Svensk invandrings- och integrationspolitik i utländsk media

There is an obvious explanation for the recent unrest – but in Sweden, it’s almost impossible to discuss. The country has opened its doors to a flood of people from some of the most troubled parts of the world

Unlike Canada, Sweden doesn’t select for skills, education or the potential to succeed. It has no quotas.

The Swedes are extremely progressive. Underlying their open-hearted immigration policy is a broad humanitarian desire to do good...

But semi-literate people from the tribal cultures of the Middle East or Africa are not the same as the Western middle-class Chileans who fled Pinochet.

The best explanation I have heard comes from Jonathan Friedman, an American anthropologist who is married to a Swedish woman, and lived in Sweden for several years before moving back to California. He blames a “politics of submission by Swedish elites.” Continued large-scale immigration, he told me in an e-mail, is untenable in a situation of economic decline. But Sweden’s elite “refuses to see what is really happening and instead holds on to absurd ideologies of immigration as enrichment.”

For decades, supporters of multiculturalism have pointed to Sweden as a classic example of a society which allows immigrants to continue practising their own culture while living peacefully alongside their host communities.

Around 15 per cent of Sweden’s 9.5million inhabitants were born outside the country.

The second largest group of immigrants, after the Finns, are Iraqis – numbering more than 125,000. Former Yugoslavs total over 160,000 and Iranians almost 65,000.

While Sweden is still relatively affluent, with living standards among the highest in Europe, tension has grown in recent years as the country struggles to cope with rising youth unemployment and an ever-growing influx of foreigners.

Sweden was ruled for decades by the Left-wing Social Democratic Party which has been committed to the creation of an egalitarian society since it was founded in the late 19th century.

It was ousted from power by the current ruling centre-Right coalition, which has failed to make major changes in the country once dubbed ‘the most successful society the world has ever known’.

Stockholm, one of Europe's richest capitals, has the fastest inequality rate of any advanced OECD economy

Overall, about 15 percent of Sweden's 9.5 million people were born abroad, compared to 10 percent 10 years ago. The influx has mostly come from war-torn countries such as Iraq, Somalia, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria.

Despite Sweden's high living standards and its egalitarian ways, the country has seen the biggest surge in inequality of any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country over the past 25 years, according to a recent OECD report.

The difference is striking between native Swedes and the fast-growing immigrant population.

Reinfeldt said the transition can be trying, but he added: "We are more open than other countries. Long term, as a society, we win on this. It will lead to more people getting jobs. It will contribute to a more exciting and open society."

Its generous welfare and asylum policies have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to settle here, many in recent years from Muslim countries. Nearly a quarter of Sweden’s population is now foreign born or has a foreign-born parent.

Sweden’s liberal policies have become costly.

When those jobs disappeared, Sweden stopped the flow of immigrant labor, but not the flow of refugees, many of whom clustered in Malmo and other former industrial centers

Police officials say things are much better now. Fires were down 40 percent last year compared with 2009. But last month, two police vehicles parked at the station were set on fire with small homemade explosives.

One U.N. report says Sweden will be a third-world nation in about 15 years, below Libya and Bulgaria. Sweden is a society that believes it is racing into the future, but critics warn that it is racing to the bottom.

The country has been compared to two nations that also tried to build perfect societies: North Korea and the Soviet Union.

In Sweden, if you don't like how utopia is being built, you won't be shot like in North Korea, but your life could become very unpleasant, very quickly.

But left-wing hackers helped the newspaper track him and others like him down so they could be exposed before the whole nation as racists. Another man, a manager, was fired because of it.

Sweden's leftist establishment and media believe a cornerstone of their perfect society is multiculturalism: large scale immigration from some of the poorest, most backward nations on earth. Swedes who disagree with that plan risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi.

It doesn't matter if Sweden's immigration model is failing miserably, if test scores in Swedish schools are plummeting, or if crime in some areas has skyrocketed.

And forget about an American-style "melting pot" in which immigrants will someday learn to become Swedish. In Sweden, that's a racist idea, too.

CBN News talked to several journalists who described a Stalinist-style atmosphere in which Sweden's citizens are now afraid of saying anything that might get them labeled in the media as "racist."

"What some Swedish parents advise their children nowadays is to not to interfere in the public discussion, not to express so-called 'radical' ideas about this or that that is critical of the consensus in Sweden," Jalving said. "

“We deal with this differently than in most other European countries,” Ullenhag said. “It’s about showing political leadership. Instead of adjusting our policies to the Sweden Democrats, we stand up for being open and tolerant.