Sweden and the integration crisis
Something is rotten in the state of Sweden. The grenade attacks have skyrocketed in recent years. Sweden is now the only country other than Mexico where the police register the number of grenade attacks. Explosions generally increase. “Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?”, Asked a confused BBC 2019. Year 2020 there were more than 200 explosions and 360 shootings. The murder rate for 2020 was the highest in Sweden in 18 years: 124 people were killed and 39 percent of the murders involved weapons. Sweden is the only country in Europe where fatal shootings have increased since the year 2000. Even the once Swedish adoration guard has had to admitwith no small amount of confusion, that Sweden has gone from having “one of the lowest figures of gun violence on the continent to one of the highest in less than a decade”.
Then there are the riots. In 2017, the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby was shaken by riots after police tried to arrest someone suspected of drug trafficking. In 2020 riots shook the southern cities Malmö and Ronneby, after right-wing extremists burned a Koran. Crowds threw stones at the police and burned down bus shelters, some of them chanting “Allahu akbar!” as they did. There were even worse riots this year. Again in response to a public violation of a copy of the Koran, insurgents caused enormous amounts of damage in Örebro, Malmö, Norrköping and Linköping. One hundred policemen and 14 members of the public were injured and more than 20 vehicles were destroyed. Sweden’s National Police Chief sa he had ‘never seen such violent riots’. Unsurpassed bombings, shootings and riots – what is happening in this nation that has once been so widely hailed as a social democratic paradise?
Last week, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson gave us a clue. Brave – given the culture of cancellation that tends to surround issues related to immigration – Ms Andersson sa integration is lacking in Sweden. Sweden has not successfully incorporated into its social and moral structure some of the large number of immigrants it took in during the great migrant crisis in 2015, she said, and as a result we now have “parallel societies”. In the aftermath of last month’s riots, when largely Muslim groups expressed their violent rage over the humiliation of the Koran, Andersson honestly turned to the Swedish people. “The integration has been too bad at the same time as we have had big ones [amounts of] immigration, she said. “Society has been too weak, the resources for police and social services have been too weak.” This failure of integration has inevitably led to “segregation”, she said, so that we now have “parallel societies in Sweden – we live in the same country but in completely different realities”. Both Islamism and right-wing extremism have been able to flourish in our ‘weak’ society, Andersson said.
Andersson should be praised for his sincerity. Unfortunately, much of the recent increase in violent crime and social unrest in Sweden has stemmed from immigrant groups. Like Sweden UD was forced last year to admit, in response to the global interest in the seemingly destabilization of Sweden, “People born abroad are 2.5 times more likely to be registered as suspects in crime as persons born in Sweden by two domestic-born parents”. Swedish police say that much of the bomb and gun violence in recent years has been the work of criminal gangs consisting of foreign-born young people – “criminal clans that have a completely different culture”. Or consider Sweden’s sexual crime statistics. Four esteemed social scientists in Sweden studied violence trends over the last two decades. They found that of those convicted of rape, 40.8 percent were Swedish-born with Swedish-born parents, while 47.7 percent were born outside Sweden. Of the foreign-born men convicted of rape, 34.5 percent were from the Middle East and North Africa and 19.1 percent from other parts of Africa. This is undoubtedly striking.
One problem, of course, is that facts like these are all too often easily and easily folded into pre-existing narratives, usually about the folly of some form of immigration or the evil of Muslim men. Still like Ayaan Hirsi Ali rightly says, ‘the overwhelming majority of foreign-born men living in Sweden are not guilty of crime “and no social or ethnic group should be” convicted of acts of a very small proportion “. Then there is the second answer to Sweden’s undoubted integration crisis, as if something is even worse. That is to pretend that it does not happen, that look the other way, to be silent. Hirsi Ali rebukes how immigrant crime problems are either exploited by the “populist right” to demonize foreigners or subjected to a liberal-elite attitude of “See no harm, hear no evil, speak no evil.” is why Andersson’s intervention is important – she does not try to devalue entire societies, but she is also not willing to ignore the social conflict that can arise from mass immigration that is not accompanied by clear integration strategies.
The silence of the Western awake elite about Sweden has really been alarming. In fact, they actively discouraged the discussion about Sweden’s segregation problems and branded it as “fake news” from racists and xenophobes. When Donald Trump and others said that there were no-go zones in Sweden, where authorities and others did not dare to trample, they were ridiculed. Nevertheless, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledges that there are ’61 areas around the country that have become increasingly exposed to crime, social unrest and insecurity ‘and the Swedish Prime Minister addresses concerns about’ parallel societies’. Now that the Prime Minister himself has said that some societies in Sweden live in “completely different realities”, will the waking set admit that they were wrong when they said that everything is fine in this Nordic heaven? I do not suspect.
The integration crisis is real. Too many European societies are passionate about the very idea of integrating immigrants, because they think it is far too judgmental and perhaps even racist to do so. When it comes to ‘assimilation’ – it is seen as a fascist idea on the border. European societies are now actively sending the signal that they are not worthy of integration. We are horrible, racist, Islamophobic nations with a checkered history and a problematic population – that is the cry of significant sections of Europe’s intellectual classes. ‘Stay outside, in your own communities, you will be safer and happier there’ – this is the divisive, destructive message that is unknowingly sent to immigrant communities with the permission of this national self-loathing that is now prevalent among the great and the good. Accepting huge numbers of immigrants while signaling to these immigrants that the countries they come to are horrible places full of bigots and gammon is a recipe for exactly the kind of instability we have seen in Sweden and elsewhere in recent years.
That so many in the cultural elite made a large, loud demonstration of their openness to mass immigration in 2015 but have practically said nothing about the practical integration struggles tells us everything we need to know. For many of these people, being for immigration seems to be little more than an opportunity for virtue signaling, to advertise to the world how caring you are. What those immigrants really are do when they come here – how they can become members of society, embrace our value system, learn our language and our traditions – is irrelevant, it seems. Virtue has been signaled, and everything else is unimportant. This is the numbness in the post-borders posting of Europe’s awake establishment, in their silence about Sweden and other nations experiencing social tensions. Promoting integration is not racist – it is important, both for the integrity of our societies and for the social well-being of immigrants.
Brendan O’Neill is pointeds political editor-in-chief and host pointed podcast, Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy