Sweden's Self-Inflicted Nightmare | Hacker News Reader

Sweden's Self-Inflicted Nightmare

nytimes.com

35 pointsfedups23 comments

It's pretty natural to argue that there are "no limits" to the number of refugees/asylum seekers we can accept. After all we are obliged by international conventions to process asylum applications for people on our doorstep. A country that argues that their borders are closed, or that only X thousand refugees will be allowed to seek asylum, are most likely breaching international conventions, or never signed them in the first place.

What the authorities are saying now is basically that we'll honor our obligations but if you come here now the queue for processing will be many months and you have to sleep outside and it's Sweden so you don't sleep outside in winter. Essentially they are trying to achieve two things: raise awareness in surrounding countries that they too need to help, and also signal to refugees that Sweden might not be the best idea this winter.

I'm not sure what "self inflicted" refers to, I think more countries than us have signed these conventions. What we have had is a pretty liberal non-refugee immigration. Naturally that has to be cut back now, to accomodate refugees.

I heard the US were debating 10k Syrian refugees. To put that in perspective, 10k came to Sweden this week.

The US has absorbed tens of millions of immigrants since 1980 (ten million from Mexico alone since then). While it's a perfectly fine point you're making regarding Syrian refugees, that has to rationally be balanced in the context of the vast scale of immigration the US is already handling.

By comparison, Sweden's total population has increased by less than two million in 50 years. The US takes in that many legal immigrants every two years.

I think we need to compare at the correct scales: At the current rate Sweden is seeing 1 refugee per 1000 inhabitants per week. To put that in US terms would be 1.5 million per month.

Also I'm only talking about refugees, not immigration in general. Sweden has a lot of immigration from neighboring countries, but that doesn't really strain the system.

The Stockholm metropolitan area is home to 20% of the Swedish population. About 15% of Sweden lies north of the Arctic circle, with the majority of land in Sweden covered in forest.

The US, in comparison, has a MUCH greater capacity to take in immigrants. The US as almost as many people in one city as Sweden has in the entire country.

For once a reasonable article about Sweden.

I doubt many of my fellow Swedes will agree, but those to blame in all this are the Sweden Democrats.

By having a party of thuggish clowns (a point that cannot be argued) monopolize a single issue like immigration and making it impossible for real political parties to take steps in a more restrictive direction they have achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted.

The only joy from all this is that they now have to live in their own mess.

From what I have read it used to be very difficult to have a reasonable debate about restrictions without being labeled as a right wing racist.

It seems to me that when moderates didn't dare to speak in public, the voters had only one choice. They may not agree with everything, but when it is the only major party that wants restrictions they have no choice.

Had the Sweden Democrats not existed the proper parties would have had the full spectrum of positions to chose from.

By being so reprehensible the Sweden Democrats gave the other parties no choice but to dismiss them entirely.

I'm not sure your position is logically sound. The Sweden Democrats used not to exist once, and evidently the existing political parties didn't cater to the right-wing spectrum of the popultion, which is why an ultra-right-wing party has been able to emerge.

Wikipedia says that the Sweden Democrats are anti-immigration [1]. Your comment seems to imply the opposite. Could you elaborate more?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Democrats

I think his point is that the Sweden Democrats are perceived as being terrible people, so no one wants to be on their side of this issue.

No, in fact the Sweden Democrats has nothing to do with this. They have not even been able to vote about this - all this mess is ONLY the seven parties that came together.

Significant immigration is inherently in conflict with a big welfare state. You can't have both, unless you're willing to lower the standard of living of everyone to do it, or you have fast economic growth. Citizens of Europe's big welfare states are going to continue to disapprove accordingly, as witnessed by the way Germans are turning on Merkel or Denmark's move right, or Sweden taking action to stop the inflow. Or, say you're Finland, and you're teetering on a slight economic depression [1][2], with zero growth for a decade, bad unemployment, and rapidly rising poverty to go with inbound austerity measures to control the budget deficit - do you take in huge numbers of immigrants? How do you pay for it?

Germany is supposed to be Europe's economic engine - their GDP is at 2008 levels, they're struggling to just show any positive growth, while their poverty levels are the highest since re-unification. How do you convince your citizens to take in a million or more refugees at a time like that? It's a tough sell.

[1] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/35c8560c-c62f-11e4-add0-00144...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/12001895/Finlands-depress...

If "neo-fascist" continues to be used to describe people who are willing to help foreigners but are not happy to see their own countries completely transformed at the societal level, more and more of us will become comfortable with that label.

Even if Swedish Democrat politicians (like the article states) claim that "it's better to help people where they are than to bring them here", their budget proposition included a 47 billion SEK (about 470 million USD) reduction of international aid under a 4 year period. For reference, the total international aids budget for 2015 is 29.5 billion SEK. Nothing they have proposed have made any indications that they have any intentions to provide help to those in need who happen to be far away.

It's still true that the debate here is extremely infected and polarized, though.

This is what happens when you just let anyone with an asylum claim into your country and don't have a plan for how to handle the actual numbers of people.

What ticks me off the most is that at least the german gov't has known about this problem since 2012 (https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Downloads/Infothek...) and have sat around doing nothing to prepare. We could have actually had a system in place to integrate these people, get them jobs, quickly process those with/without ligitimate claims, etc, but no.

I live in germany and listen to a lot of sveriges radio news, so I feel I have a pretty good view of how things are in sweden and germany right now. In sweden, its so bad some refugees had to sleep outside a couple of days ago, and this is with many already sleeping inside immigrations offices, or buses driving in to let them sleep in, etc. Due to germanys size and relative economic prosperty I think it will take significantly longer to weigh as heavily on the system, but estimated costs for this year for 800k refugees were about 6 billion a while back (roughly 1/6 of anual Hartz IV costs) http://www.br.de/nachrichten/fluechtlinge-asylbewerber-koste....

Bottom line, if there is not an EU wide solution to this problem it will break Germany and Sweden unless they change policy - for sweden it needs to be ASAP. Since A) there is no end of warfare and legitimate asylum claims in sight in the near east and africa which means the current influx will undoubtedly continue over the next decade B) Integration will be near impossible with these kinds of numbers producing even more socio-economic problems which you'd think germany would have learned from with its turkish workers problems ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Germany#Integration_i...) ...

Practicaly speaking, it doesn't look like any other eu countries want to buckle up and take the economic weight of all these people who will burden their welfare systems so basically Germany and Sweden will be forced to change policy, its just a question of how bad the situation gets before they enact a change in policy.

> Bottom line, if there is not an EU wide solution to this problem it will break Germany and Sweden unless they change policy

I think it's plausibly that by pursuing their open-door policies, Germany and Sweeden also encouraged the flow of immigrants into the EU. Assuming this is true, isn't it a bit unfair now to unload that burden to other EU countries that were more realistic from the start? Basically, Germany and Sweden were to only ones to accumulate moral capital, but now they expect other countries to share the financial burden.

The further away a country is from the Southern/Eastern border of the EU the better the whole 'refugees should stay in the country where they arrive' deal looked to them when they signed up for it.

The problem is that the 'edge' countries where refugees tend to arrive are in no way capable of dealing with the flood and at the same time don't have the funds, the manpower, the will or the organization in place to deliver on this promise. These countries also tend to have the most porous borders.

Germany is in much the same situation by the way.

The thing is that EU countries would be fine if they all imposed "no limits". But selfishness has lead most EU countries to simply reject taking migrants entirely, leaving the few that do have "no limits" overwhelmed.

The alternative explanation is, selfishness has led Sweden and Germany to proclaim their "no limits" policies in order to accumulate "moral capital". This resulted in a huge increase in the flow of asylium seekers, but now these countries want the rest of the EU to share the burden of their failed policies.

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