, the way things have been falling apart in the last 50 years is directly contrary to increased diversity of culture being beneficial.
It was relatively unified because blacks were subjugated until 1968, despite the bloodiest civil war in history liberating them from slavery 100 years before that. Where are you coming from with this?
Diversity isn't a problem in itself; we just have no singular culture for everyone to assimilate into so we trend towards chaos. "When in Rome" has never applied here.
These are terrible examples.
I absolutely don't want Sweden to turn into either those countries.
Extreme class divide in the 1st case, massive judicial injustice, plus the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s...
And Singapore is an extremely authoritarian country.
Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible. Singapore has invited skilled labor from all over the world.
If 1 million Polish or 1 million Portuguese had migrated to Sweden over the last 20 years, I doubt we would be having such problems.
He asked if there were countries, "where integration between widly[sic] different cultures worked on the long term," and I answered that there were. And it was easy as there are many such examples. This was not a claim that Singapore was superior in every way to Sweden. Merely that multi-cultural countries can be stable and successful. You don't want to live in Singapore, and that's fine, but you all have to move your goalposts away from, "multiculturalism doesn't work," because it absolutely can work.
> the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s
The US and Sweden both had a rough 1970s, and both bounced back pretty well.
> Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible.
The US accepts about a million new immigrants every year, give or take, and has forever. The accents have changed somewhat over my lifetime time but almost all of them have been from countries that are poor and experiencing very bad things. It is a core strength of America that we collect people from all over, quickly turn them into Americans, and borrow the best things about where they came from, and call them our own. Some of my ancestors emigrated to America from Sweden, and I will say that I am very glad that they did for the economic opportunities they found here and because I didn't have to grow up in a monoculture.
Please. Media hysterics aside, the U.S. is much better than many, many countries on class divide, and incredibly good at turning immigrants from an incredibly broad range of societies into Americans very peacefully with their full, willfull personal involvement. It manages to do this without even forcing integration or making most people feel ashamed of their origins. It's why there are huge ethnic communities spreading around the country to this day despite their children integrating with the essentials of U.S. society.
So much of the claims against the U.S. for the above seem to be based on a deluded idea of how it works in practice with minimal perspective allowed. Compared to most of the world's other big countries and so many smaller ones, the U.S. is incredibly effective at class mobility, social mobility and integrating immigrants peacefully while still allowing vast numbers of them in per year to this day. I don't see Russia or China welcoming one million immigrants per year and peacefully turning them into their own people in all but ethnic origin and underlying pride in cultural roots.
Even western Europe, for all its liberal platitudes, is rife with hardened underlying racism and ethnic social balkanization to a degree that would give even deep red state Americans a run for their money, it just hides it more smoothly (usually).
I would much rather grow up in a poor family in western Europe than anywhere else in the world.
All your arguments are related to migration. I agree there is a lot of racism in Europe. There is a lot of racism everywhere(yes, even in the US).
I am talking about social mobility. Things such as health care, education and the justice system works much, much better for the poor in Europe. Obviously YMMV. Some countries are more backwards than others, France and the UK especially(according to my observations).
While in the US you have to pay tens of thousands of to hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a good university, in most of Europe all you need are good grades from high school(or equivalent).
Similarly, good health care is accessible to everyone, while in the US it can absolutely bankrupt you, even for the middle class.
Obviously both Europe and the USA are both diverse places. You can't really compare Switzerland to Romania. You can't really compare New York to Georgia.
Integration is exponentially harder if you're a (potentially traumatized) and uneducated asylum seeker from a poor country, compared to someone who migrates for work and already holds some qualifications. So, in that sense Sweden's migration policies are to be blamed, since the country has received way more asylum seekers per capita than most other EU countries.
Apparently Sweden has the highest gap between employment rate of citizen and non-EU citizen in the whole European Union. I think it's mainly because so many migrants arrived to seek asylum rather than work. But yes, city planning and ineffective legal system do not exactly help either.
A lot of the issue it seems to me is not immigration per sei but who you let immigrate. Let in PhDs and medics and no problems. Let in illiterate drug gangs as in Sweden and much problems.
Yes, people with decent education are almost never causing trouble, no matter the country of origin. They can find legal paths to improving their lives, while migrants with difficult background (and their children) have very difficult time doing that. Sweden isn't like the USA in the 1800's, you need education and decent language skills for any good jobs. Free education is no silver bullet that suddenly turns masses of illiterate people into doctors and economists, because even under such system there's competition for university spots.
Sweden quite simply took in way too many people who would have required a lot of help to integrate, stuffed them into bad neighbourhoods and gave them free money. I'm sure many companies have benefited from this supply of slave labour, but for the society as a whole it has been a disaster.
> Ahhhh the woefully delusional thinking... this is why we can't listen to such people: they can't see the forest for the ideologically possessed trees
Your comment is the textbook definition of irony.
It's quite obvious that integration is the solution to every single problem you try to pin on behavior that originates in contrasts with the local culture. Arguing against integration requires a belief that local culture is also responsible for social problems you're pinning on immigrants, which would refute the hypothetis that immigration is behind them. Thus, any outright rejection of any approach to integration can only be held by baseless ignorant belief systems (i.e., ideologically possessions).
But then again, racists aren't known for being intellectuals.
Sweden was one of the countries which specifically took the refugees that other countries didn't want: Somalian, Eritrean, Syrian, Afghan, etc. If you look at other countries that have taken people from these countries, the same thing has happened but at a lower level. Sweden went as far as it is possible to go, they let anyone in and gave them citizenship immediately...this is the result, that is why they have had particularly severe problems.
I will also gently point out...the recent wave of illegal immigration into Europe is coming from these countries again. Other countries are represented, some of these have their own issues but the specific issues with people from one or two of the countries above (I won't name which) are well-known and exist in every other country they have ended up (in the case of one, this has been going on since the mid-90s...the reason why no-one wanted them before is because countries have tried to take them before...and it didn't work, Sweden had very specific beliefs about integration that guided their decisions...and they turned out to be very wrong).
This is exactly it. Sweden took in the lowest quality immigrants, that did not even have id, lied about which country they're from and many were convicted criminals.
There it is said that only a third of the gang members are German citizens. They've got like 100 gangs that matter there, and pretty much all are Turkish (Kurds too, not that specific ethnicities matter too much but the point here is that they are immigrant gangs and they are a direct result of the immigrant policies).
I think the biggest difference is that for immigrants, Germany is seen as country where one can prosper, have a good job and a nice car because of its strong economy while Spain is seen as a paradise where you can live a decent life on government subsidies because of its policies, also the weather and culture.
Edit: I must add that here in Spain we have the "okupa" problem where people occupy unused houses for years sometimes before a judge rules they should be taken out.
The situation in Sweden is dire and everyone living in the west would do well to listen to the lack of sounds our canary is making. Decades, with an emphasis on the last decade, of disastrous immigration policies have lead up to this and when the time has come to admit that the opposition to these policies was right all along. But instead only shallow dismissals of racism and bigotry are what you hear from establishment politicians and their followers.
I have come to believe since a time ago that the only solution is a more or less revolutionary change in how our country is managed is the only way to solve the underlying issues of corruption and nepotism that we see in our governments right now. This situation also does not seem to be unique to my own country unfortunately, but rather indicative of the situation the entire west sits in.
As times get more and more violent, the chances for a truly peaceful solution become smaller and smaller. It's high time to start looking at what in other times would have seemed like drastic solutions, like mass deportation. Beggars cannot be choosers when it comes to solving a problem of this scale, and at this late a stage of a frankly potentially terminal sickness.
Anyone that’s been to sweden can see how segregated some of these people lived for “decades”, and not by their choice. What i dont understand is why such countries advertise themselves as “welcoming” when in fact are pretty unwelcoming and closed. No wonder people struggle to integrate. People dont just appear from nowhere, they are being pulled by certain factors - one being that the swedish economy is supposedly advanced.
Instead though, sweden, germany, etc want what they call “cheap labour” - a people living in perpetual poverty doing jobs “the locals dont want”. All masked by virtue signaling. Well it turns out the cheap labour doesnt want to live like a perpetual underclass and wants a way out. These criminal acts are just signs of desperation. I think they should be dealt with swiftly and boldly and the criminal element rooted out but people need to be given a real chance to integrate. Regardless, sweden is now a changed country and will remain so.
The immigration was never an economic benefit for Sweden, I recall that someone calculated that the average immigrant was actually a net cost for the nation, given the disproportionate amount of welfare costs that it takes to take in these people. The idea that we took them in against their will and because we wanted to exploit them, is a very wrong idea on more than a factual level, in fact it reeks of the kind of passive aggressive gaslighting that seeks to propagandize Swedish men and women to hate themselves.
And even then, theories about why it didn't work is certainly something that belongs in an ivory tower. Now we need decisive policy to correct this giant error, no matter "what caused the error". Mass deportation is the only solution that I see, and the more we wait in implementing it, I predict the less peaceful the outcome will be.
Sweden’s only option is to learn how to live with it. The criminal element shouldn't be deported. Should stay there and pay and be a witness to a new sweden were these issues are solved. Deporting them means letting them get away with it and potentially do worse things elsewhere, or spread resentment. I think an iron fist should be used in punishing those guilty and a soft and gentle hand towards those who are not. The society should also genuinely open towards everyone and accept that being swedish is no longer a blue eyed blond haired affair and never will be.
The UK appears to have succeeded at that despite and in-spite of all the issues. Take notes from this country, as in my view, it is the most open among european countries.
> The society should also genuinely open towards everyone and accept that being swedish is no longer a blue eyed blond haired affair and never will be.
replace that with any other sets of races an tell me if that's still acceptable
This has nothing to do with cheap labor. This has everything to do with politicians doubling down on policies that don't work to save face, rather than to admit they were wrong. What is being done now is too little too late. The Swedes who are generally good people, will never do what is now required(mass deportation).
Nordic Biker War? Where 10 people died in all of Scandinavia over a decade time? You think this is at all comparable? 10 people die on a W E E K L Y basis in Sweden, almost exclusively young migrant men(usually 2nd generation).
Indeed, Sweden(=Swedish left wing and liberal politicians) should not have been pursuing this extreme policy of open borders from Africa and the Middle East.
The Swedish people were never in favor of mass immigration, despite the amount of propaganda they were fed on a daily basis by SVT & SR(Swedish state broadcast).
You gave no evidence as to why cheap labor has nothing to do with it. Poverty breeds violence, we know this. Sweden’s income inequality is growing fast. There is also loads of evidence in the USA that segregation breeds violence as well because they generally don’t receive equal public service. It’s all a cycle. You can’t bring people in without serving them fairly. Maybe their mistake was bringing in too many people and not the “wrong” people.
Swedens income equality is growing fast because they are continuously bringing in more people who can not and never will contribute to their economy. This will take generations to fix, if it is possible.
Those people simply can't contribute. But it's not because they don't want to, there isn't much to contribute towards. The swedish economy, as any corporate-socialist economy, isn't able to absorb people - unless of course they are "cheap" and two can replace one. And that's where the issue comes from. Some of those people have had enough of being an underclass and the only way out it appears is through crime. What else are they going to do? Start a business? Sell components to volvo and ikea? Those types of small businesses have been obliterated as in any country dominated by corporations. So these people can't contribute by working because there's no economic growth and can't start a business because state-private enterprises can't grow fast enough.
“ What i dont understand is why such countries advertise themselves as “welcoming” when in fact are pretty unwelcoming and closed.”
Good observation. Probably the answer is that it felt morally good in the short term. Many members of the “educated class” in Sweden wanted to feel good about doing what they believed was right, but just as long as it didn’t mean actually having to be too close to the newcomers. So they kept filling up the (in relative terms) unattractive remote districts and tried for a long time to look away while problems there built up and gang shootings and bombings became frequent
I’ve heard hypotheses about Sweden’s collective guilt about having helped the Nazis during the 2nd world war being a possible cause for the posture as “moral superpower” which shaped the politics of the later decades.
The article just says that the numbers are the worst ever for Sweden. But how bad? Is it 1.1x, 2x, or 10x worse than five years ago? How do the crime numbers compare to other European countries? To US?
Would you happen to know what the definition changed from and to? I'm trying to figure out how one changes the definition of murder from anything but being murder.
According to that same page the trend is also moving worryingly upwards (Utvecklingen sedan 1990).
So to answer the OP's question (Instead of trying to cheat by answering a completely different question) it's about 2x worse now than 10 years ago. The fact that we were once on this level before is completely irrelevant.
Here in Canada, we have been handling immigration woes our entire existence. It's not easy.
Imagine as you might, you bring in 150,000 syrians. Do you have enough arabic translators? Obviously not, how about language teachers? Obviously not. How about beds? What you want them to sleep on park benches?
But when you have gotten to the point where your law enforcement has failed their job and you bring in the military. The fundamental country rule is that the government gets complete monopoly over violence, law enforcement is to prevent violence. When you no longer can do this, you have failed and are no longer legitimate as a country.
> The west has a problem with policing, its either too soft
I noticed that also in every city in the Central and West Europe; in comparison with America (specially central and North America) the cops here has a complete different patrolling doctrine that is not prepared for that kind of ostensive preventive/remediation repression.
During some events of the summer 2020/21 I was surprised that in some situation of confronts or ostensive patrolling they lack some basic things like tactical formation (and it’s variations), non lethal options only pepper spray for small units (no teasers, no batons, or precision options), lack of non-characterised units, and an unnecessary gear (guys carrying several keys in a big keychain) and loose gear (pants that are not fit for running, heavy boots with inappropriate shoelace).
And on top of that a concerning lack of situational awareness.
Of course we do not have the issues from America policing (truculence, lack of de-escalating skills, less intelligence backed and more confrontational) but I think it’s time to change if they want have any success against those gangs.
Sweden went from almost entirely ethnic Swedish, with high levels of social cohesion and trust (easier to achieve in a monoethnic country), to one quarter of the population now being of a non-Swedish ethnicity, in a span of 50 years. It is now one of the most crime-ridden countries in Europe[0], with some having described it as the "grenade attack capital" of Europe.
I don't know why some keep on insisting that importing large numbers of people from vastly different cultural, political, and economic backgrounds, with neither a real plan on the government's part to integrate them nor a factual evidence of the immigrants being able to integrate well, is a good idea. Even worse are the blind accusations of racism when someone questions such policies.
I'm an immigrant myself (though not to Sweden), and I don't have anything against immigration; only the idea that people have an unrestricted right to be anywhere they please and behave in any way they please. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." An idea so old it's literally from the Roman Empire.
Nobody wins in the scenario of Sweden: not the native Swedes, not the immigrants who want to integrate into Swedish society, who now face additional burdens of discrimination.
You have to go back a bit further than 50 years for that. The 1960s and 70s were the period of peak immigration from Finland to Sweden. Finland was a poor country with too many young people and too few opportunities, while Sweden had jobs and generous welfare policies. Many of the migrants could not integrate into the society, and too many of them ended up abusing drugs and alcohol and committing crime.
What happens now seems to be the same thing on a larger scale.
The source you posted has had articles written about it because one person managed to skew it alone, since it's just based on some online survey. Crime in sweden has actually been decreasing overall. Murders have been increasing lately but are also about the same as 30 years ago. The murder rate is lower than in Finland. It's the trend that is worrying. It is a serious issue, but no one benefits from sensantionalism
Other sources aren't going to differ much. Eurostat-backed data[0] shows that Sweden does poorly on many categories of crime, compared to Europe as a whole and especially compared to its neighbors.
While I agree that the government should plan better for integration, I still think people should be able to travel wherever they please. It seems incredibly unfair to deny those whose misfortune was being born in a poorer country.
If you look at how humans have identified in terms of communities, we’ve gone from a tribal identity all the way to a national identity. It only makes sense as we go on to become a global identity.
Also - Sweden has passed the threshold with immigrants in selected political positions (it's a really small country) so selected officials nowadays blocks anything conservative regarding nationality. Nobody wins.
> No matter immigrants or not, they need to get locked up, and they would've gotten locked up in their respective countries.
Because the perpetrators are often children/teenagers, in many places actually not. It's the underage factor making many of these cases challenging to prosecute.
If you are organizing your prisons properly, this is not an issue. Inmates who are sentenced for serious crimes like gang stuff should never be able to communicate with each others without supervision. They are people who really like to abuse all kind of weakness and kindness shown to them, so I don't feel sad if they have really bad and lone time in prison. Things like prison gangs are so stupid and easily preventable if you don't let inmates "socialize" with each others all the time.
Prisons run on taxpayers money, and its really not cheap thing. And its not like they magically turn into taxpaying members of society after they get released.
I think, No matter what their home country says, they can have em back. We should not care what happens next, since they themselves fucked up bad enough after given second chance.
Policing does barely anything. Putting one hard criminal in prison only opens up a power vacuum that 10 more people step up to want to fill. Since when has "tough on hard crime" ever "worked" unless you go completely nuts like, for example, Duterte in the Philippines?
This needs to be worked on much earlier by improving social programs and integration. It's a multi-decade job. Barring government led death squads (which I'm not proposing here, mind you), deterrence does not work.
Interviews with some of these young criminals (borderline child soldiers at this point) show that they do not expect to live past 20-25, so they really don't care.
> Policing does barely anything. Putting one hard criminal in prison only opens up a power vacuum that 10 more people step up to want to fill.
Unless the entire gang gets wiped, which they can do, but they dont.
> Interviews with some of these young criminals (borderline child soldiers at this point) show that they do not expect to live past 20-25, so they really don't care.
Thats an issue, because they will never say that if they stayed in their countries (pre-war).
Many of these criminals are Swedish citizens (second generation). You want to deport them where exactly?
Or do you want to put them in mega prisons that do not currently exist? That's pretty expensive too.
Pretty good idea IMO. I don't really know what makes people love gang members and other violent scum on the Earth. Surely they stop being murderous terrorists if we are just lenient to them. Bad people can thrive because good people are afraid to make it very clear that this kind of behaviour is not accepted and you will be dead or locked for life if you even try. Let's watch some TV shows that romanticises the criminals instead, and maybe listen to some some nice music that glorifies gangs...
