Is anyone else unable to get through this capture page? Every time it comes up I end up doing countless captures, clicking not a robot, round and round, never get through.
Shootings occur in all kinds of areas in the major cities, but also in smaller towns. Sweden has also had a worrying number of bombs outside stairwells in residential areas and in detached houses. Therefore, the problems are not only concentrated in marginalized areas or what the Swedish Police call, particularly vulnerable areas. Per capita, Sweden has twice as many gang members as Mexico but you can hardly compare the gang structures in the two countries.
Although it happens that innocent people die or get injured, the acts are targeted at active gang members and, more recently, tragically, their families to a greater extent.
The problems are significant in the context of gang crime, but it's not like an ordinary person needs to be afraid of being out for a walk or being assaulted, robbed, or attacked by gangs. In Malmö, which is Sweden's third-largest city and is located near Copenhagen, gang problems have significantly decreased in recent years through Group Violence Intervention efforts.
I'm not trying to gloss over the problems, which are significant, but I understand that the authorities and communities have the will, knowledge, and resources to change the situation.
Next time some article about shootings in the US or shows up on HN, will people remember these exact points?
So many probably mostly Europeans and Australians have a completely unrealistic views on actual risk of getting harmed by guns in the US. Yes, they have many shootings there but just like in Sweden or pretty much anywhere in "the west" with gun violence, it is mostly criminals shooting each other not terrorists, mass shooters and the police shooting random people.
In places with better access to legal guns there is also often a huge portion of gun induced suicides that are thrown into the statistics for no good reason.
We are all most likely killed by someone close to use regardless of how, so pay attention who you and your loved ones hang out with.
We are all more likely to be killed by hands, feet, knifes, random tools than by the evil AR-15 or a similar type of rifle.
The chance of even getting harms by a gun is incredibly small if you aren't a criminal and you dont point a gun at yourself, its basically a non-existing risk.
> it is mostly criminals shooting each other not terrorists
Nobody is born a criminal. Gang violence is expanding like a plague because of the collapse of society / government / whatever you want to call it in the lives of young people. A young person (usually adolescent) who is victimized by criminal gangs (and they need victims to exist) will not receive any protection or help from neither the police, the military, the schools, parents, family or anybody. Usually they're told just to take it and keep their head down. Criminals exploit boys by having them run errands or just squeeze them for money, girls are instead exploited sexually.
The civil society has nothing but bottomless contempt and even outright hatred towards teenage boys, so there is no dignified route of life for them unless they come from one of the few families that care for their future. Joining a gang becomes the easy way for them to find some dignity and respect among their peers and even in civil society. This has been going on for decades among the poorest in places such as the US, but now it happens to "middle-class" boys in Sweden and other places, because this middle class would rather see their own children be victimized or killed than make any effort to pass on their middle-class status to their kids. So it's not "mostly criminals shooting each other".
Very comparable in the Netherlands, fortunately for now still limited to the larger cities but it is also slowly spreading out from there. Most of this is drug related.
Perhaps, but we need to be careful what conclusions (and reactions) we take from that.
People from all walks of life make regular usage of recreational intoxicants, often perfectly legally. Huge, legitimate global industries are dedicated to it. If that association were the primary basis upon which to categorise as a gang, or as morally corrupt, then the Champagne region of France, and the Coca-Cola Corp (associate and maker of many an alcoholic beverage, among their giant stable of products), would be among the world's biggest "gangs". And yes, in some ways they are! but that's another matter.
So, despite the common 'drug' associations of gangs, the unique commonalities which define criminal gangs lie elsewhere, and thus a primary focus upon intoxicants, when attempting to address gang criminality - such as the longterm ineffective War-on-Drugs rhetoric - is doomed to failure, as the proof of reality shows.
Magically take away all drugs and alcohol overnight, and we'd still have a disenfranchised minority social underbelly, realising their discontent in all-new and equally potentially harmful ways.
Yes, that whole war-on-drugs thing was a giant mistake.
And agreed that there is a problem - now - but resolving that will be costly and time consuming and will require a lot of goodwill from all of the parties involved. I've worked in the mailroom of a bank, which was probably close to 70% minorities and it was awesome: I've never seen so much camaraderie anywhere else that I've worked. Turkish neighbors are great people, the young and coming Dutch kids living one door down not so much (vandalizing the property and causing a lot of trouble). It all depends and they're all individuals, as long as people paint whole groups with a single brush it can't ever work.
But free up enough money for education and you just might turn this around. Interesting tidbit: racism is everywhere I've lived, but it all depends on where on the color chart you are offset towards the 'white' end if you have more money and towards the left if you are poorer. It's pretty wild to see how universal this is, I've observed it pretty much everywhere that I've lived, even in places where people of color where the majority. They did the exact same thing. Baffling.
Usage is not the driver. It's the prosecution of drug production and distribution. Netherlands "allow" (yes, it's more complicated, but close enough) drug use, but producing drugs is forbidden. So, who supplies the drugs that people are allowed to consume? Gangs. Sweden has taken the war on drugs and dialed it up to 11, with the result that it has turned into a real war. And each time they dial it up even more you get another round of escalations.
The Netherlands have a big residential bombing issue as well. This issue is not fueled by migration. It's the moralizing prohibition of hard drugs followed by exploding profits, violent market takeovers, corruption and erratic enforcement sparking territorial runs.
It's not a good idea to take in massive amounts of poor and uneducated refugees from distant cultures, give them free money and housing, and then just leave them be. That's not a real migration policy, it's just a recipe for creating a segregated society. The Swedish welfare state has certainly taken care of the basic needs of the migrants, but it hasn't really worked well at actual integration, and creating social mobility. Poorly integrated youths who see no future prospects through honest work are prime material for crime gangs to recruit.
I still haven't figured out whether Swedish politicians and voters didn't realize this, or simply didn't care. What's happening has seemed inevitable to me for well over a decade.
> It's not a good idea to take in massive amounts of poor and uneducated refugees from distant cultures, give them free money and housing, and then just leave them be.
Literally the founding story of European Australia .. the bulk of poor uneducated landed here had criminal records to boot.
Still, they were given work to pass the time and after a few decades 'free' land (well, other peoples land).
These days modern Australia population is ~ 25% born elsewhere with a fair number of refugees and poor migrants but these are matched with education, job opportunities and initial placement in communities they can establish themselves in.
That support is pretty crucial to minimising friction.
not everyone who went to the Oz was a criminal -- tho plenty were.
there was a gold rush and for a while Melbourne was the largest city in the British Empire. plenty of actual "try my luck in the new world" folks landed, both in the 1800s and later.
During the founding wave the bulk of the poor were convicts.
During the founding of non convict colonies (Adelaide, Perth, etc) there was the mega rich of the day - second sons shipping out with entire households to establish footholds and means of trade, and their servants (by the terms of the day these were people with a position and a wage albeit not great).
The trying their luck in a gold rush etc crowd came after the founding of the main colonies, some convict, a number not.
FWiW in my estimation "Had a criminal record" | "was a convict" is distinct from "was a criminal" - the first two are a matter of record, the third is more of a judgement call of character.
Many sent to Australia as convicts had character, ethics, a trade, and were victims of circumstance, poor economics, the wrong politics, the wrong class, etc. rather than being of some essential criminal character.
I’ve watched this story grow over the last decades or so.
There is no gang problem, its just a conspiracy theory/propaganda.
There is a gang problem but it’s overstated.
There is a serious gang problem.
There is a serious gang problem but it’s bikers.
There is a serious gang problem, OK, it’s not bikers.
There is a serious gang problem, it’s immigrants and immigrant descended Swedes, but it’s Sweden’s fault for not integrating them <-You are here.
Consequences. Like erecting a transparent plexiglass-cylinder with 3 meters diameter and 5 meters height in public, filling it up to half height with pig piss. Dropping the problems into it, until they cease to exist. And associated bystanders realizing there will be no paradise for them, soiled before the eyes of their god.
I believe Sweden has passed this gap recently. Politicians, even on the left, can now oppose gang violence and comment on some integration problems without being labeled as outright racist.
However, most of the media and people on the opposing side of the political spectrum are still wary of people who focus too much on crime and integration problems. They are viewed as populist and are kept at an arms length distance. So it is still necessary to balance these opinions with sober coverage of other, less infected, issues. Our equivalent to InfoWars exist on the extreme far right and still doesn't have real credibility among common people. I believe most of the middle class don't have to deal with conspiracy theorists in their families or at work just yet.
For too long, there has been this apathetic "well, if I'm not a gangster, then why should I care?" mentality, because up until lately the crime has been localized to people in the gangs. Gang members killing other gang members, basically.
Even in the no-go areas, you're pretty safe walking around as a civilian. You'd expect those areas (in Sweden) to look like war zones, where the citizens and bystanders are locked up all day, in fear of moving out. Yeah, not so much - the areas are very much "boring" suburban areas.
But, alas, then the gangs started to bomb and shoot up apartments of rivals and their families. Suddenly you're not all that safe, because what if your neighbor turns out to be the second cousin of some local gangbanger?
With that said, all this roots in piss-poor integration. The gang members aren't first generation immigrants, we're talking at least second gen - even third generation.
And like all other organization, be that crime, terrorism, or whatever - they prey on the kids that have fallen outside the system.
>Majid's parents are from Iraqi Kurdistan, but he was born in Iran when they were fleeing Iraq on the way to Sweden during the Iran-Iraq war. The family settled in Uppsala in Sweden when he was one month old
I grew up in Sweden, moved around a bit in Europe and lately came back.
What worries me about the country is not primarily gang criminality, but the general degradation of everything that was once good about Swedish society.
Probably still better than a lot of places. Immigrants who come here often praise the system, how well everything works here; but they have no idea how well it used to work.
I'm 46 yo. When I grew up, the Swedish state took care of a lot of things; public transport, phone services, health care including pharmacies, postal services etc. It was mostly cheap and reliable.
These days all of it has been privatized, which has made it more expensive and not nearly as reliable.
Even government institutions, like the tax office have gone seriously downhill lately. You used to be able to go there and get professional help in reasonable time. These days it's a joke in comparison. There isn't even a tax office anymore, it's been lumped together with the unemployment office and God knows what and staffed with immigrants just of the bus who don't know shit about anything.
You used to be able to ask the police for help and expect to get it, politely; these days I'm more afraid of cops than criminals to be honest.
Poor tax office is interesting because tax office is a rare agency by government that earns money. There's a motivation to make service better, unlike some other public services.
Because they're overly aggressive and assume everyone is guilty of something.
Being grabbed of the street, detained and questioned just because you look similar to someone who did something wrong is not an uncommon thing.
I don't know whether to blame the hiring standards or the conditioning they put aspirants through, probably both; I've seen perfectly normal people, friends of mine; turn into fascist assholes in no time.
I’m really curious how about how good it used to be? It feels to me like there’s a cultural resistance to be self critical of the whole, and that is slowing down wide-scale progress.
I moved to Sweden 2 months ago (from Seattle, where I grew up) but over the last decade I’ve lived in Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, and Reykjavik.
The government here feels most similar to the US, worse in some ways. Paperwork is like a hobby and doing it slowly is almost glorified.
I love it in many ways, but it’s baffling that I still don’t have a government ID, and am months away from getting a bank account. (Which would block me from getting a paycheck if I wasn’t high enough to at my company to get an exception and wire to my U.S./EU accounts. But for most relocated employees, they just don’t get paid for the first few months). The HR here says this is something they can’t change because it’s legal requirements from the government? But they just shrug and say that’s the Swedish way it works because it’s been working. And now I’m too embarrassed to hire the people I need to until I have good workarounds for these processes (there are many more issues).
As a Swede with history of what used to be good, and what’s working in other places, what would it take to get Sweden to correct these aspects of the way things are run?
Yeah, tell me about it. The thing that sickens me the most is that Swedes in general are still very keen to pat themselves on the shoulder about what a great country they live in; even though it's mostly memories by now.
Been there, done that. Getting a bank account once I moved back was a major pita. I still haven't been able to renew my drivers license since I've been moving around without a fixed address. That part isn't new though, it's been like that as far back as I can remember.
But at least back in the days, the system worked, you got something back for your troubles.
I have seen these issues here in Germany too. Fintech-banks like N26 or Revolut used to fill the gap and give you a quick bank account before you could settle down in a permanent address.
The problem is that they require a work permission for the account, which used to be quick, but since the immigration system is now overworked, they're giving one year Visas and taking their time to give the work permission. So N26 or Revolut are only really available for European citizens (that was the reality for a few years now, dunno if it changed).
Funny enough, more traditional banks have picked up the slack and dropped the strict requirements, and you can open an account from day one of being here with them.
Is n26 an option? A newcomer should be able to get a German account pretty easily from them, and with SEPA it doesn't matter which country your IBAN is in. Or is the currency an issue?
For one: Public healthcare used to be reasonably accessible. Now it's not rare to wait >6 months to get examined for anything beyond emergencies. Also true for mental health.
Please note that these are my own experiences and anecdotes, but I think they answers your questions.
The free healthcare and elderly care used to be quite fast and humane. The very professional healthcare is still available for those with serious illnesses, but it's very difficult getting an appointment for more benign problems, dentist appointments, etc. The elderly care has changed so it's now almost a luxury to be accepted to the (still quite expensive) public retirement homes, that are burdened with huge waiting lists nowadays. Most elderly people have to resort to treatment at home, staffed by young or otherwise fairly low skilled carers who spend very little time with their clients. We are talking mere minutes per visit, mainly to hand out pills and serve food. Those carers often spend as much time on TikTok in their cars as they are interacting with clients. This sounds like hyperbole but is based on my own experience as a carer, as a neighbor to those receiving this care, and as someone with multiple people in my close family having worked as carers.
It is very difficult to phone the police to report a low-severity crime - ongoing or not - such as for example fraud, noise violations or reckless driving. You are not supposed to dial the emergency number if the crime in question is not in danger of hurting anyone. So how would we report vandalism for example? We wait on the phone for up to two hours only to hang up before we get the chance to even report the crime. This affects the statistics. Any criminals are long gone if we reach the police at all. This is caused by an overwhelmed law enforcement and is how children mostly get away with torching cars as a service for criminal older teenagers.
Schools have degraded immensely for some reason. This is not an immigration problem although I believe that may play a part in some parts of the country. The biggest issue is what can only be described as some sort of ADHD pandemic, where classrooms are disorderly to the point where kids are offered over-ear hearing protection to be able to focus when their classmates are making too much noise. When I went to school in the 90s, we had our fair share of fights, students that were acting out and teachers that couldn't be bothered. But it was nothing like it is today, and I don't really know who to blame. I think the teachers are doing their best, I think most parents are engaged and want the best for their kids, and I think most kids see the problem themselves. But even the best schools have these problems. My kids go to a fairly high profile school with unusually strict policies that are actually enforced, but they've still had alcohol and drugs in school, thefts, violent acts and a general environment that is making it difficult for the kids to learn. I suspect older teachers are more successful than their younger colleagues but that is merely anecdotal.
20-30 years ago our mostly social democratic parents used to complain that Sweden was slowly "turning into the USA" (meaning: a society where the rich prosper while the poor suffer), and now it's really starting to feel like that to me as well. Our society has been getting very cold lately and I'm not sure this is where I want to grow old anymore. Not that there are any alternatives, really. The free healthcare and education is still awesome when you need it and most of us can't imagine where to relocate to, because we are after all used to a fairly well functioning society. I would be quite happy if we went back to where we were 40 years ago.
> Those on the right largely blame immigration, which has added 2mn people to the country in recent decades. Those on the left point to social factors, including the privatisation of Sweden’s welfare system which has led to worse services in deprived areas.
Probably both things are true.
When countries take in large amounts of immigration, their generous welfare systems can become stressed.
I thought that I play with is that the internet is also partially to blame – hear me out.
In pre-internet times, immigrants faced the prospect of limited social contact unless they integrated with their communities. Alternatives to this was the formation of a cultural community such as a "little italy", "china town", or even a ghetto. However integration on some level would still be needed.
It's logical to believe that governments got a good idea of how many people they can import from each country while still maintaining a high level of integration.
Now enter the internet - it's now easy to stay connected with our cultural peers, function solely in our mother tongues and our problems from "back home" still feel close and worth hanging onto. It's also easier to avoid integrating into the community since many regular points of interaction, such as shopping, can be done online and in isolation.
This might mean that our previous numbers for how many people we bring in from each area will need to be reevaluated, possibly leaning into more mixing and conditions that ensure better integration such as requiring higher levels of language proficiency.
Sweden appears to be the victim of its own careless immigration, that'll be a difficult pandora's box to shut - but not impossible.
There is definitely something to your idea. I have moved countries a couple of times in recent years and found that I get fewer opportunities to use the local language than in past moves, simply because a lot of face-to-face interaction has been replaced with online interfaces (the bank, state offices) or automated kiosks. And I am the motivated, educated immigrant with plenty of time to spare who wants to learn the language and absorb all the idioms and local culture references expressed in it.
The flipside of this: locals also don't necessarily need to interact with foreigners. Altogether this might simply be another part of the "Loneliness Epidemic".
It's largely the result of an ideological deadlock, where legitimate logistical concerns about immigration and integration were lumped up with islamophobia and racism. Immigration was also seen as desirable in order to address the demographic crisis and low birth rates.
This in turn had the ironic side-effect of cementing a sort of structural racism where all these immigrants showed up and were given at best estate housing and a welfare check with very limited prospects for the same sort of quality of life as the natives.
Turns out very few people want to lead a shitty life doing menial jobs as a second class citizen. Isn't that weird?
Turns out if you give kids the career options of cleaning toilets or takeaway delivery (both for a pittance), a life of crime starts to look real appealing. Heck, it's a real testament to the humanity of these people that Sweden doesn't have more criminals than it already does.
Yeah, I have noticed exactly the same thing in Germany.
There are some nationalities doing low-paying jobs in disproportionate amounts. Turkish for example, the largest immigrant group here. If I divide my current company by "high paid" and "low paid" jobs, Turkish (plus Germans with Turkish background) are over-represented in the "low paid" half (more than 60% I estimate). On the other hand, there are only a handful in the "high paid" part (no engineers, for example, only a handful engineering-adjacent). These exceptions are often people coming straight from Turkey, from wealthier backgrounds, rather than 2nd/3rd generation German-born. This has been the situation in pretty much every company I worked or observed.
With recent housing problems, they also don't have as many options of where to live, so they end up in the same neighborhoods, where they rarely have a chance to speak German, let alone to integrate with the culture. Integration courses are crowded and extremely difficult to get into. If you're working full-time it's borderline impossible to find something after 5-6 PM. Religiousness also plays a role in making integration via integration courses hard (EDIT: but Turkish are more secular, this applies more to Arabs), there are specific classes for women, which is often composed only of Muslim women (since there are so few women-only classes, Muslim women are given priority), so few chances to chat with non-Muslim women.
One interesting anecdote that I can't prove, but I see a lot of people moving to Turkey in large numbers. Some of them are 2nd or 3rd generation and have never been there. Life is not easy.
"Turns out very few people want to lead a shitty life doing menial jobs as a second class citizen. Isn't that weird?"
This describes the huge population of gastarbeiter in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, but I am not aware of any violent movements arising from them being unhappy with their lot. (The violence one does remember from those years was from a different demographic entirely.) It describes the modern UAE, where I am unaware of any gang phenomena. So, is this really all that is to blame for Sweden's problems?
> "The violence one does remember from those years was from a different demographic entirely."
Indeed. Funny enough, in those discussions, a lot of people bring up the Vietnamese as a group that is well-represented in Germany, but are rarely if ever associated with violence.
The interesting part is that there used to be a problem with Vietnamese gangs post-reunification [1], entirely solved by now.
There are a bunch of other factors as well. For one, the Mexican cartels are trying to expand into Europe, and basically offering franchise rights to local gangs. Sweden isn't uniquely targeted in this, but it sure did have a whole lot of dissatisfied youths.
The Swedish legal system is also not very well suited to dealing with the problem, and the system for amending laws has a lot of inertia.
A big problem is laws against information sharing between government agencies dating back to the shocking revelations about the STASI during the fall of the DDR. In calmer times this is a fine principle, especially given how much data is stored on Swedish citizens, but when you want to deal with organized crime, it's absolutely disastrous.
This needs to be upvoted. This is exactly what I've noticed across Europe. It feels like there's a glass ceiling outside of the arts and maybe politics.
It doesn't feel like there are role models there like Satya Nadella, Jerry Yang, Alex Padilla, or Obama.
I don't think the issue is so much about skin color, as it is about language proficiency and integration. If you aren't fluent in Swedish or very proficient in western-style English, you have a significant uphill battle in terms of career and life prospects.
You have Iranians and Syrians and what have you in all manner of well paying jobs. But there is really no plausible path from refugee to those types of jobs.
I wasn't saying a racial glass ceiling but a ethnic one, largely for the same reasons you mentioned. Lack of language proficiency plus a bit of bias against foreign degrees forced plenty of white collar immigrants to take blue collar jobs in Europe (and even Canada). This decreases social mobility as you don't have the network to get an "in" into plenty of well paying industries. While skills absolutely matter, some form of network really helps out.
Europe in general is the backup plan for most immigrants. Our parents preferred immigrating to US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand instead. You only ended up in Europe if you couldn't end up in those 4.
Netherlands and the UK have only started to change in the past 5-10 years.
Aside from politics, British Asians honestly aren't that notable in the business space. Most British Asian billionaires tend to be Indian and Pakistani oligarchs to took British citizenship (eg. Hinduja). The British Asian community always felt pretty dislocated and isolated compared to those of us in the US+Canada, despite us being a newer community in North America.
In Netherlands, similar story, though there has been a recent increase in white collar Asian immigration after the US Visa regime became much more backlogged.
Can't speak for the Arab+Turkish community in France and Germany, but I had a Tunisian coworker who made a point of how he preferred being in the US over France or Belgium. And on the German side, it's the backup plan for most immigrants as well. I can't think of a notable Turkish German or Arab German role model outside of arts and politics except for the COVID Vaccine guy, and that was very recent.
For example, in the 70s-90s Lebanese would have an easy time emigrating to France (and many have) due to French fluency, yet plenty preferred moving to Australia, Canada, or the US instead as there were more opportunities to climb up.
Conversely, there is plenty of Chinese and Indian immigration to Europe, but it tends to be blue collar in origin, as opportunities and social mobility is simply harder in Europe if you're an other.
Take a look at the Arab community in the US versus Germany for example - the American half is heavily Levantine (Palestinian, Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese) like in Germany, yet better assimilated than the equivalent communities in Germany (even before the civil war). There have been Arab Americans as Governors (Atiyeh, Sununu) and Business Leaders (Maloof, Yagan, Salhany, Halaby), yet not in Germany.
As long as the immigrants coming are paying into the system more than they take it's not a problem. The issue is purely the type of immigrants Sweden welcomed.
We should be clear about this because even at scale immigration can work well, and be a net benefit economically.
Another problem Sweden though is that they also didn't import people with compatible cultural values. So you have a population of people who are unable to economically contribute, and often unwilling to integrate.
I just wish people listened years ago when people like myself suggested it was likely to play out like this instead of being so mean and accusing us of all having hateful motives. There's no going back now.
> I just wish people listened years ago when people like myself suggested it was likely to play out like this instead of being so mean and accusing us of all having hateful motives. There's no going back now.
Agreed. Unfortunately those people who leveled accusations will face no consequences. Even if you were to bring up that they wrong, naive, selfish, you'll just get a shrug from them and a "get over it". Like the results and end-game don't matter to them now, when before they swore with their life that it mattered and anyone in opposition was a xenophobic piece of crap.
I suspect anyone who wants to address the elephant in the room here will have to choose between accepting support from semi-fascist types or getting cancelled
* A region with instability, poverty and agrarian-tribo-rural-economy will imprint emergent traits onto the local culture.
* Long ossified culture cannot be shed quickly even in the best of conditions
* Agrarian tribal cultural practices are incompatible with hyper-liberal secular society. Integration is the only option.
* Integration is hard. Even more so when it is optional, gentle and approached with ignorant naivete.
Of course things went wrong. The Swedish drank American kool-aid. Like America, they naively tried to claim that their national identity is not an ethnic identity. They set out to prove themselves better than the US by taking in large populations of refugees and showing how they could do the America model better. That's where they got it completely wrong. The US took centuries to decouple its cultural identity from its prevailing-ethnic identity. (by successfully secularizing Protestantism.) The US also heavily vets its immigrants (unlike Sweden) and places the most oppressive integration-force-field second only to France. The air you breathe (Media), the carrot (The American dream) and the stick (the English language) all perfectly align to facilitate integration of the 2nd generation born into the US.
Swedish is an ethno-cultural identity. If you can't start with accepting that, then ofc the grand immigration plan was going to fail.
> The US also heavily vets its immigrants (unlike Sweden) and places the most oppressive integration-force-field second only to France. The air you breathe (Media), the carrot (The American dream) and the stick (the English language) all perfectly align to facilitate integration of the 2nd generation born into the US.
Most of America's immigration comes from the southern border and is completely unvetted. Your thoughts on integration also don't align with reality.
Edit: participating in this thread has resulted in the moderators of this site applying a rate limit to my account, so I can no longer reply.
The rise of massive Hispanic immigration to the US is fairly recent [1]
About 25% of USA's immigration is as a result of unvetted immigrants from the south [2]. It is still a minority. The majority come here through family (pre-integrated) or for work (high bar for productivity).
Also, Mexico is not the same as war torn middle-east. Mexicans are already culturally aligned (Christianity), ethnically aligned (massive white admixture) and economically far closer to the developed world as compared to the recent warn-torn middle eastern nations. There have been large & well-established Spanish-Christian communities within the US for centuries, which makes it much harder for them to ghettoize.
My point about the integration force-field still stands.
You isolated Mexico for some reason. Your source cites 50% for Mexico and other Latin American countries. Also, while it is true that there is significant (Southern) European admixture in Mexico, it is much less represented among those who come to America.
I suspect you haven't even begun to think your comment out.
The idea that someone who does not presumably know the language, culture, or even where all the landmarks of a city/nation are suddenly start running organized crime is deeply mistaken and does not even track with the most well-known syndicates such as the mafia (1920s in NY compared to 1880s enmasse arrival of Italians) or cartels ("homegrown").
Look deeper and you would see these syndicates grew because there were purposefully and one might argued, promoted by semi-facist types or those who would get "cancelled" today, preventing reasonable opportunities from being provided to these populations.
Even moreso, you might see that much of our economy depends on deeply underpaid labor continuously running agriculture and service sectors and now I would argue even tech, with the danger of being deported or not getting a visa hanging over their actions.
This graph, in the financial times article about immigration, indicates 5. 5 deaths per million. The growth is horrible and yet the reality is nothing like the one being lived in by the US. Most hackernews posters often post about gun violence in the US as being something necessary to address and also simultaneously something that does not impact their day to day decisions around errands like the grocery or activities like music festivals or conferences.
Just to put things in perspective, deaths by firearm are around 60 per million in the US, twelve times the Swedish figure.
Further, as every greying country attempts to use immigration to grow a declining population, some flavor of this comment will negatively impact their efforts:
“Swedes make you feel foreign even when you have the passport, even my kids who were born here,” he says. “They blame immigrants for everything. But this gang violence affects me, my family, my friends as well."
I dont know where you got the statics from but these do not seem to be comparable values.
It most like includes accidents and suicides which have entirely different factors than gun violence and for obvious reason are more likely to be committed with a gun if its easier to get a gun legal.
Overall there is however no correlation with more suicide with better firearm access. Suicide attempts/surviving rates can be slightly lower (for obvious reasons).
Either way none of these should matter since suicide isn't gun violence.
If this is meant to be a dogwhistle about immigration, it seems appropriate to observe that many of the countries TFA compares Sweden to (Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands) have similar immigration patterns without the same violent crime rates.
I don't know about the others, but Greece tends to be a transit country, not a final destination. It does get immigrants, but those interested in crime tend to migrate to higher-GDP countries. I can see the same trend in my country too. The people coming here, for now, are very hardworking and law-abiding, whereas those interested in crime tend to migrate, our natives included, too.
It's good to know that immigrants, no matter the nationality, ethnicity, or religion, follow a normal distribution. Some of them are criminals or bigots, whereas most of them are just normal people trying to find work and raise a family.
Europe needs immigrants, it would be foolish to close borders. But we need to be tougher on crime, too. Immigrants that don't quickly adopt our laws and liberal values should be expelled because otherwise, the crime rate goes up, then far-right parties take over. And what happens next in such scenarios is that the law-abiding immigrants suffer, actually.
Immigrants are rarely much of a crime problem. First and second generation descendants on the other hand... there really aren't any simple solutions, at least not as long as we agree that an individual cannot be punished for a statistic about their future descendants.
This is factually not true, and you can easily see it in the correlation between waves of immigrants and the crime rates going immediately up. We aren't talking about just organized crime, but also petty crime, rape, etc.
Usually, after 2 generations, most people adopt the local culture. You can see it in quite tangible metrics, like, for example, they stop having many children, with the fertility rate dropping to the Western average. And if first and second generation descendants become a problem, indeed, then we can talk about society being broken, and the solution is to fix it, not to stop immigration.
For me, talking about slowing down immigration is like talking about slowing down the economy. It can't be done without people eventually starving.
Can you give 1 example where the solution you suggest has worked in the long term? i.e.: my population pyramid is broken, I am going to replace the base of the pyramid with foreigners.
I do not have a problem with that idea, but bringing people from territories where marrying your 1st cousin is legal is a bad idea with bad consequences: lower IQ, expensive health conditions, bad temperament (and hence crime), etc.
I think you describe the ideological framework that immigrants in the U.S. have. Because they've had to work hard to integrate they value what they've acquired and work hard to uphold it. The result is they increase social cohesion by their adherence to the country's shared myths/ideals, and as they must generally pursue economic integration are economically productive as well.
Agree have family I'm Sweden. Its often said the crime deterrence is a factor of severity of punishment * probability of being caught. The jails in Sweden offer a decent standard of living. Where the offende is a refugee / immigrant they likely find it better than where they escaped.
1.) its not often said that crime deterrence is a factor of severity of punishment * probability of being caught. It’s often said that crime deterrence is a complex issue and that probability of being caught seems to be vastly more powerful than the severity of punishment, for some reason.
2.) It’s still prison. You’re still locked up. Even people from poor countries want to be free.
- A friend of mine had an escort picking her up at the station from her work.
- My mom + a friend of her felt threatened by a non-native, when taking the train back from the airport. These are retired women and my mom's friend travels 3 x a year everywhere.
She felt the most unsafe here in Brussels and not taking the train again. ( This was after Operation "cleanup")
> You haven't gone to Brussels I suppose... Especially Molenbeek or Station Zuid.
I go to Brussels at least once a year.
Again with the obliqueness: is there something specific you want to say? Is the implication that your national police force is suppressing the "real" murder rate?
Again: which numbers? Don't dogwhistle, spit it out.
If you mean immigration: roughly 1 in 4 Swedish residents are either first- or second-generation immigrants[1]. This is directly comparable to Belgium[2].
The same elephant is in the room in Germany. The society starts discovering patriotism which was unthinkable few years ago. The problem gets slowly too noticeable to be hidden by mainstream politicians.
I suspect that many people still havn't realized that the elephant in the room is not solved by stricter laws. Because those are in place everywhere. The elephant is what is supposed to happen to those people. Because nobody wants them. And when you cannot deport, what are you going to do?
Yes, like the UK-Ruanda plan. Problem is that this very unethical (regarding the native population of the third country, especially if not very democratic). And has the risk that those countries make a business out of it
> But in recent years it has achieved notoriety as the hometown of one of Sweden’s most deadly gangs and its notorious leader Rawa Majid, “the Kurdish Fox”, who fled to Turkey in 2018 after a number of drug and violence-related convictions.
> Much of the recent violence is due to a major split in the Foxtrot drug gang, say police. Majid, who was raised in Uppsala by Iraqi parents, is believed to have fallen out with his former right-hand man Ismail Abdo, or “Strawberry”, who also moved to Turkey.
----
"Is there a lot of crime in Sweden?"
"Ja we have a lot of crime. Ours are named Kurdish Fox and Strawberry."
Well, some of the gangs are ran from abroad but absolutely exist in our home turf. But it's true we can't simply arrest the gang leaders, and there are people waiting to take the place of existing middle management as they are imprisoned.
The two root causes of our gang problem is the amount of money drug buyers want to spend, and that it's still possible to combine crime with clean business and launder money through that.
I live next door to a handful small businesses that each employ 2-3 people full time, have maybe 2-3 customers per day paying for services costing about 200-300 kronor (10 minute hair cuts, tanning salons, car reconditioning, 10 minute tire changes, nail sculpture), and they still make a yearly profit of between 0.5 to 2 million kronor according to public records. They are all staffed by people in their 20s that mostly hang around all day. I would assume these businesses are quite cash heavy even though everyone uses card payments nowadays. They are generally owned by people whose main business is property ownership, restaurants and construction, who keep a bunch of smaller businesses on the side. I don't think the state has the resources to even begin looking into this.
As a privacy nut I have always wanted to keep cash but I'm starting to second guess myself.
Multi-ethnic democracy is a harder mode than mono-ethnic democracy, which is why most comparisons of the US failures at various social policies to Scandinavian countries have always bugged me.
People don’t naturally feel as much allegiance to others who look and sound different. It takes time to overcome that.
I fully agree. Globally highly multicultural countries tend to be less stable on average, and it makes perfect sense if we consider basic human biology. We are tribal animals, it's hard to get around that.
Places like Sweden will have it even worse than the US, because migrants need to learn a fully new language to fully integrate, while most migrants to the US have at least some English skills to begin with.
Hungary and Slovakia, the only European countries that haven't allowed illegal immigration in, are at the bottom of that chart, while Sweden is getting rekt...
Legal immigration is of course fine and necessary, as long as the state and socials systems can assimilate it... (Japan is a good example). But articles like this show concerning data points in western countries with uncontrolled migratory policies.
That charts paints a rather skewed picture by only focusing on firearms rather than murder overall. This is not a bad thing to highlight, but you should absolutely not confuse the two.
Looking at [1], murder rate in Slovakia is comparable, and Hungary only slightly lower. Sweden isn't even near the top murder rate in the EU, and a number of other countries which accepted a large number of refugees have lower murder rates than Sweden.
There’s a concerning proclivity amongst xenophobes to use tortured statistics as means to unduly smear immigration. Even more concerning to see it take hold in highly upvoted comments here.
When discussing a topic like gang violence why would you focus on the general societal homicide rate unless gang homicide's execution mirrored that of the society at large? The only useful attribute of your approach seems to be that it downplays the severity of what's being measured at a glance. The ranked approach is also strange considering that the obvious point of interest for most people would be whether the gang related murder rates in the countries that accepted refugees trended upwards or downwards from their past values within those regions. Comparing countries to each other instead of comparing them against their historical selves is just sleight of hand to excuse real human suffering as "exaggerated".
According to [1] it hasn't changed much in 2022. 2023 isn't finished yet, so I don't know about that.
And my main point was that "gun violence" showing near zero for some countries shouldn't absolutely not be taken as "near zero crime" or "near zero homicide".
Are we looking at the same chart like? Because that chart shows it's been roughly steady since 1990, with some peaks up and some peaks down: 1991 was an outlier upwards, 2012 an outlier downwards, but overall: roughly stable. This kind of variation is to be expected since in absolute numbers it's a relatively small number of people.
> Compare to Finland which has a similar fall, but continues to fall instead of rise.
Just minutes ago in another comment you yourself posted a link which clearly and markedly shows that Finland has seen a marked and steep rise in the last few years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339299
That chart shows a steady rate up to 2005, a decline from 2005-2012 and then a rise back to the previous level between 2012 and 2015, and steady at the previous level since then. The big spike in Syrian immigration started around 2015-2016. Based on these numbers, I’d say these two factors (immigration and murder) appear to be unrelated.
You can't truly say it happened in 2012 because there is noise in the graph. Even when the long term trends are flat it goes up and down. It definitely happened _around_ the mid 2010s.
Finland also has a markedly higher murder rate to start with (for whatever reason), and it absolutely shows a distinct rise in the last few years – much more so than Sweden in fact.
Norway is indeed more stable. However, Norway also accepted significant number of migration. Although it's hard to tell how much exactly because of different definitions, it seems roughly half as much as Sweden (adjusted for population), which is less but not nothing.
And in a quick check Finland has seen even less migration than Norway.
So you will need to explain why Norway sees no rise in spite of migration, and Finland sees a rise in spite of less migration.
And sure, I'm willing to accept that migration is a factor in Sweden. Although I can't tell you how exactly since I'm not familiar enough with the nuances in Sweden. But this "argumentum ad charts" you're making that migration somehow automatically leads to crime is complete bollocks.
I mean there’s just no rise at all after 2015. It just goes back to the long term average. If anything I’d be looking for what happened in 2005 to reduce the murder rate, that seems to be the real story of this graph. But realistically it’s probably all just noise.
The most relevant figures would be homicide rate by perpetrator country of origin. Allegedly, 85% of shooting suspects are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants [0].
But reliable figures are hard to come by, partly because if scientists, even accidentally, find that, e.g., most rapes are committed by immigrants, they get prosecuted (eventually the charges were dropped, because they couldn't prove "bad intentions", negligence, or carelessness) [1,2,3,4].
The other reason is that, though Sweden used to collect data about criminal's ethnic background, they stopped I think in 2005 [5]. Though it seems they've resumed - in searching for sources for this post, I found https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/11/sweden-finally-publishe...
Just because fascism works by its own definitions does not mean that fascism is good. Neither Hungary nor Slovakia are great places to live by most metrics, even for native born citizens.
>Neither Hungary nor Slovakia are great places to live by most metrics
Huh? What's wrong with living in Slovakia?
You're making it sound like Slovakia is Botswana, Saudi Arabia or something when it's one of the safest and developed countries in the world, unless you opinion of Slovakia comes from the famous Bratislava scene from the movie Eurotrip.
Slovakia has a gdp per capita of around $21k and has stagnated with low growth since 2008. It has relatively high hdi ratings but these have also begun to decline. Both of those things are really not good for a country that hasn’t climbed out of the middle income trap yet. It’s a beautiful place, and there are certainly worse countries, but calling it one of the most developed countries is stretching the facts beyond breaking.
>Slovakia has a gdp per capita of around $21k and has stagnated with low growth since 2008
Firstly, which developed countries (that don't have "cheat codes") haven't stagnated GDP-wise post 2008? AFAIK, most of them.
>a country that hasn’t climbed out of the middle income trap yet
Secondly, GDP growth as a number on it's own, is pretty useless, as it's not a 1:1 representation of quality of life increase for the average citizen. GPD can grow just from some billionaires moving trillions form one to another or from extracting wealth from your country and its citizens, that doesn't necessarily mean the average citizen gets a piece of that pie or gets to see better quality public services. It just feeds the "line goes up" crowd who see a country as a publicly listed corporation.
Thirdly, as a country, once you reach a certain level of development by plucking the lowest hanging fruits that have been tried and tested and know to work by former industrial powers, growth becomes much harder and more capital intensive, only accessible to countries that already have crazy money to spend in R&D and innovation in the newly developing high growth markets, like the US, UK, China, Netherlands, Switzerland, Scandinavia, etc. Everyone else is stuck waiting and playing catch-up for eternity, but that doesn't mean they live poor lives.
The GDP per capita of Zimbabwe grew 3x post-2008 while Slovakia has relatively stagnated, yet I know for sure in which one I'd prefer to be born in.
>calling it one of the most developed countries is stretching the facts beyond breaking
It's one of the most developed countries in the world when you look at how bad the whole world is doing right now, not just the US, Germany, Singapore or Australia, which have their own challenges when you zoom in on them and not just glance at the "line goes up" GPD numbers.
You’re right about cheat codes - liberal policies such as freedoms for immigrants, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs are the cheat codes that allow societies to outperform. Indeed, if you exclude all the countries that are successfully using these policies, there aren’t many outperforming Slovakia and many doing much worse. But my point stands that fascism is not good for the native population it proposes to protect, unless you believe that purity of blood/national spirit is itself a value.
Sweden appears to have a gun pipeline from the Balkans, while in Germany illegal firearms aren't as prevalent (as of yet). Statistics on knife killings would paint a different picture.
...when you sort by "Rate", Germany is at spot 161, Hungary at 164, and Sweden at 144 (and for comparison's sake and because it's kinda interesting/surprising: Russia and the US are also identical at spot 52 and 53). So even when taking knife killings into account the argument doesn't make sense, Germany is much closer (actually pretty much identical) to "poster child" Hungary than Sweden.
That does not seem to be true. The most recent good data seems to be from 2019[0] and shows Germany with 0.34 stabbing deaths per 100k people, one of the lowest in the world, and lower than Sweden (0.35) and Hungary (0.41).
Germany has basically as many privately owned guns as sweden per capita. Germany is nearer to the Balkans. It hosts a million people from a war country (Ukraine). There are lots of illegal weapons.
One important difference between Germany and Sweden: youth unemployment is much much lower in Germany.
Similar developments as in Sweden can be seen in the Netherlands, due to the drug trade.
You keep it illegal for PR purposes but force below you to bend the law to allow what's illegal.
That's supposedly what happened in Germany in Foreign minister Annalena Baerbocks office.
Basically the embassy reported that it has all reason to believe that the passport is faked. Still, Annalena Baerbocks ministry pressured them on providing the legal documents that would allow said person to seek refugee status in Germany.
This is xenophobic BS. Same point was recently made by many Greek far-right chaps, only to find out that the most wanted gang leader was actually Greek (read: EU passport holder). So "illegal immigration" is not the main issue here.
It’s hard to overstate the pace at which Sweden changed since the 00s.
Swedish culture still values multiculturalism. And, during my 20 years there, I was never able to convince anyone about the dangers of tolerating intolerance.
When you check demographics’ stats, you realise that these issues will be compounded in the future. It makes me sad.
I've been predicting a rise in numbers of 'good gangs' in the west for years now. Of course it must start with a rise in bad gangs first. I believe we're heading towards anarchy. The law just doesn't serve the majority anymore.
Exactly this. It’s not even a secret, quite a few intelligence and defense agencies have published reports in this issue. These agencies even intentionally using this process to destabilize target countries first. Based on what I’ve read the agencies haven’t fully recognized that it will eventually come for everyone, though I have seen that written as a scenario. It’s likely effective state agencies will continue to develop novel funding sources in preparation, and the transition will be cleaner in countries where they’re successful. Your local district paying a monthly fee for the FBI’s security plan would be a better choice than a gang style security startup.
It feels like the tables are turning and the tactics that the west used to destabilize developing countries will now be used against it. Also, the west might end up saddled with illegitimate debts to consolidate the mass enslavement under a corrupt elite class just like it was in Africa. I won't be surprised if we start to see western dictators come to power (if it hasn't already happened). We should expect our dictators to be cunning and use old beliefs to their advantage so that people don't recognise them as dictators.
That’s definitely a possible outcome. I don’t think the universe enforces cosmic justice though, so it’s just as possible the west transitions into the post-state era with stronger institutions and more access to resources.
There’s lots more, hopefully these will get you the keywords to start finding more docs. I’m not a mil guy but know some. Actually part of the strategy is to get civilians more informed on the nature of the changing operating environment, because a lot of areas that used to be considered non military are becoming contested arenas.
Also just to reiterate, I don’t think they’ve made the jump yet to realize that relying on congress for funding is going to get harder.
Gangs are horrible entities that have to be stamped out via swift decisive action. Take it from us in the US. The whole reason we have to deal with the half of the politicos who shoot up walmarts, and the half of politicos who loot walmarts is because too many politicos protect their pet gangs and terrorists.
Don't let this happen to you.
Now in the US we have to take out our shooters and looters while their protectors maneuver to make that difficult from on high. I'm pretty sure you'll see a lot more prosecutions of politicos like you're seeing with Trump. It's basically step one if you want to take back malls, walmarts and churches from the shooters and the looters. You'll end up having to take down a lot of politicos and then bring the hammer.
You make a joke but you've hit on something. I would argue that the American model is "fettered" migration (also apparent in gulf states and plenty of other countries), that is you allow illegal immigration but use it as a strait jacket to bind the migrants in. You force them to work below minimum wage in poor conditions that your citizens would never accept and then marginalize and vilify them when you need a scapegoat. I would say that is "fettered" migration and it doesn't work great either.
While this does indeed sound like a problem for Sweden and something they will have to fix, it's worth pointing out that by my calculation the US fatal assault by fire arm rate is 12X the rate that is causing a crisis in Sweden.
It's relevant for a sense of perspective for the majority of people who are reading this page (because they come from the US).
People quote articles like this in the US to pretend that the EU is suffering from some dystopian crime wave but (from the perspective of the US) the opposite is true.
Even if they come from the US (maybe they don't), what is the purpose of comparing with the US specifically? The situation is dystopian for the victims, just as in the US.
Czechia has the same population as Sweden. Such series of intentional explosions would be considered insane here.
Trends matter, too. Sweden used to be known as the country where people don't lock their doors. Very high trust societies are rare and their demise due to rising crime is harmful to entire humanity.
14.6 firearm deaths per 100,000 (146 per million) , about 54% suicide, 43% murders (the rest accidental and law enforcement). Comes out to about 62 deaths per million, rate here is about 5.5 so 62 / 5.5 = 11.27X
what is the difference between the two definitions ?
btw, we've somehow been back-watered here on the site. I can't even find this thread in my profile, and it's only shown on the main page for this comment as a part of another thread.
pewresearch.org numbers are off, it claims the US total gun deaths including suicides is only 4 times of France. Deaths by police and military seems very low.
This thread is collapsed by default, but I can still see it.
this is one of those statements that is too ambiguous for the internet. It's hard to know if you are being sarcastic? Attempting satire? Or you are trying to make a joke, or genuinely don't know what you are talking about. So, can you clarify?
No I am serious, if you are comparing murders, you should include all weapons!
There are regional differences! Fire arms are heavily regulated and relatively hard to get in EU. We are close to war zones, hand grenades are easier to smuggle, and are used in Sweden.
If you include murders by knife, London is worse than US!
Edit: also you wrote "assault" that could include anything from armed robbery without health injury, to self defense. Apples and oranges!
ok I've updated it to show that I mean "fatal" assault by firearms.
Quick google search brings up the following
"All in all, there were 77 incidents of detonated hand grenades in Sweden during the six-year observation period, in which nine individuals were injured and one killed."
is this what you are talking about? Doesn't sound that dramatic.
Seems like you are just trolling. Especially with the throwaway account, hard to take what you are saying seriously.
The title is all this site is willing to divulge to me.
I just took the train into the city, had a burger & beer, and soon I'll train back home. I have zero worries about my safety.
Anyway, the Right party pulled the balance of power from the Left and formed a centre/right coalition more than a year ago, because of all the bad people coming here and doing bad things. Weren't they going to fix this?
> I just took the train into the city, had a burger & beer, and soon I'll train back home. I have zero worries about my safety.
That's also the life of millions in Ukraine right now so your anecdote doesn't mean much
Looking at the statistics and historical trends paint another picture, of course this isn't El Salvador, but it doesn't mean it's going in the right direction
> That's also the life of millions in Ukraine right now so your anecdote doesn't mean much
You're always right to question anecdote, but I call bullshit on the comparison to Ukraine. Crimea was taken. Borders are actively shifting. Nuclear attacks were a serious threat. I half-assedly considered actions I might take if the war spilled over here in some form.
But looking at the article's scary graph: the badness has a bit-over-doubled between 2014-2022. So if you were hanging out with 6 of your friends in 2014 and concerned that one of you was going to be gunned down in the next year, you should have around that same level of concern when hanging out with 2-3 of your friends in 2022.
I live in western Washington. In the past couple of years I met some Ukrainians - for home related remodeling, help wit cleaning and cooking. I can tell you none of these people will go back to Ukraine. Their kids are already in public schools learning English and integrating in the society.
>Anyway, the Right party pulled the balance of power from the Left and formed a centre/right coalition more than a year ago, because of all the bad people coming here and doing bad things. Weren't they going to fix this?
While I do think problems are way overblown, I don't know if you realize, these issues take generations to fix. If there is one legitimate scary bit about immigration is that it has VERY long-reaching consequences. You can deport someone who just got there, you can't deport someone's grandkid, he has nowhere to return to.
Because cultural differences have pushed him to crimes.
For example. I'm Spanish. My neighbors are Moroccan. The father didn't once in his life acknowledge my mother. He wouldn't talk to her. He would ignore her if she talked. To him, my mother was barely a person because she was a woman. Now this is extreme, but legal behavior, if it ever came to pass that he crossed some lines he might have gotten deported.
His son though? Stealing, selling drugs and beating his sisters are some of the things he has done, but he is a Spanish citizen, just like any other, so there is no magic "back to your country" card to play.
My point is that it's legitimate to pick and choose who you let into a country because the consequences of doing so are far-reaching. Because even if you might be able to deal swiftly with the guy you let in, every human being takes culture with him, and culture spreads. Integration is the most important phase of immigration, along with making sure those people you let in aren't going to be pushed into a life of crime and I don't think anyone ignoring that is taking immigration seriously.
> I just took the train into the city, had a burger & beer, and soon I'll train back home. I have zero worries about my safety.
My grandma smoked since she was a teenager and she is still alive and has no cancer. I guess all tobacco research is just fear-mongering.
> Weren't they going to fix this?
Were they? I’ve read a summary of the Moderate Party manifesto (https://archive.is/v6IYb) and, well, it looked pretty moderate. It looks like those measures will simply prevent exacerbation of the problems rather than solve them in under a year. It’s not like they did something similar to the Salvadoran gang crackdown.
The right campaigned on their tough on gangs stance. They made it the main topic of debate in the run up to the election, and filled all the interviews with it. They talked about nothing else. They scared the public into voting for them to solve the problem.
They're not going to fix it because then nobody will vote for them. Besides, they can't fix it, they just needed a bogeyman and there isn't much to fix to begin with. All that you can do is educate and aim to reduce the gap with the next generation or to accept that your own culture isn't static.
Ask the Scottish how they feel about Sweden exporting its culture a while ago.
Sweden | Norway | Denmark made #thuglife a thing across modern Scotland, northern and eastern England, much of Ireland, established DaneLaw, crashed the old Roman bathhouses, and turned Dublin into a major European slave teading hub.
The Danelaw originated from the invasion of *the Great Heathen Army* into England in the year 865, although the term was not used to describe a geographic area until the 11th century.
Are they deporting immigrants (regardless of country of origin) involved in violent crimes? Genuine question.
I know rehabilitation is different in Europe than the US, but there are likely resource constraints for attempting to do so at scale looking at trailing immigration volume.
They very often are not able to deport. Because no country takes those people in. The laws are in place but there are few ethical options.
Same story for the border closing in Finland by the way. You are dealing with a deeply unethical state, so when you don't let them in, these people will have to die. Because the other side knows that you are more likely to give in out of ethical principle.
Generally, in any country, if your asylum/refugee claim is accepted, they won't deport you back to origin unless the situation you were escaping has resolved.
(I'm guessing its generally asylum/refugee immigrants people are complaining about, not those from elsewhere in europe)
That’s unfortunate if an immigrant won’t assimilate responsibly into their host country and causes continuing harm through this policy. You’re just importing future prisoners and criminals.
Refugees/immigrants/etc should be welcomed (I have sponsored refugees in the US), but violent crime must be prevented if someone runs out of chances. You need some recourse when you run out of options and people who have immigrated refuse to act in good faith. Immigration is a gift and a privilege.
I assume you meant integrate instead of assimilate?
I definitely want immigrants to integrate in our society (and am prepared to do this when I travel into another country).
But I would not expect anyone to assimilate - which to my understanding means giving up their previous culture and take on the culture of the host country.
Good for you. I worry however. Not exactly for my own safety, but for where this is leading. It can become much worse if this trend is not forcefully dealt with.
I lived in Hjulsta for ten months. Statistics don't get worse than that. I was usually the only white person out after dark. Twice people rang on my door in the morning because I forgot my key out in the door over night. I moved away because it was too far from my workplace. Best supermarkets in the entire town though!
My friend looks basically like an Iranian (very dark wavy hair and dark eyes, but somewhat pale skin), even though he is a Czech, and lives in Stockholm. He saw blond people harassed multiple times.
He says "I am quite lucky that the worst individuals consider me 'one of their own' and leave me alone. This means that I can take the metro without any precautions. But blonde girls that work with me started preferring safer commute to the office a long time ago."
My first hand anecdotes; we let our kids ride subways on their own in Stockholm from about 9 years old. Everyone I know use public transport, I have never heard anyone complain about this!
Subways are safe. EDIT: I am sure there are problems I am not saying it is perfect
Did you also experience bomb attacks? Apparently, there were over 100 bomb attacks in Sweden this year. Our Eastern European country has twice the size of Sweden's population, and we had zero bombs going off, possibly since the 90s, as I don't remember any. Gun violence is really low here too, we barely remember any that made the news.
I'm sure that Sweden is a nice country to live in, I've visited it, seems great, but ignoring the crime wave is short-sighted, and I don't understand what “high standard” you're talking about.
I live in an area where there has been gang related gun violence and bombings; there are no neighborhoods around here where I feel unsafe. No one is ignoring it but sadly the current affairs are being used as a political tool to remove freedoms and further far right agendas. I do not know where you are from but lets say; Romania they have done an amazing job the last 30 years their homicide rate per capita has at times managed to drop below our current levels.
The high standard means that there is actually still a functioning society there with stability, security and trust in police and government. While we do have problems with the money generated from drug trade and other crimes.
This seems to be a problem though for migrants who go to a country from a "worse" place.
"The standard for bad here isn't bad" because it was worse elsewhere. Where I live in the US we have this too where migrants who have come here don't see anything bad because where they are from was worse.
They don't see what those of us that have been here from birth have seen. That standards are sliding. Yes, for you the migrant coming from a poorer place, this place is richer. But for me the native this place has become poorer.
And talking about and suggesting we need to stop the backslide gets an eye-roll from the enablers.
I moved - sorry, immigrated - to Stockholm end of 2016.
At that time the sensationalist media was reporting on 'no-go zones' - parts of town that even the police were too afraid to go to.
One night I was sitting on the subway when a guy came and sat down opposite a girl, and started telling her he was gonna go check out one of these 'no-go zones'. His destination was östermalm.
"Elegant Östermalm is known for its smart bars and restaurants on Stureplan square, and its cultural venues, such as the Swedish History Museum, displaying Viking weapons. Designer boutiques dot the area near Östermalms Saluhall, a food market known for traditional specialties like gravlax and smoked shrimp. Centered on the imposing National Library of Sweden, tranquil Humlegården park hosts plays in summer."
You can do the same for anywhere. For example Tenderloin:
"Tenderloin in San Francisco is known for its cultural diversity - home to micro-neighborhoods representing the Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Pakistani, Central Asian, and Yemeni communities. There is a bustling cultural scene with numerous live jazz bars, theaters where bands like The Rolling Stones and Beatles have headlined, and museums highlighting the historical numerous LGBT+ community".
That said, Östermalm didn't feel bad when I visited. I think op is confusing Östermalm and Östberga.
I heard Östermalm correctly - it was a vivid memory and where I worked at the time. Reading about "no-go zones" was fresh in my mind.
I remember thinking "Really? Where the Bentley dealership is?" Good luck finding graffiti there, let alone circumstances rough enough to scare the cops away.
Yea must have been a joke or an actual ignorant tourist. When I was there it seemed the less well off areas tended to be extremely cut off from the rest of Stockholm too.
I made an actual effort to go to Tensta when I was there (it's hard to find good Levantine food in the US) and it definetly felt dislocated. Very much like a purposely created ghetto. Like Visitation Valley and Bayview in San Francisco.
Östermalm is the most bourgeois area in central Stockholm. It’s the kind of place where the weekly supermarket offers are for lobster and caviar instead of chicken breast or potatoes. Certainly not dangerous by any standard. Must’ve been a joke that went over op’s head or a misunderstanding.
I guess it's a joke. Östermalm is very unlikely to be counted as a typical no-go zone. The joke is that every area of town can have weird people after dark
Unfortunately everywhere in the Western world there seems to be denialism about this.
And I'm actually legitimately afraid to actually voice that opinion in-person. I can vent here anonymously. But in the circles I'm in in San Francisco, I wouldn't dare suggest that certain migrants may not be compatible. There could personal, social, career impacts. You're automatically branded a xenophobe of some kind.
Well, isn’t it some kind of xenophobia? Saying that some “types” of outsiders are bad news full stop and should be kept outside else they’ll ruin the country is at least xenophobia adjacent, no matter how true you think it may be (probably unsurprisingly, I disagree on it being true, but that’s beside the point).
Doesn't being labeled a phobia strictly require the fear to be irrational in nature? Being afraid of an approaching train while standing on a train track isn't "train phobia", for example.
I feel in both my European countries I can voice with most anyone all the concerns I have. They share them for the most part but at least will be open to discuss if not. But with my American friends and colleagues I feel I could risk my reputation and have it affect my career. It’s sad to see really.
No we’re not at all. ironic how you can group like 30 countries together there and call them all racist
Acknowledging that some cultures are not compatible with ours is not racist. Acknowledging that some that come to Europe do not value European values or way of life is not racist. I’m my experience with Europeans we can discuss this difference openly. In my experience I am weary with being honest with Americans
There is no culture that is incompatible with the "european" culture (whatever the hell that is supposed to be - each euro country has a very different culture as you pointed out.)
Who comes to Europe that does not value European values?
What are European values in your opinion?
Without you being clear on those things, I immediately think this is a thinly veiled xenophobic or racist dogwhistle.
Fellow European here, so would love to hear more about what you think European culture is.
I mean, if you're branding people as "incompatible" based purely on their heritage or religion, then you know ... that's not great.
I don't know about San Francisco, but across Europe there's a fairly wide recognition that acceptance of liberal values is and should be an "entrance requirement" for migrants. This includes people on the left. There this myth of "people on the left refuse to acknowledge this", but broadly speaking that's just not the case, and hasn't been since at least the 90s.
There's all sorts of points of disagreements about immigration, but this really isn't one of them.
You're not "automatically" as if there's some process you can't intercede in. This is a xenophobic position, you can avoid being called xenophobic by not holding it.
I grew up in a Muslim country (a nice one, btw). They were not trusting most neighboring Muslim countries and the people from those countries. They know what they know and act accordingly.
In my native country, people did not like Gypsies (that was quite a long time ago, now it's no longer the case). This is because of the quantity of negative experiences with them, not because they are of a certain race or religion. The situation changed a lot when the number of negative incidents decreased, which confirms that the criminality is the factor, not something else.
Why do we think religion is such a sacred cow (no pun intended)? Why is criticizing a religion any different from criticizing let say, capitalism and billionaires?
Basically we decided to grandfather in ideas that don't really have a place in a modern liberal society.
With that said, I have no issues with reformed muslims that keep the community/"civilized" cultural aspects of Islam, but yes, of course i'm suspicious of anyone who thinks that they are ordered by god to something (and that's true to all religions)
Because freedom of religious persecution is enshrined in a large number of core laws simply because we have already seen what can happen if you don't have that kind of provision.
Freedom of religion has nothing to do with criminality of some people that may also have that religion, but where the religion is not the correlation, but a coincidence.
And freedom of religion does not impact the freedom of opinion, so one can criticize any religion without affecting the freedom of religion.
GP asked a question: that was an answer to that question. That there are other factors at play is pretty obvious but if you want to target one religion you will have to target all religions. And that's not going to happen. Hopefully.
Of course you can. But if you know a little bit about how religion works then you will realize that it is strongly coupled to the identity of the person. Someone isn't a carpenter or a baker in the same way that they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew. They can't just turn off that chunk of their identity while you question their religious values or their religion, they will interpret it as an attack on them. And that's half the problem.
The other half is that any religion - and therefore most of its adherents - are conservative and static. They would like things to stay the way they are. Obviously this is at extreme odds with emigrating from one place into another. People not only bring their culture with them but also some of their luggage. But the locals would do well to realize that they too are usually not exactly paragons of virtue and that there are plenty of things where they would feel personally offended if an outsider pointed out to them that they were maybe not all that level headed about something.
For instance: in NL we have this crazy confrontation about St. Nicholas, which arguably is a racist display in the guise of a childrens festival. Or maybe it really is just a childrens festival. Everybody has an opinion and it is always either the one or the other but never anything with some nuance. So fights break out and everybody feels like they are the ones in the right.
That's what identity will do for you.
If you want to question religious values and religions themselves then you're going to have to start by planning something that will take decades. It took some small parts of 'the West' about 100 years to go from majority strongly Catholic or other Christian denominations to being more accepting of atheists and that in turn led to those places eventually losing a lot of religion. And that's with a religion that went through the enlightenment, which isn't the case for most religions practiced outside of Europe, and only then because the main centers for religion in Europe all were subject to this (and to the horrors that came before).
So in a way all this feels like a step back. But fixing it will take at least 100 years and probably more. Without an actual solution in the form of education, massive funding and housing and healthcare improved at a scale that no country in the West could afford based on their present day budget it may well never be solved at all.
As for whether or not I'd be suspicious of a person who belongs to a cult, my grandmother belonged to the cult of Catholicism, and we didn't see eye to eye on a great many subjects. But I didn't have a problem with it, she was my grandmother. Neighbors are practicing Muslims, I don't have any problem with that, it's their heads and their houses.
And then we come to your 2.
If you move to a country I think your first and foremost pledge should be that you are not going to put your past to work to recreate the place that you fled from in the place that you've arrived at. But people are hardly aware that this is what they are doing, they are so immersed in this that it is invisible to them. And that's a serious problem that I think will only be solved in many generations, and possibly never.
You can probably sense that I don't have a high regard for religion, not because I don't think people should not be able to believe whatever they want to believe but because it brings so much misery. I've seen plenty of this up close to know that most of the people that do this do it from the conviction that they - and not you or I - are in the right. And that's a very difficult thing to repair because then we're back at identity again.
> If you want to question religious values and religions themselves then you're going to have to start by planning something that will take decades
Exactly why we need to start that process now.
I'm not saying we should treat all immigrants as terrorists or anything, I'm just saying that we should recognize that a large influx of people who don't share Western values is a danger to western society and we need to think how to handle it instead of just saying "be inclusive" and hoping that nothing bad happens.
And if we want a (silly) tech analogy, this isn't that different from tech companies who grow too quickly and lose their "culture" on the way. You have to have a hiring strategy if you don't want that to happen.
You'll need an ironclad definition of what Western values are and what a western society is and then you'll have to first go after everything that is homegrown that is also against those values. Ironically you'll find a ton of domestic parties that would like nothing better than to destroy their own select set of those.
And then there is the little problem that Western values and society are still so young that they haven't fully formed yet. And to an American it means something completely different than to a Canadian, a Briton, a West European and an Eastern European. And then there is the Nordics, the Baltics and so on. It will have to be a real work of art to make that workable.
To continue the hiring analogy it's better to have a few false negatives in order to avoid a false positive.
Not saying it's straightforward or anything, just that we probably need to put more effort into carving out an immigration policy as well as refining the "onboarding" process of immigrants.
Yes, absolutely but that costs money and nobody is willing to foot the bill. Also in the past such programs have been a feeding frenzy for the people on the supply side but with very little tangible effect.
It's interesting though how racism establishes itself by being anything but itself. And then, afterwards everybody wonders how it could have happened again.
Let me take a stab at this in a way that it is somewhat balanced: I've grown up in Amsterdam, born in a time when there were hardly any immigrants and then wave after wave of them came by. What keeps me grounded is that I've been an immigrant myself. First to Poland, then to Canada, then to Romania and with long stretches in other countries in between. But I'm not brown and I'm not religious so I don't come across as strange or off-putting. I dress like everybody else does, I try to speak the language and adapt to whatever culture I join because I don't want to stand out and I'd rather be treated like a native.
But a person-of-colour immigrating into a country that is nominally 'white' doesn't really have that option. From a mile away the 'locals' can tell that person is different in some way. And if they are religious in a different way that counts much heavier against them than my atheism ever will simply because they're not aware of it (assuming they are religious themselves).
Depending on how the person responds to it this can have all kinds of effects, but the main response is the one the locals have to the non-white, possibly religious in a different way than they are foreigner. They are not going to openly tell this person they're not welcome and that they are afraid of them and don't trust them (see your question above). But what they will do is:
- disadvantage that person and their children
- talk about them in a negative way behind their backs
- blame them for everything that is wrong with their society (housing, welfare, whatever)
- harass them, but only when nobody is looking
And so mutual resentment builds. The kids find that they and their parents are not being treated fair, still want to live the good life and before you know it you have another criminal. Or not, but then there is someone who feels that the whole of society is out to get them.
This is why the West and immigration have not worked out well so far: equal chances don't exist and the locals tend to believe that immigrants are there to do the dirty work and be kept in their place. Amazingly one of the right-wing parties in NL now has a woman and an immigrant (Turkish/Kurdish) as the party leader. To the great abhorrence of many former VVD voters, who are now likely going to move to the PVV, the even more rightwing anti-immigrant party. NL may well have its Trump moment soon.
Yep, people causing the same behavior with their prejudices that they are prejudiced against. It would be funny, if it wasn't a problem.
Even being a skilled high earning immigrant, the ones that are sought after, you will get some weird interactions. It's weird being called "one of the good ones" by a guy at a bar who was ranting about immigrants, but even interacting with nice intending people can get uncomfortable, like a native waiter telling me that once I learn the language, I will be able to get a nice paying job.
So far, things are still fine for me, I'm isolated about most of the problems, and I still find what I was looking for (a more quiet society, a less car centric infrastructure, different culture); but if the far right keeps rising, I will certainly think twice about staying. Those people will act on their prejudices, won't be able to asses if I really cause problems or not.
Can you show me a christian one? A liberal democracy without horrors of genocide and colonialism in its past? If we're meant to respect europeans despite their atrocities you must return the favor.
Technically, there’s no “Christian country” in this era because the religion adheres to separation of church and state, unlike Islam where we can find many theocracies.
But, to call a list of successful democracies where the majority identify as Christians of some sort and without colonialism in its past;
Norway
Switzerland
Denmark
Liechtenstein
Oh, Sweden too.
And it’s funny why you specifically mentioned without past colonialism and genocide, because many Muslim countries score high in this sector too.
Sweden had colonies in north America and the Caribbean. Denmark still controls Greenland. Sweden and Norway are both colonizers in the US way, expanding boarders by stealing land from the indigenous people (Sami) etc
Well, I think the key think to understand here is that it's not about genetics, despite what idiots keep harping on. We're all apes and a random individual transplanted in another group after birth will quickly start accumulating cultural traits from that group.
That said, culture is strong and it's even stronger in the internet era, especially for large groups of individuals. It's extremely hard to bend or break it.
To that point, there is a great book, Armies of Sand, that talks about a concept called the culturally regular individual.
And the book makes a decent point that the culturally regular person from a specific culture is probably a distant match to Western ideals. And that distant culture has quite bad results in many areas we would consider important for modern society: education, research, industrial output.
I think that if you had a specific and defensible point about immigration policy you would have put it here. What you actually put takes great care to be so indirect that you cannot even be identified as having a specific position, let alone one that can be discussed in a rational way. Given the number of words you spent on it I'd guess that means it's either unserious or unsavory, and don't really care to parse which is which.
> In this chapter I am going to demonstrate that Arab education, in all its
various forms, teaches the values of the dominant Arab culture. Education
in the Arab world, both formal and informal, constantly seeks to mold the
actions and thinking of the individual along the lines of the culturally
regular patterns of behavior described in Chapter 17.
> <<<Arab families and
schools teach conformity, deference to authority, loyalty to the group, etc>>>.
It isn’t found in the formal curriculum. You won’t find a class in any Arab
school called “Conformism 101.” Instead, you will find it in the teaching method
itself: in how students are taught to think, to learn, and to behave.
Page 417.
Read the book. Stop projecting.
It's a complex matter and for some stuff people REALLY love to put their heads in the sand. Some problems need to be tackled head on, as Denmark is doing at the moment.
I asked you to be specific about who and why and you still have not done that.
I am getting from this that you aren't keen on schooling based on conformism and that you believe Arab schools teach conformism. Leaving aside the question of whether that position has merit, what would you do with that information?
Would you ban immigration by Arabs? From Arabic countries? By people educated in Arabic schools, who may not be Arabs and may not come from Arabic countries? What about ethnic minorities in Arabic countries like the Kurds in Iraq, who maintain a parallel school system? What about individuals schooled in conformance-centric religious schools in the US, or in non-Arab conformist cultures like Japan?
Dock points for countries with different alphabets, bad educational systems, bad research & development, etc, give extra points if they can prove "extra curriculars" that align with the local values, for example volunteering, civic action, etc. Oh, give extra points if the countries have strong ties to the EU, economic and otherwise. For example trade agreements, cultural exchange programs, etc.
Send back every illegal economic migrant. Saw a comment recently about a Guinean that was in Tunisia (safe country), Algeria (safe), Switzerland (safe), France (safe), but they absolutely, positively, HAD to be in Luxembourg.
Read the book. The conclusion is very "unsavory" for the target group. "Unsavory" in the sense that it's a very harsh conclusion that unfortunately matches many stereotypes.
So Berlin has a problem with gangs of Palestine/Lebanese background, especially around the area Nordneukölln/Sonnenalle. But if you look at the history, the issue is nearly entirely of german making - and the voices from the liberal left had been warning a long time that things would end up this way, if the convervative policies would continue:
A very large part of those people or their parents/grandparents came to Berlin during the Lebanese Civil war, or due to the Intifada in the time between 1975 and 1990. They‘d travel to Eastern Berlin and then take the S-Bahn to the West - that was easy, there were no border controls. Because having border controls on the West Berlin Side would mean acknowledging the border, and thus the GDR, and that was politically undesirable. And once on the western side, they‘d apply for asylum. Since they were fleeing a war zone, and not be classified as politically prosecuted, they‘d not get full asylum, but deportation into a war zone was prohibited by the Geneva refugee convention (Duldung, in german legal speak)
Now, they‘d have a grey zone status - no asylum means no social security, no work permit, no legal status. The only ways to earn some bits of money were illegal jobs. They were deliberately marginalized and kept at the fringes of society. There were no offers that would help them integrate into the German society, no language classes, schools and childcare would try hard to keep the kids out - which was legal, because their status implied that school wasn’t mandatory for those children. This changed in 1990, when school became mandatory. But instead of placing these kids in schools where they‘d receive suitable education, the Berlin Senate kept the schools underfunded and after the reunion staffed them mainly with teachers from East Berlin (those were public officials and could be ordered to teach wherever the senate wanted). Unsurprisingly, teachers with GDR education in an underfunded school in a school system that was new to the teachers were not well suited to deal with the task at hand. The entirely predictable result: Many pupils left without a proper education that would give them a chance on the labor market.
To make matter worse, the CDU (conservative) senate in the 1980ies primarily funded religious conservative groups in the Lebanese/Palestine expat communities - with the intention that they‘d strengthen the bond between the expats and their home culture and countries. Instead of rather funding the liberal non-religious groups.
Fast forward to now: We now have people in their sixties and seventies that came as young adults, never had a legal permit to work, their kids with no real chance at even basic eduction, all grown up in poverty, the third generation kids, grown up in a dysfunctional implementation of a school system, all of them deliberately marginalized, and at the same time being influenced by religious conservative groups supported by the government.
It is objectively true that we have a problem there. But it‘s been a long time coming and it stems to a very large extend from not acknowledging that these people exist, that they need to be given a chance to integrate because that would, as a first step, require acknowledging the fact that they are here to stay.
This is the Berlin example, but if you look at how the entire debate around the Turkish „Gastarbeiter“ went in the 1980/1990ies, the same pattern is visible.
Yes, because it is well know that Mohammad urged Muslims to create criminal gangs and start dealing drugs...
Sorry, but what sort of stupid nonsense worldview do you have?
There are certainly immigrants with non-western values and also immigrants who are criminals but why are you mixing these two demographics together? If anything the ones dealing drugs are likely to be the most westernized.
If you are asking for examples of brutal acts performed or ordered by Muhammed, here is a long list [0]. Most notable to me is the murder of 600-900 captive non-combatants. This is referred to as the massacre of the Banu Qurayza (woman and children then made slaves).
I suppose you brought up Muhammed on the basis that his venerated status in Islam enables us to significantly extrapolate Muslim culture from his own personal culture. I will therefore state that the evidence of Quran/Hadiths yield evidence of great brutality in the person of Muhammed, which therefore may inspire brutality and violence in any devout followers of his, or in the broader Islamic culture. This is certainly conducive "creating criminal gangs".
Sweden is the only country that accepted "asylum seekers" without extensive background check (to verify they actually are asylum seekers) and granted them permanent residency - which makes them legally immune to deportation.
These two facts make those people feel "safe" to commit high crimes.
It is both in this article and many others, it's not like this is a secret.
So what solution do you propose if no country takes these people back? Hopefully at some point conservatives will understand that you cannot make these people simply disappear.
> Hopefully at some point conservatives will understand that you cannot make these people simply disappear.
Oh, now you've done it. That's the bit you're not supposed to say out loud. You can make them simply disappear.
Geert Wilders here in NL, quite possibly our next prime minister (god forbid) has said exactly that: "fewer Moroccans". But he stopped just short of saying how he would like to accomplish that because that would be putting his cards on the table. Hopefully enough Dutch people remember some of their history classes in the coming week.
it's just a way to wishy-washy other people opinions because they disagree with what they have to say. I personally don't like these kind of discussions in HN, most are personal opinions and rarely backed up by statistics or official sources.
This place is full of those people, and the rule seems to be that you can be as racist as you want as long as you're genteel about it and don't actively start dropping slurs.
It's not xenophobia to point out that a nation's migration policy is failing, when it obviously is. It's a systemic issue, not some cultures or people being better or worse.
It is an issue of some cultures being objectively worse. Many immigrants come from places where the rights of women are not respected, and surprise surprise, the incidence of rape has gone up by 50% between 2008 and 2018, and first/second gen immigrants now comprise 60% of rapists in Sweden.
They should have been more involved in colonialism and slave trade when they had the chance. They would have learned and wouldn't have these issues now. /s
According to you, the "right" is claiming recent immigration is related to the "violent gang crisis" mentioned, and the "left" is instead claiming that the privatization of the welfare system is related to said crisis.
Their argument is that the left wing side are responsible, and are incorrectly blaming social factors other than the mass immigration of third world refugees who are now creating a gang ridden hellscape in parts of Sweden, emulating their original homelands. That is not begging the question.
Obviously the gangs are made up of those immigrants, not native ethnic Swedish people. With the assumption that all sides are painfully aware of that, the connection/causality is being demonstrated very clearly in Sweden today. That's what the article is showing. The argument is that the left side is being disingenuous.
Well, all right, if you don't demonstrate the correlation, or if it hasn't already been demonstrated. I'm not in Sweden, so it may be "obvious" to those on the scene. But to those who don't know the situation, the one word claim of "obviously" isn't very convincing, either.
Are there any statistics on crime rates in Sweden, broken down by immigrant vs. native?
As I said, I'm not there, and I don't disbelieve you. But evidence is better than "obviously".
Sorry I thought it was obvious. This has been a massive ongoing problem in Sweden for years since they opened the borders to a mass wave of immigration from hellscape African/Middle Eastern parts of the world in the 2010's. It has been in the news regularly for the past few years. Bad people exploited their ridiculous policy (not genuine refugees, just criminals and psychopaths) and they accepted hundreds of thousands of people without a filter.
What makes it to be on the top of your mind? If one considers hereditary-cultural Swedes, they didn’t like their own culture enough to grow it by children or other means. Like the Shakers it will disappear.
Mostly because there is a shooting happening where my family lives daily or bombs that go off close to where they may be.
But also if I go into a larger town, especially at night, there is very few swedes out in large parts of sweden nowadays. You see immigrant gangs hanging out everywhere and you can't really walk freely in pretty much any city anymore at night without being afraid of being a victim of some crime. Most of the time, people may just threaten you but you never know and there is no idea to call the police because they aren't doing shit and your problems may just become larger if you do.
While Sweden absolutely can be much stricter with background checks, in my experience in Scandinavia, y'all are racist jerks.
I'm a brown guy who's grown up in North America their entire life, and day-to-day conversations with people there suck. There absolutely seems to be a mentality that if you don't fit a specific trope you can't be Swedish.
No amount of token representation in Scandinavian TV will change that. There needs to be a persistent societal change in Sweden to better manage diversity.
The Swedish left sucks by infantilizing minorities and the Swedish right sucks by actively demonizing them. No one actually tries to communicate actively with minority or immigrant communities - they just use "community organizations" to do it for them.
Honestly, despite all the issues the US has - managing diversity is definitely not one of those.
Very true. I can see what you are referring to.
Even as a very successful law-abiding "expat" I could not stand the tribalism and extreme unconscious racism in my workplace and the society in general. As you said they think all foreigners are children or stupid and they don't respect your knowledge. Life there made me depressed, so I ran away in less than a year and living life now in Ireland. Not blaming the Swedes themselves, they're free to think whatever they like or be arrogant or whatsoever but blaming the false picture and narrative they draw about the country. If you don't respect or want people to live and contribute to your society then don't have a misleading policy of tolerance and integration.
You are damned if you do, damned if you don't. I don't think there is a way to not be called racist once in a while any more. I could hide in the forest and we are still "all racist jerks", according to you, People love to project racism on others. But perhaps you can exemplify for us why we are
all racist jerks, but you are not?
In general, I agree with you. I hate the swedish culture in that aspect. In Sweden, "diversity" is another word for skin color, if you are diverse in how you think or your opinions you will be ousted very quickly and people will distance themselves from you which is most likely why I don't have many friends and have moved many times under my life. Quite often, I don't feel swedish at all.
I kinda agree with the prospect that the swedish right demonizing them but the problem is that it usually comes from bad experiences with immigrants. Immigrants that work, are productive and do their due diligence very few swedes have an issue with.
If people there are such jerks, why do you want to be in their country, or have day-to-day conversations with them? What gives you the right as a foreigner to force "persistent societal change" in a country on the other side of the world? Haven't Americans violently tried that already in a whole bunch of different places?
> if you don't fit a specific trope you can't be Swedish.
Swedes are an ethnic group, you can't be Swedish unless you're born Swedish. Just as you can't be Han, Inuit, Ukrainian or Bantu unless you're born with that ethnicity. American, Brazilian, Roman and a few others are nations that are not ethnically bound, but they are the exception.
I didn't. Blame my employer for sending me there to lead a CAB for our Northern Europe customers. I've always hated traveling to Northern Europe. At least in Italy or Greece I can pass as $Southern_European American so I don't get stink eye.
> you can't be Swedish unless you're born Swedish
So how does a non-ethnic Swede who has been living in Sweden their entire life and with Swedish citizenship become fully Swedish?
This is the crux of the issue. If you aren't given a chance to assimilate, there's no reason to.
At the end of the day, Trump can say racist stuff about Mexican Americans, yet Mexican Americans become Governers, leaders of industry, and everyday middle class people in the US. And this is just one example.
I don't see a similar kind of assimilation in most of Northern Europe, excluding the British Isles and Norway (kinda).
> I didn't. Blame my employer for sending me there to lead a CAB for our Northern Europe customers. I've always hated traveling to Northern Europe. At least in Italy or Greece I can pass as $Southern_European American so I don't get stink eye.
Fair enough, then it's work and at least you aren't stuck there forever having to try to make friends.
> So how does a non-ethnic Swede who has been living in Sweden their entire life and with Swedish citizenship become fully Swedish?
He or she will never be Swedish at all. Just as the thousands of Western missionaries who went to China never became Chinese in the slightest, even if they learnt the language and picked up the customs. The person will always be a foreigner. If they have a child with a Swede, that child will be half-Swedish and so on.
Assimilation is a whole different thing. But if the Swedes don't want to welcome foreigners to equal positions of influence, that is their decision. Most of the countries in the world have official policies and laws to limit the influence and the rights of immigrants – including the US.
> This is the crux of the issue. If you aren't given a chance to assimilate, there's no reason to.
Rather, if you aren't given a chance to assimilate, you shouldn't come. If I'm treated rudely as a guest in somebody's house, I'll excuse myself.
I'm just saying it as I've experienced it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's hard to describe but there's definetly a palpable sense of otherness that I haven't noticed anywhere in the US.
There is absolutely culture war issues everywhere (especially here in the US), but assimilating into being "American" is easy compared to what my relatives back in Europe faced and my own experiences there for work and vacation. And it's a big reason a number of them either emigrated to the US/Canada or back to Asia.
The US mostly does not have a systematic problem with how emigrants are treated. It's completely normal for people to emigrate to the US, become a citizen and be completely accepted as such. The US does however have a particular problem with systematic ill treatment of the descendants of slaves. The key word is systematic. People as everywhere are free to be dicks to other people.
This is a story about how a yet another state is failing to provide security, so private actors - gangs - are filling the role the state is not. Yet instead of blaming the security monopoly for the lack of security, the interviewees are blaming the gang members for “not integrating”. To be fair to the state, As migration flows increase alongside technological radicalization, states are increasingly struggling to fill their traditional roles. People should prepare themselves.
Clearly, the root cause of the problem is not immigrants or immigration, as some others have suggested. It is the people of Sweden who have ultimately done this to, and continue to do it to themselves. It ultimately comes down to their society's collective system of values, where they have also decided that systems of values that don't align are both simultaneously unacceptable and somehow also still permissible.
This sort of content goes against the guidelines, offers nothing of interest to the broader hacker community, invites the wrong sort of people to post and offers no additional insightful or new information to the discourse.
I think those submitting need to ask if they are making this place better or worse.
