Actually, I specifically said “There is grounds for questioning some of the statistics tossed around the immigration issue”, though on rereading I see it should say “There are grounds…” I readily agree that the claim of rape rates going up 1400% is probably an exaggeration. Ideally, we could get better numbers by reading straightforward research and statistics from the Swedish government. Unfortunately the government doesn’t provide them, as far as I know. Indeed few governments in Europe seem to give their citizens a clear picture of how rates of rape and other violent crimes in Muslim immigrant communities compare to rates in the nation as a whole.
Skeptics might think this is because the statistics don’t look so good, and might help those dreaded anti-immigration groups. Maybe there’s some other reason.
How many European countries tracked major crimes by ethnicity or nationality in the 1950s? 1960s? 1970s? Later? If they stopped keeping those statistics, when did they do it?
Actually, I am not sure that it would be wrong to refrain from publishing those statistics in the current climate. Violent crime tends to be a phenomenon associated with poverty. Poverty is a phenomenon associated with recent immigrants. Unless one can demonstrate that such numbers are useful in preventing crime, the most direct result of publishing such figures is to feed the racist and xenophobic demagogues. Do we have an example of a country where the publication of crime rates of immigrants or ethnic minorities led to actions that reduced crime?
That’s true in some ways, and far from true in others. Sweden’s definition of “rape” is liberal in the sense that it can encompass more than the usual PIV intercourse - but until last year it was also restrictive in that an alleged victim had to show they were either forced or were incapacitated. So a case like this one, where the girl was surrounded by six boys and was too afraid of what would happen if she resisted, wouldn’t have been considered rape until the law change last year. Sweden’s courts also seem to impose a heavy burden on the alleged victim to prove not only that they didn’t consent, but that the accused knew they were not consenting (see a list of examples here).
One thing that may account for at least part of the “higher” rate in Sweden is that each separate incident of rape will be recorded - so a woman who reports being raped twice by the same person in one night will be recorded as two rapes; a woman gang-raped by five men will be recorded as five rapes. Swedish statistics are also based purely on initial police reports, which may not be the case in all other jurisdictions. Most comparative studies don’t control for these factors, so have to be interpreted with caution.
I find it ironic that if I had seen 10 years ago what I wrote here (Sweden being totalitarian country with brainwashed people) even I would have said the claim is surely written by a lunatic. Interestingly, the American writing swedenreport.org seems to be also questioning his mental health. “How could it be possible that all these Swedes around me are denying reality, am I simply missing something”.
Then again, why would Huntford, intelligent and successful Englishman who lived in Sweden as a diplomat, call Sweden a totalitarian country already 1971? What would he benefit lying about it? Anyone who has read The New Totalitarians can see he wasn’t insane at least.
In any case, I think we all can agree there is something truly exceptional about Sweden, right? Something that begs for an explanation. Explanations like “Swedes are just so nice people” don’t really explain anything at all. They (or more likely their society) surely weren’t so nice 500 or 1000 years ago. Hardly even 50 years ago with their eugenics program.
All I can say is: try to learn to understand Sweden. Listen to those who you can expect to know Swedish society well, both lovers and haters. I guess the author of swedenreport.org can be counted as a latter.
If I should recommend one article on swedenreport.org I think this one is quite telling. It is about immigrants Swedes call “war children”. The pictures of these war children have been taken from major Swedish newspapers. Please take a look. Do they look like children to you? http://swedenreport.org/2015/04/14/sacrificing-1000-to-save-1/
I assure you, there is not a least bit of intentional irony on these articles. When average Swede look at these pictures, they really see children on them. They don’t even recognise the annoyed expressions on subjects faces.
Does this appear to you the way reasonable, sane people act and think?
And for those who thinks I am writing this with a KKK hood on my head, I’d like to clarify that while failed immigration is destroying Sweden as we know it, it is not the root cause of the problems. It is merely a symptom of other failures . I could also name many countries that have high immigration but are still doing just fine.
I think I can’t explain my point of view any better than this so I guess I will now rest my case.
?? A sports reporter who decides to dabble in dishonest biographies may or may not be “intelligent and successful” by some undefined measure, but it hardly indicates that he has the the background to make legitimate social or political observations. Abusing words that have genuine meanings is a standard practice of polemicists and cranks of all sorts. Referring to Sweden as totalitarian is the same sort of language abuse as referring to G W Bush as fascist or Obama as socialist. It is nothing more than a rhetorical device to frighten people who do not understand what words actually mean.
This is silly. Most of the children in those photos look just like children. With a war in its sixth year, one can easily picture a child of 14 or 15 looking like a young adult several years later. (And in the context of war, 14 or 15 is a child.). The Swedish policy may have problems or even be wrong headed, but criticizing that policy based on photos of some of the children who have grown up in exile is meaningless.
If one uses the rhetoric of ethnic supremacists, it is reasonable to draw the conclusion that one believes their nonsense, and claims of “suicide” in this context are the rhetoric of ethnic supremacists. If one cannot challenge a society’s actions except to engage in supremacist rhetoric, perhaps one needs to give more consideration to one’s actual objections.
That Sweden and other Nordic and Scandnavian (and Finnish) cultures have a tendency towards egalitarianism is well known. I guess it comes from the mix of Protestantism and those cold, long winter nights where communities either muster the discipline to pull together or they starve and freeze.
From the perspective of other cultures, where clientelism is normal and works against creating stable and efficient government, an ordered egalitarian model can seem like a virtue. But it is also limited. Cutting down tall poppies, ignoring difference, self censorship and encouraging standards that puts the community above individual self expression may be good survival techniques, but when that problem is past their disadvantages become clear. The under rate creativity, imagination and personal expression. Culture and the Arts are suffocated in conformity. Innovation, other than small step improvements to existing designs, are risky and to be avoided.
When it comes to a divisive political issue like immigration, which has many facets, sometime egalitarian societies flounder around finding that they do not have the right equipment to solve the problem.
However, I do not see that Swedens problems are much different from several other European countries. Exaggerating the problem and tarring all immigrants with the same brush is not really much help and just plays into the hands of rather simplistic solutions from radical parties.
Immigration is just one of many issues. People worry about it too much in my opinion.
Well this takes us full circle. If immigrants are very poor and are just as prone to crime as ethnic Swedes, what does Sweden gain from taking them in? And figures on rates of crime by race would be very useful in determining whether Sweden should continue on its current path of multiculturalism or should return society to a focus on ethnic Swedes. But you can’t conclusively show that a piece of evidence will be helpful without knowing what it is, so the task for opponents of immigration is basically to do the impossible.
We already have seen why immigration is a necessary feature for Sweden: low birth rates. I have no problem with the state (any state) collecting demographic information. I simply noted that if its primary result is going to be feeding the hate culture of xenophobia, perhaps it is better to skip it.
Ask people who want to hire workers for low-paid jobs. I’m sure Sweden has agricultural workers, hotel housekeepers, and the like. Poor immigrants do those jobs in other countries, why not in Sweden?
But importing unskilled third world people who have very different values and religions is an option of last resort, because it will lead to the permanent alteration of Sweden’s culture and way of life. Surely there must be some other alternative. This could plausibly be an option that Sweden was forced to take, but it sure seems like an unnecessary step that Sweden’s progressives chose. Norway, for instance, has a lower birthrate but fewernon-Western immigrants.
Well, if immigrants do have a higher crime rate even when correcting for poverty, that would be valuable information to know. Furthermore, it wouldn’t feed “the hate culture of xenophobia” but would justify it; it would prove that ‘the other’ really was worse than the native. And the primary result wouldn’t be new hatred of immigrants, but would be using the new information to better evaluate the rewards and costs of mass immigration.
If you want immigrants, you pretty much have to take third world ones. People aren’t clamoring to get out of more developed countries.
How do you know the alteration in culture is going to be permanent? Immigrants may not adapt to a new culture easily, because learning a new language and culture is hard, especially if you’re working for a living while you’re doing so. It’s much easier for their children and grandchildren to pick up the language and culture. It’s much easier to learn a new language as a child (ideally, as a baby) than it is as an adult. It’s much easier to learn about a culture if you speak its language fluently than if you don’t. All kinds of immigrants to many different countries have tended to cluster together, because it’s hard to learn a new language as an adult and it’s easier to socialize without a language barrier. Swedish immigrants to the US a century ago often lived in Swedish-speaking enclaves. Very few Swedish-Americans today speak Swedish.
This is a very good point. The mass immigration that is tearing apart the fabric of Sweden’s society is a consequence of their choice to import hundreds of thousands of low-skill refugees. For better or worse, this a decision they made, and they have to live with the consequences. Sweden’s progressive policymakers are to blame, not the immigrants. I don’t attribute much moral agency to the immigrants; they’re just acting within the acceptable confines of their culture and socioeconomic status.
What I meant mainly was that Sweden’s options for increasing their birthrate natively don’t seem to have been exhausted or even seriously broached. That to me seems like the most optimal and obvious solution for which a variety of potential options exist, from tax incentives for married couples to have children (like the dependent tax credit in the US) to an social campaign to promote pregnancy (e.g. singapore). This path doesn’t create the problem of social cohesion and political polarization that mass immigration does.
Sweden’s immigrants aren’t ever going to be fully integrated because the Western world has largely renounced assimilation in favor of multiculturalism (Sweden especially so). Moreover, as we’ve seen from immigration of various ethnic groups into the US, no group entirely loses their identity but instead indelibly shapes the general culture of the country they enter. It’s true that very few Americans today speak Swedish, but it’d be wrong to state that Swedes didn’t affected the culture of the United States. Likewise, southeast Asian immigrants already have and will continue to remold the culture of Sweden.
In what ways are the Germans and Irish harming the culture of the U.S.?
Sure, any large immigration changes the country to which the immigrants come, but if a majority of citizens accept those changes, I do not see the problem.
I guess i would see the problem, here, if there was any indication that Sweden was actually suffering a loss of creativity, production, or art. I see no such issues occurring.
Well both groups have had past periods where their influence has beeen less than stellar. Im thinking of Tammany Hall type political corruption and the German American Bund. With the good there often comes bad.
I don’t think anyone could argue that Sweden does not have cultural assets. It is regularly up there with the very best of Eurovision song contest talent and it leads the world in flat-pack furniture design.
The writers of brooding, darkly forboding who-done-it detective stories the constitute the wave of Nordic noire are currently enjoying a lot of popularity. Nice, if you like that sort of thing, but it is all rather a grim verdict on Swedish society, somewhat like the sentiments expressed of some of the posts hereabouts.
It is easy to get the impression that it is a nation of borderline depressives run by bossy social workers. Maybe immigration will inject some happiness genes into the DNA.
There’s a bigger problem here: cultures aren’t static. There’s no way of knowing what American culture would look like now if there had been no Irish, German, or Swedish immigration, but I guarantee you it wouldn’t look like American culture before those waves of immigration began. Cultures just don’t stay the same on a timescale of centuries, whether there is immigration or not.
There is also an assumption in back of anti-immigrant sentiment that “those” immigrants are too different to ever assimilate. I wouldn’t bet on that, or I wouldn’t bet that their children or grandchildren won’t ever assimilate. The immigrants themselves might not. It’s hard to learn a new language and culture, especially while working to support yourself. Their children and grandchildren, on the other hand, will be able to learn the language as children or, better yet, as babies. That’s when it’s easy to learn a language- there is tons of research showing that it’s much harder for adults. It is, of course, easier to learn about a culture if you speak its language fluently than if you don’t.
American Jews assimilated, or at least the majority of them did. We still do have some distinctive cultural features, but some of those went back into the mainstream culture- bagels and lox, anyone? (I’ve been to Sweden, and I think they, like a lot of northern European countries, could use some immigrants with good food. There are reasons why I’d like to go there again, but the food is not one of them.) Swedes might gain some foods that are characteristic of the places their immigrants come from. Those foods will probably become part of Swedish culture eventually, like curry has in the UK and pizza and burritos have in the US. I think US food culture would be much worse off without pizza, burritos, or bagels. Maybe some non-Muslim Swedes will celebrate Muslim holidays, just like some Americans celebrate St Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo or Chinese New Year.
If Jews assimilated into American culture, for the most part, there’s not too much reason why Muslims couldn’t do the same into Swedish culture. Jews assimilated into American culture despite efforts to keep us out. Of course, it mostly wasn’t the original Jewish immigrants who did the assimilating, but their children and grandchildren.
Political corruption happens all over the world, and has throughout history. It’s hardly unique to Irish culture. We’ve had some pretty nasty homegrown political groups as well.
Immigrants eventually assimilate into the broader culture of a country, which is, in turn influences and enriched with a positive energy. A great deal of the dynamism of the US was on the back of immigrants ambitious to make progress in their life. It takes a certain amount of enterprise and courage to take up the challenge of making a new start in another country. However, some groups take longer than others. Sometimes it takes a couple of generations for people to get settled. With many good people, there will also be some bad apples. That, sadly is part of the package.
European governments really do not know how to deal with immigration. They see it as a somewhat inflexible tap to turn on when there is a labour shortage. Or, when there is an international refugee crisis, they grudgingly accept those that they consider the most deserving cases, but do the minimum to help them settle in. They have no plan that extends further than keeping the current crop of grumbling voters happy. Even countries like the US, Canada and Australia that were built on immigration and have the wide open spaces to accommodate them, also have problems.
Europe is at the moment in the middle of a refugee crisis with people fleeing poverty and war in Africa and the Middle East. Thousands clinging to leaky boats and many drowning in the Mediterranean, many washed up dead on Italian beaches.
There has been a woeful reluctance amongst some European states to respond to this humanitarian crisis which seems to amount to ‘devil take the hindmost’, leaving it up to Italy and Greece to absorb the refugees.
Sweden stands out with a very enlightened policy towards this issue and they have put in place the machinery to make it work. Aside from the humanitarian case, I can see a long term benefit. It will forge a very useful long term link with the people of a major state in the Middle East. Syria will not be a war zone forever.
Other countries should do the same.
Sweden’s asylum offer to refugees from Syria:
Sad to say, I cannot see this happening in the UK, where the immigration/refugee issue is informed by prejudice and is prone to political grandstanding. The idea of the bunch of incompetents at the Home Office organising something like that!
Really we are dealing with quite small numbers of people here. Look at the numbers the Turkey and Jordan are dealing with:
You would have a point if I had claimed political corruption was unique to Irish culture; I did not. The Irish in the NE United States did bring political corruption to a higher art form. It’s one of the reasons Tammany Hall has become a byword for such corruption.
Have any evidence for that? Irish immigrants just happened to gain sufficient population in New York City that when they took over the graft and corruption from the preceding administrations, their patronage program was able to last longer. I cannot think of anything that the Tammany people did that was explicitly Irish or that they brought with them from Ireland, aside from a steady influx of new people to rely on patronage. Tammany got its notorious reputation from being based in the largest city, not from being any different than the groups controlling other large cities.
The same hold true for the German American Bund. It really had no significant differences from the Know Nothing Party or the various anti-immigrant organizations that have appeared from time to time throughout American history (or before). While the appeal was to German immigrants rather than Nativist Americans, it introduced nothing new to the country and hardly lasted long enough to introduce any significant changes to American culture.
There is no question that immigration brings change to both the culture of the immigrants and the culture of the receiving country. However, the statement to which I was replying had implied that there was a loss of culture through immigration rather than a change to culture. I do not know what the U.S. “lost,” but I suspect that whatever it was has been more than compensated by celebrating Christmas and Hallowe’en, and the availability of pizza, Kung Pao Shrimp, burritos, hot dogs, and bagels.