I suspect anyone who wants to address the elephant in the room here will have to choose between accepting support from semi-fascist types or getting cancelled
* A region with instability, poverty and agrarian-tribo-rural-economy will imprint emergent traits onto the local culture.
* Long ossified culture cannot be shed quickly even in the best of conditions
* Agrarian tribal cultural practices are incompatible with hyper-liberal secular society. Integration is the only option.
* Integration is hard. Even more so when it is optional, gentle and approached with ignorant naivete.
Of course things went wrong. The Swedish drank American kool-aid. Like America, they naively tried to claim that their national identity is not an ethnic identity. They set out to prove themselves better than the US by taking in large populations of refugees and showing how they could do the America model better. That's where they got it completely wrong. The US took centuries to decouple its cultural identity from its prevailing-ethnic identity. (by successfully secularizing Protestantism.) The US also heavily vets its immigrants (unlike Sweden) and places the most oppressive integration-force-field second only to France. The air you breathe (Media), the carrot (The American dream) and the stick (the English language) all perfectly align to facilitate integration of the 2nd generation born into the US.
Swedish is an ethno-cultural identity. If you can't start with accepting that, then ofc the grand immigration plan was going to fail.
Most of America's immigration comes from the southern border and is completely unvetted. Your thoughts on integration also don't align with reality.
Edit: participating in this thread has resulted in the moderators of this site applying a rate limit to my account, so I can no longer reply.
About 25% of USA's immigration is as a result of unvetted immigrants from the south [2]. It is still a minority. The majority come here through family (pre-integrated) or for work (high bar for productivity).
Also, Mexico is not the same as war torn middle-east. Mexicans are already culturally aligned (Christianity), ethnically aligned (massive white admixture) and economically far closer to the developed world as compared to the recent warn-torn middle eastern nations. There have been large & well-established Spanish-Christian communities within the US for centuries, which makes it much harder for them to ghettoize.
My point about the integration force-field still stands.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...
The idea that someone who does not presumably know the language, culture, or even where all the landmarks of a city/nation are suddenly start running organized crime is deeply mistaken and does not even track with the most well-known syndicates such as the mafia (1920s in NY compared to 1880s enmasse arrival of Italians) or cartels ("homegrown").
Look deeper and you would see these syndicates grew because there were purposefully and one might argued, promoted by semi-facist types or those who would get "cancelled" today, preventing reasonable opportunities from being provided to these populations.
Even moreso, you might see that much of our economy depends on deeply underpaid labor continuously running agriculture and service sectors and now I would argue even tech, with the danger of being deported or not getting a visa hanging over their actions.
This graph, in the financial times article about immigration, indicates 5. 5 deaths per million. The growth is horrible and yet the reality is nothing like the one being lived in by the US. Most hackernews posters often post about gun violence in the US as being something necessary to address and also simultaneously something that does not impact their day to day decisions around errands like the grocery or activities like music festivals or conferences.
Just to put things in perspective, deaths by firearm are around 60 per million in the US, twelve times the Swedish figure.
Further, as every greying country attempts to use immigration to grow a declining population, some flavor of this comment will negatively impact their efforts:
“Swedes make you feel foreign even when you have the passport, even my kids who were born here,” he says. “They blame immigrants for everything. But this gang violence affects me, my family, my friends as well."
That was a lot of words.
One question - are there any patterns with who is involved in this gang violence?
If this is meant to be a dogwhistle about immigration, it seems appropriate to observe that many of the countries TFA compares Sweden to (Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands) have similar immigration patterns without the same violent crime rates.
If you mean immigration: roughly 1 in 4 Swedish residents are either first- or second-generation immigrants[1]. This is directly comparable to Belgium[2].
It's good to know that immigrants, no matter the nationality, ethnicity, or religion, follow a normal distribution. Some of them are criminals or bigots, whereas most of them are just normal people trying to find work and raise a family.
Europe needs immigrants, it would be foolish to close borders. But we need to be tougher on crime, too. Immigrants that don't quickly adopt our laws and liberal values should be expelled because otherwise, the crime rate goes up, then far-right parties take over. And what happens next in such scenarios is that the law-abiding immigrants suffer, actually.
I do not have a problem with that idea, but bringing people from territories where marrying your 1st cousin is legal is a bad idea with bad consequences: lower IQ, expensive health conditions, bad temperament (and hence crime), etc.
Like half the US? (and the map for that looks probably exactly opposite what you're thinking right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_law_in_the_Uni... )
Usually, after 2 generations, most people adopt the local culture. You can see it in quite tangible metrics, like, for example, they stop having many children, with the fertility rate dropping to the Western average. And if first and second generation descendants become a problem, indeed, then we can talk about society being broken, and the solution is to fix it, not to stop immigration.
For me, talking about slowing down immigration is like talking about slowing down the economy. It can't be done without people eventually starving.
You haven't gone to Brussels I suppose... Especially Molenbeek or Station Zuid.
Ps. I'm from Belgium
I go to Brussels at least once a year.
Again with the obliqueness: is there something specific you want to say? Is the implication that your national police force is suppressing the "real" murder rate?
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/07/27/station-brussel-zuid...
- A friend of mine had an escort picking her up at the station from her work.
- My mom + a friend of her felt threatened by a non-native, when taking the train back from the airport. These are retired women and my mom's friend travels 3 x a year everywhere.
She felt the most unsafe here in Brussels and not taking the train again. ( This was after Operation "cleanup")
- Operation cleanup in Brussels South - ( https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2023/08/29/brussels-south-two-d... ) which resulted in 56 arrests and some people on a wanted list ( https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2023/08/28/56-arrested-in-polic... ). Note: this was a criminal cleanup that was mentioned on the media upfront
- 5 younger kids from Brussels raped an ex in Malta ( news update from 16/11/2023) https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/11/16/belgische-jongeren-v...
- News from 2 days ago ( 18/11/2023) The most popular bars ( Delirium, you've probably went ) where 2 female tourists got drugged and raped https://www.hln.be/brussel/elke-keer-ik-wakker-werd-was-mijn...
Plenty of other examples.
Including from people living there or lived there.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2022/03/01/molenbeek-police-sta...
Or... it's a coincidence that Abdeslam was from Molenbeek? :) Sure
Sweden is simply too nice to criminals. Police, laws... everything.
Other countries have no tolerance for that.
2.) It’s still prison. You’re still locked up. Even people from poor countries want to be free.
As opposed to the current state of things where migration is already a big business both legal and otherwise? Check how much money smugglers make.
And the likes of Turkey and North Africa squeezing the EU for money to "prevent migrants crossing the Mediterranean". How's that working out?