Carl Bildt: The truth about refugees in Sweden | Hacker News Reader

Carl Bildt: The truth about refugees in Sweden

washingtonpost.com

45 pointsimartin2k33 comments

Asylum seekers are now 2-3% is Swedens population. If the US did the same thing that would mean 10 million people. (Israel, next door, has taken in zero)

The people coming in now are completely different from Balkan refugees, Persians and Lebanese. In the case of the Balkan refugees, they were European. And the Persians were fleeing from an Islamic theocracy - they didn't share their values. Ironically, it was a women of Christian Lebanese descent who was murdered by these new arrivals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alexandra_Mezher

Bildt mentions Spotify and Minecraft, but the new arrivals are making a different use of modern technology: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/sweden-facebook-gang...

Carl Bildt has his head in the sand. Look at these most-wanted pictures from Sweden and Denmark: https://www.interpol.int/notice/search/wanted/(RequestingCou...

https://www.interpol.int/notice/search/wanted/(RequestingCou...

Try not to notice any patterns, since that would be crimethink.

What pattern special to Sweden or Denmark do you see in your Interpol links?

I do not believe they are specific to these countries. I had a look at France (where I am from) and that are no Jean-Marc Duponts.

This is a metric like others, with its shortcomings but it has its use. I would be honestly delighted to see a competitive one about, say, volunteering in pediatric hospitals showing that there are no Jean-Marcs but rather plenty of Mohameds. The positive metrics, so to speak. One which is neutral (do not volunteering in the streets for instance whet you need to be "alike" in order to be accepted) but something truly showing integration. I do volunteer work and, sadly, do not see such trend.

Mono-ethnic modern states have high levels of altruism and 'civil society' - Japan, Finland etc. Multi-cultural societies don't since there is less trust and more us-vs-them mentality.

While the pattern is obvious, it's also easily explained. It's easier for foreigners (particularly those from outside the EU) to flee the country and thus be sought by Interpol.

The new ones are always "completely different" from the old ones.. until someone digs up old articles that say the same thing about the old ones.

Americans pointing fingers at Sweden is bizarre in light of any actual data because Sweden is a very successful society in terms of economy, crime rate etc. ("Sure, we have a beam in our eye, but did you hear what happened last night to the guy with the mote in his eye...")

I get the impression that Sweden is a favorite target of the alt-right because it's a formerly homogenous white and culturally monolithic country, the kind that white nationalists see as an ideal. Now that Sweden has a major refugee population, they await its impending collapse (despite any economic evidence so far).

I doubt that there would be a catastrophic collapse in any sort but instead a gradual boiling that we don't identify because we refuse to thoroughly look, where it either spirals into a harsh, violent reaction on behalf of the population or a shift in demographics that's only noticeable ten years later and then we wonder where all the blondes went. Sex crime is intertwined with shame, more so when race is involved. The UK had a pedophilia scandal stewing for years: https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Meat-Britains-Grooming-Scandal/d...

People might wonder why Swedish politicians produce these absurd head-in-the-sand articles, but the truth is that Sweden has an extremely conformist political culture.

Recently an artist was imprisoned for 6 months and had some of his artwork destroyed for going against this groupthink: http://www.thelocal.se/20140821/swedish-artist-jailed-for-ra...

There are plenty of groups whose job it is to make sure you lose your job if you don't go along with the orthodoxy : https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/the-rise-of-swedens-far-l...

It is almost as if the presence of the word 'truth' in a political context has the same value as the presence of the term 'democratic' in the name of a country - Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, German Democratic Republic, etc.

Which is a shame as it is possible to say a few things which have the ring of truth about them concerning the 'migrant crisis' in Sweden. Instead of writing a long diatribe I'll just link to a video made by someone calling himself 'an angry foreigner' ('en arg blatte' in Swedish, the last word is a derogative term for foreigner) someone who came to Sweden in one of the previous waves of refugees during the Balkan wars.

https://youtu.be/y1_viPSD-bY

You could just use the words "democrat" and "republican". It's funny when you think 5 seconds about what those words mean.

The democrats are about as interested in what the people would decide as the republicans are in letting every state do things for themselves.

Its seems a bit political that the total number of Syrian refugees are not mentioned in the article to contrast with the total number of Balkan refuges (and, to be even more fair in comparing numbers, we might include people from neighboring countries to get a similar land size.)

In my rough understanding, we talking about 100,000 refugees from the Balkans that came between 1991 and 2001 vs around 300,000 refugees from Syrian and neighboring countries for the time period 2011->2016.

On the contrary, he is probably quite aware. Immigration's advantages already come with tiny numbers of immigrants, whereas most problems caused by immigration get caused by large sudden influxes of immigrants.

So he's taking a tiny bit of immigration to illustrate that an influx at over 6 times won't generate any problems (I think you underestimate the difference. It's actually about 10x)

I think the hypocrisy reaches its climax when Mr Trump talks about fighting the fake news, yet uses a story from Fox News as his source in one of his speeches.

He makes our (Swedens) prime minister look like a pro.

Swedens prime minister is in fact a professional (he is getting paid for what he does). But when it comes to "pro" in the sense of "knowing what they are doing", Trump makes everybody look like a pro, compared to himself.

Trump does seem like a fool, and yet he won the election despite the RNC, Hillary (who outspent him 2 to 1), and a hostile media.

Italy's Berlusconi won elections multiple times in 1996-2010 despite acting like a fool.

He is probably Trump's closest equivalent in any Western country over the past decades: large personal fortune, mishmash populist agenda, media obsession, self-branding as an outsider who dares speak the truth... And Berlusconi's legacy is not much to celebrate. Italy is objectively worse off compared to its peers than it was 20 years ago. Winning elections doesn't mean anything on its own, but Trump is still in campaigning mode.

The RNC was critical to Trump winning.

It resisted him in the primary, but it was critical in the general election, providing the voter information that the campaign used to target their advertising and such (The Trump campaign spent more on digital ads than the Clinton campaign, they targeted those ads a great deal).

I'm honestly not sure why you write "hostile media". Anecdotally, and empirically, Trump got huge mentions and proportion of news time from all the media entities. Sure, some was unfavorable, but on balance, he came out way ahead.

I'd say most of the coverage was negative, the kind of scandals that have brought down many other candidates.

Somehow, in Trump's case, there was no such thing as bad publicity.

I'd say most of Trump's coverage was pretty positive, despite him undeniably getting involved in scandals that would have brought down any other candidate. The disabled reporter mockery alone would have torpedoed every other candidate.

Somehow, in Trump's case, the media was able to find a false equivalent in some other candidate every single time.

That Fox News's 'Swedish defence advisor' is also named Bildt must be completely coincidental.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/26/fox-news-nils-...

"I suspect that his [President Trump] actual knowledge of the issue is extremely limited. If it were not for the massive turmoil that could ensue, I would urge him to skip one of his golfing weekends and come to us and see for himself."

Yet almost every weekend somebody is getting shot in Malmø, in one area of the city the police gets rocks thrown at them by organized groups of youth when they show up.

It's similar to the 'build vs maintain' debate we have in software. The article is about how great it was to build this up, but it's going to be someone else doing the hard work of maintaining the 'debt'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

According to this Infowars article [1] (not the most unbiased source, but if they fudge their numbers I would expect them to exagerate) there were 11 murders in Malmø in 2016. For a city of almost 300,000 people that is about 3.7 murders per 100,000 people. As a point of reference, in 2016, NYC had a homicide rate of 3.91, LA 7.25, Chicago 28.0 per 100,000 [2]. Those are big cities, so one would expect the crime rate to be higher.

Anyway, your statement that almost every weekend somebody is shot in Malmø was incorrect for 2016.

[1] http://www.infowars.com/culturally-enriched-malmo-sweden-is-...

[2] http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/nyc-homicide-stats-comp...

Chicago 28.0 per 100,000

That's the same rate as Columbia.

It is better to compare the murder rate in Malmö to that in Copenhagen, the 'city across the bridge' in Denmark, as both used to share the same "Scandinavian" culture. For those who do not know, Copenhagen is about three times the size of Malmö, the two cities are connected together by a bridge over the 'Öresund' (called the 'Öresund bridge'). Copenhagen has a much lower crime rate than Malmö and - related - a much lower murder rate. The numbers are [1 - Swedish article]:

   City       Murder rate

   Malmö      3.4
   Paris      1.8
   London     1.3
   Copenhagen 1.1
   Berlin     1.0

The comparison with Chicago is clearly off, but that goes for more or less all of Europe. The highest murder rate in Europe is to be found in Tirana, the capital of Albania, with 6.7 murders per 100.000. The highest in the world seems to be found in Caracas, Venezuela, at 120 murders per 100.000.

So Malmö is no Chicago and Europe is no United States of America. But, also, Malmö is no Scandinavia.

Thanks for the extra statistics. Can you add a link to the article? It seems to be missing...

Yes, I forgot the add the link - that's what you get when you reply to stuff while waiting for the welder to cool down so I can use it again... Here it is:

[1] http://www.friatider.se/malm-farligast-i-norden

> London 1.3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London

>> London is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. In 2007 there were over 300 languages spoken in it and more than 50 non-indigenous communities with a population of more than 10,000.[1]

>> At the 2011 census London had a population of 8,173,941. Of this number, 44.9% were White British. 37% of the population were born outside the UK, including 24.5% born outside of Europe.[2]

Correct, and this is linked to organized crime. A small group that have gotten hold of lots of weapons. It's a problem, but it's a problem caused by a few - which means, it should be possible to solve it with the right approach and sufficient police resources - which is the big issue at the moment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com