Fox and Trump blowing everything out of proportion shouldn't stop a healthy debate about what the benefits of the current wave of immigration for Sweden and the Swedes really are.
Fox and Trump blowing everything out of proportion shouldn't stop a healthy debate about what the benefits of the current wave of immigration for Sweden and the Swedes really are.
The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, every instance of abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict. As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse, and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.
Source: am living in Sweden in a "hotspot", am an immigrant but am rich and white. I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which shocked me. Sweden is a very safe nice country, and the alt-Right in Sweden (SD being big where I am) and abroad are misrepresenting it.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in criminology and also not very familiar with sweden's situation
Could you provide some evidence of this rather bold claim? I really am interested because many of my opinions are based on this assumption.
Person living in Norway here:
No, being an immigrant doesn't make you a criminal.
However, statistically speaking certain crimes are very much overrepresented with certain cultures.
I'm not saying Europeans are perfect: a lot of bad stuff existed when I was young.
But there where certain things that just didn't exist.
It is scary to see the coming of a culture were rape is ok, honour killings are ok (as told by immigrants who speak up) etc etc.
Really?
>Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. I would rephrase this as "high crime rates are associated with low-income demographics, which those immigrating to Europe as part of the refugee crisis fall into". Also, one could safely argue that the poorer the community, the higher the crime.
"Low-income" neighbourhoods in Sweden have changed, they've become much poorer as a result of the refugee crisis, therefore crime has risen in areas that used to be "safe". Therefore those who used to live in those areas have experienced a major change in their surroundings and find themselves in less safe environments. Again, the world's poor are the ones bearing the weight of this change.
Full disclosure: My source is anecdotal, from friends that have families in the poorer neighbourhoods in Malmo who are struggling to relocate to safer areas.
Actually, I think it's more complicated that that. I can't find the data but I remember a report that stated that Somali and Iraqi immigrants had 5 time higher conviction rate, and that more than 25% had been convicted for a crime, compared to ~5% of swedes.
I also remembered that immigrants from Sri Lanka -that have been a conflict zone for a very long time - had more or less half the conviction rate than Swedes, which is an interesting fact.
[Swedish article about statistics in Norway, with very similar demographics and culture, except way lower immigration: https://www.svd.se/brottslighet-bland-invandrare-borde-oroa-...]
They also have free healthcare and enjoys free education up to university, including financial aid for studies and a home equipment loan.
There are also very few signs of structured racism, when looking at various ethnic groups with comparable education, etc, although it of course exists, just like all other biases and generalisations in a society.
There have been a substantial asylum related immigration for long enough that we can look at the second generation, and their level of education, crime, etc, and draw the conclusion that whatever we are doing, it's not really enough or possibly not even the correct things to do.
And class ( or socioeconomic background - there are related problems that are ignored ). And education. And the fact that we have not done anything to prevent this for the past 30 years.
Was there a single riot like that in Sweden that did not involve immigrants? How about honor killings?
Those are completely new categories of violence for Sweden.
> I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which shocked me.
That's what you get when you bury your head in the sand and choose to ignore the reality.
> The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, every instance of abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict. As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse, and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.
Yet in Sweden they measure immigrants and Swedes in the same way and it's five times as much on average while some migrant groups singled out are doing better than native Swedes.
As I already wrote in in some other thread, Swedish national economist Tino Sanandaji (himself of immigrant background) has shown this is not the case: there is actually a problem of immigration-related crime in Sweden, not just poverty-related.
Sweden has had and still has very small income inequality. But in country-wide statistics, crime has still gone down generally while situation has worsened in some urban areas where there are regular shootings and grenade attacks, things that were completely unknown a couple of decades ago. In a word, there's less killings within a group of local men who have an argument about booze and kill each other with a knife, and there are more killings where a gang member is ambushed and shot or killed by a grenade.
Yes, Sweden is still a very safe society, on average. Much safer than the United States is on average. What's remarkable is, however, that the development has reversed: Sweden is no longer becoming safer, but United States is. During the time period 1990-2015 when homicide rate per 100 000 pop in Sweden has gone from 1.3 to 1.1, the United States has gone from 9.4 to 4.5. My native Finland, traditionally the most violent of Nordic countries, has gone from 3.1 to 1.3, and Norway from 1.1 to 0.4. Denmark is at 0.8. Sweden will soon be the most violent of the Nordic countries.
So Sweden does have a problem, it's not improving like other Western countries.
The U.S. situation is, of course, a thing where also Donald Trump's narrative is wrong: the U.S. has become much safer over the past 15 years, not less safe. There is still some reason for concern in the U.S. though, because the crime is concentrated in a few cities (such as Chicago, the home city of former president, even if some other similar cities like Baltimore and St. Louis are even much worse.)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445237/sweden-crime-ra...