Sweden will offer migrants $34k to go home
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Sweden's gun crime death rate is now the highest in the European Union.
> Statistics show that gang shooting suspects are predominantly of migrant background.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/swedens-deadly-gang-war-has-turne...
None of the other Scandinavian (or Nordic if you're being pedantic) countries have ANY issues with random explosives.
"Our crime statistics are high because we changed how we count crimes!"
You would hear phrases like that. It was actually bizarre looking from the outside in how much denial there was about these problems. Maybe if it has started being addressed back then then it wouldn't have gotten as bad.
Meanwhile a political party with a neo-nazi history caught the spotlight (SD), which made it even more difficult to criticize immigration.
It was like a perfect storm, making immigration a very difficult subject to have a moderate opinion about.
Pretty significant cultural changes, like now in their hometown, there are separate swimming days for the sexes at the public pool. When I started going to Sweden 30 years ago, all the beaches were top-ional.
Things like, I think he called them the "bearded babies", which was a group of thousands of refugees who were obviously up to 30 years old, claiming they were 17, so they didn't need to provide any information and received preferential treatment.
It was enough to lead my die-hard liberal punk rock guitarist friend to start voting SD in last few elections. They were the only ones who would talk about the problems.
> commented Oliver, although the segment wasn’t even focused on immigrants and Sweden, a country whose crime rate has steadily declined since 2005
> Selin completed a study recently focusing on negative news reports about Sweden’s acceptance of refugees. It found numerous exaggerations and distortions, including false reports that Sharia law was predominant in parts of the country and that some immigrant-heavy neighborhoods were considered ‘no-go zones’ by the police.
That's because it's comprised of everything else, like shoplifting kids and gangs of bicycle-stealing thieves in student towns like Uppsala.
"Oh yippee, we had six hundred fewer cases of shoplifting and two hundred fewer cases of bicycle theft, and only two hundred more cases of deadly gun violence and one hundred more cases of deadly use of explosives -- minus eight hundred, plus three hundred, a net reduction of five hundred cases of crime!"
Don't fall for the obvious white-washing.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...
The only real numbers the article gives are > About 62,000 people are linked to criminal networks in the country, police say.
which says... nothing? What does "linked to" mean? are those people that buy illicit drugs off the street? are they "linked to" a criminal organization?
> Last year, 363 recorded shootings led to 53 deaths across Sweden, according to police.
Absolute numbers, without per capita context (given above) this is not useful.
> In 2022, the gun murder rate in Stockholm was roughly 25 times higher than in London.
This is _gun_ murders specifically, but for all murders, London is comparable to Sweden overall (~1.3 per 100k population), I wasn't able to find numbers for Stockholm specifically, but yeah, if I die I die, I'm not sure I would particularly care whether it was due to a knife or a gun.
Overall, seems like another overblown narrative that doesn't reflect reality to me. Violent crime just doesn't seem to be trending upward in Sweden.
Curious if others have information that counters what I've found.
Edit: sorry, Wikipedia was the source for London homicide rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London
Here's the English language page about the repatriation compensation (currently 10,000 SEK):
https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...
----
You can apply for the grant if you have a temporary or permanent residence permit in Sweden
* as a refugee
* as a quota refugee
* as a person eligible for subsidiary protection
* on the grounds of exceptionally distressing circumstances
* or because of your connection to a person who has one of the residence permits listed above.They've probably thought through all the ways to exploit this, just curious.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-e...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/522136/sweden-immigratio...
What do you mean by that? Both Poland and Sweden are members of the EU.
Probably not a thing in Sweden but in Italy there were a few scandals recently about illegal/semi legal Indian and other migrants working in sweatshops and farms.
Poles on the other hand have the legal right to come and work in Sweden with no legal restrictions whatsoever.
About Poles, that makes sense.
What do you mean ? He said: "a lot of the migrants are from countries in unrest.". /s
Probably similar to the native population though.
I would imagine it's ideological demagoguery and not concerned with serious critical analysis of long term effects.
The previous left-wing government that basically said "we're taking everybody" had good intentions but extremely poor execution. Merkel's Germany didn't do much better tbh.
In any case, when migrants don't integrate, and you fail to make them do so, you can either ignore the problem hoping it goes away or try to solve it in a way that is human and causes as little suffering as possible.
Not everything in politics is pure logic, there are lots of emotions too. Not aligning with neo-nazis is one of those emotions.
Like a pro-slavery party?
Good find. By the same token though, the Democratic Party in US was the white supremacist party in the 19th century. There is probably ideological demagoguery involved with them as well.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/164821-biden-rem...
> “A mentor and a dear friend”
Make what you will of it. Just saying that not that long of a time has passed. We’re talking about the sitting US president.
Jimmie Åkesson just says "I saw nothing of that".
In the 1940s. Mentioning this, but the fact he would publicly denounce the Klan by the end of the decade, and spend the rest of his life profusely apologizing for having been so stupid as a younger person -- is just smear, basically.
Byrd later called joining the KKK "the greatest mistake I ever made". In his last autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook—seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions".[37] Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened".As an example if Vance apologized for being in the KKK, how eager would we be to forgive him?
Probably not. Even if - as in this case - it was 30-50 years later. (That Biden said kind words about Byrd)
You likely meant the 20th century. White supremacists were voting solidly Democratic up til around the 1960s.
Wait, they actually do that! :
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-seehofer-warns-refugees-who-t...
There is considerable uncertainty in the calculations, but they indicate that the net redistribution via public finances to an average refugee over his or her entire lifetime in Sweden amounts to an average of SEK 74 000 per year.
Swedish article
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ny-eso-rapport-flyktingin...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240914135437/https://www.svt.s...
It was controversial, from a number of angles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23immigra...
This isn't possible in Japan. Japan does not recognize same-sex marriage.
Never trust a European politician who says they don't like immigration. Wait to see what their policies actually do to the figures
The average income in the US is $20k higher than that in Sweden.
https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=S...
US is a top destination for Swedes moving out even without this incentive, but Sweden is not a top choice for US expats.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/523165/sweden-emigration...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/american-...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
1. This also applies to Sweden
2. Even by median income US is higher than Sweden and even after adjusting for PPP, so you can use cost of living. US looks better after addressing your concerns.
What is the real salary once you substract retirement funds and medical insurance?
Those two cities aren't really in the same urban league. Compare Stockholm to, say, Miami or Austin.
Feel free to add more data.
If you adjust by living costs and look at median wages, US looks even better.
Balancing out taxes are lower and inflation is lower in the US.
Answering your question:
Adjusting by PPP, US is second only to Luxembourg
This was your response to my question about children being shot at school. It's clear we have a very different set of values here in Europe.
I couldn’t find 2024 statistics, but in 2023 there were 391 gang-related gun deaths in Sweden. With about 10 million people, that’s 0.00391%.
America has gun problems for sure, but school shootings are largely irrelevant compared to deaths from crime and accidents. And it’s not “clear” that you have “a very different set of values” in Europe when we’re discussing a nearly 10 year wave of gun violence in a European country
The reality is that countries and governments are made of people. If you piss them off long enough, bad stuff is going to fester and violence will eventually come forth as the “only viable solution”. It’s up to policy makers and politicians to lead public discourse and try to find a solution.
I think the other thing though is that governments need to be more open about the consequences. We’re seeing this now in the Netherlands with the push of the new right wing government to cut immigration visas. But whoops, now we don’t have enough people to fill jobs and the tax base is being pushed to the edge to pay for social services that are only going to get more and more strained.
Without some form of immigration, the west as we know it will cease to function as the population ages and jobs are not filled. So sure, you can vote to keep the immigrants out, but just know you’ll probably die alone from a preventable complication because the home health nurse is stretched between 30 patients in a 24 hour period. Elections and choices alike have consequences and not voting is also a choice.
To end on Sweden again, im sure the rest of Europe will be watching this experiment very closely, though cynically I don’t think it will matter or have much of an effect.
Cultural stability and assimilation rate are real processes, that can be influenced by various policies.
Similar, economies run on labor and skill, and growth or shrinking of a labor pool has serious ramifications.
Yet these things aren't part of most of these discussions: instead it's sound bites and hyping extreme scenarios (on all sides) as common occurrences.
--
In most countries with low birth rates, it would be extremely beneficial to everyone there to boost population growth through immigration.
Yet immigration and assimilation create cultural friction with the then-dominant national culture, so that needs to be managed.
Ultimately, I'd like to see more honest communication around "We're encouraging immigration to drive our economy" and "Here are the things that immigrants are having to deal with, as they adjust to living in our country, and what you can do to help them."
It sucks when someone is outcompeted by immigrant labor, but that should probably prompt some self reflection -- how can someone new to a country substitute into their job? And why weren't they doing more to find a job where that wasn't possible?
It is possible to make the argument that negative birth rates are either (1) a result of overpopulation correcting itself or (2) a result of social problems relating to factors like marriage and career goals. I would consider (1) to be a strong form of this argument and (2) to be a weak form. (1) being true implies that there is essentially no way to maintain first world living standards at the current level of population in first world countries, and that the population actually should go down in the short term (say over the next few decades or so) until it reaches some balanced level at which the birth rate would likely naturally return to ~2.1 This seems like it may actually be the case in certain countries like Japan and Korea where most of the population lives in high density cities and it is even more clear in cities like Hong Kong which has a population density of 7,060 people per square kilometer[0] and a birth rate of 0.7.[1] and Singapore. If (1) is true, high immigration would always be a net negative in the long term. If (2) is true immigration is acting as a band-aid for solving that problem, and once that problem is solved the specific argument you gave in favor of immigration would not be valid anymore. I think both (1) and (2) are true to different degrees in different countries. It is hard to argue that the issue with eg. Singapore's low birth rate has nothing to do with it having the third highest population density in the world.[2-3] Some European cities also have extremely high density cities such as Paris, but there is considerable variability, which leads me to the conclusion that the answer involves both (1) and (2).
>It sucks when someone is outcompeted by immigrant labor, but that should probably prompt some self reflection -- how can someone new to a country substitute into their job? And why weren't they doing more to find a job where that wasn't possible?
One reason might be that immigrants are willing to work for less pay. Additionally immigrant families are more likely to live in denser housing, for example in multi-generational or multi-family households, to reduce cost of living,[4-6] which is something non-immigrants generally do not want to do. These are just two among perhaps dozens of factors. The two above factors are related to my earlier point about there potentially being "no way to maintain first world living standards at the current level of population in first world countries."
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=H...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=S...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
[4] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OHE/Pages/HCI-Housing-Overc... - California. Data broken down by race rather than immigration status but should correlate with immigration status.
[5] https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0501 - US. See "1.01 or more occupants per room." Also compare average household size and average number of rooms.
[6] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12187-020-09743-7 - Finland
However it's much more likely to be that it's due to the atomonization of society and as such people have a hard time raising kids.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2002.1117 - "When explaining the level of fertility, population density comes out second in importance after female literacy, yet still well ahead of the traditionally studied factors: female labour force participation, income, urbanization and food security. This strong negative effect of population density on the level of fertility five years later is statistically significant in almost all years, both at the global level and among the sub-group of developing countries. " Note that this is after trying to account for other factors: "It is worthwhile to have a closer look at this apparently strong bivariate relationship between density and fertility because it might not really reflect a causal relationship, but rather could be due to some other developmental variables in the background, such as level of income or level of education that might simultaneously lead to lower fertility and make higher population densities possible. For this reason tables 3, 4 and 5 give sets of multiple regressions that study the relationship of population growth and fertility to population density while controlling some of the other social and economic variables measured." (Developing countries also show an inverse correlation, as mentioned in the quote)
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/average-u-s-apartment... - "According to a new report, the average size of a new apartment in 2022 was less than 900 square feet."
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1350102/usa-apartment-si... - The smallest city by apartment size is Seattle at 689 square feet and then Minneapolis at 720. Both do not have a very high densities compared to the largest US cities by density. Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, SF and DC are next in that list, however, and they are all high density. I will also note that apartments do not automatically shrink when population density increases and there are a lot of historical factors that perhaps play a larger role for the size of apartments as well as the difference between the legal boundaries of a city and the boundaries of the city as relevant to this discussion. This said, landlords theoretically should opt to convert one large apartment to two smaller ones (or two large ones to three smaller ones) although I don't know how common that actually is given you need to install new plumbing, gain permits etc. to do that.
[3] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Living-lar... - "The average median per capita size of a Hong Kong dwelling is 172 sq. feet, smaller than Tokyo at 210 sq. feet, Singapore's 270 sq. feet and Shenzhen at 300 sq. feet."
What is more, unless we change how democracy works (e.g. young people and those who have children (<18) get extra votes the older generations will keep voting for policies that only benefit them and make things even worse longterm.
But this is an official communication in Europe - we need the numbers to grow. Rapes, shootings and bombings are a small price to pay for ever-increasing GDP and next bonus for CEOs.
> It sucks when someone is outcompeted by immigrant labor, but that should probably prompt some self reflection -- how can someone new to a country substitute into their job?
By being cheaper and agreeing on worse working conditions. Privatizing profits and socializing losses. Liberal credo.
Or healthcare and social systems not collapsing in a few decades? Europeans have three options: start having more children, start working well into your 70s or accept a lot of immigrants (who are consequently are also likely to have much more children due to their cultural & religious “values”).
The last one seems like the easiest option if you are a politician/voter in your 50s-60s+ since you won’t live long enough to see all of the outfall.
Yes, Europeans should start having more children if they want to keep their way of living. But no, immigrants will not save demography, as data shows that migrants tend to have less and less children in subsequent generations (ignoring the fact that fertility rate is falling everywhere around the world, even in poorer countries). It is not a panacea, it is not even a palliative. Nobody can point to any country in Europe and say that mass immigration changed it for the better (some limited immigration may be beneficial, though). And this was my point - immigration benefits mostly those that own factories, capital etc.
You are right in your last sentence - gerontocracy is taking a future from their children. Everywhere.
I didn’t say that immigration is a longterm solution. It might delay the collapse of social security, healthcare etc. systems which is the main thing that matters to the people who hold the majority of political power in Europe (those in their late 50s and > 60). Expecting them to willfully sacrifice their personal wellbeing for a more sustainable longterm solution wouldn’t make a lot of sense. So we are pretty stuck…
> as data shows that migrants tend to have less and less children in subsequent generations
Depends. If they don’t assimilate and don’t abandon their religious and cultural practices that might not happen. e.g. the Haredi in Israel (not exactly immigrants in the same way but an example of how very high birth rates can be maintained. Unfortunately this type people are extremely unproductive economically and hold extreme political views..)
> And this was my point - immigration benefits mostly those that own factories, capital etc.
I don’t fully agree. From the economic perspective at least. Having a higher proportion of young/working age, productive adults in the population benefits everyone short to medium term.
US handled this specific problem much better than Europe overall though. First of all they managed to attract the most capable and productive emigrants (Europe is rarely the first option) and have done a much better job at assimilating them.
Consequently US is in a much better position demographically compared to Europe, China and the rest of the developed world.
You're getting it backwards: What creates a lot more cultural friction is lack of assimilation. And Sweden officially abandoned assimilation as a goal under Olof Palme in the 1970s. That, and the fact that it was taboo to criticize this lack for many decades, is what has put Sweden where it is now.
Sure, public debate there looks ugly now, mainly because so many on the left still live in the past and basically accuse anyone to the right of Palme of being Genghis Khan's and Hitler's secret love child. But still, the actual government finally having officially abandoned at least some of the previously-mandatory virtue signalling is one of the few promising signs that Sweden may still have some way forward.
> Ultimately, I'd like to see more honest communication around "We're encouraging immigration to drive our economy" and "Here are the things that immigrants are having to deal with, as they adjust to living in our country, and what you can do to help them."
Unfortunately I'm still doubtful that they'll have the balls to tell it all thew way like it is, to wit: "The one thing that immigrants have to deal with in order to live in our country and not destroy it, is to assimilate; to become Swedish."
> It sucks when someone is outcompeted by immigrant labor, but that should probably prompt some self reflection -- how can someone new to a country substitute into their job?
And all the virtue signallers (which I can't quite tell whether you are one of) should probably reflect: Couldn't be because they're "competing" while living on social benefits and working on the black market, paying no taxes or social security fees, could it?
Incredible how people are complacent with that.
If someone has really good reason to stay, they don't take the offer.
That good reason being able to get more money out of the taxpayer in the long term.
How do they do it? They just do it!
- Successful Behavior Is Repeated - People Respond To Economic Incentives
Perhaps that explains why almost nobody applied and only one got it last year. Many would love to go home. They just can't.
In the case of Syria, the Caesar sanctions will probably cripple Syria's reconstruction. So there probably won't be much to return to for the foreseeable future.
But yeah it's in Europe's interests to quickly rebuild there
The title says it's going to be for migrants.
* at least that's how the words split in English, I don't know if the Swedish language divides up reality in the same way
HN crowd should understand the value of positioning your self in a better scenario
Och det förutsatt att du pratar svenska eller har ett yrke där du klarar dig utan. AI-översättning (så här) kommer inte att klippa det.
(Sechs Jahre nach meiner Ankunft in Berlin, und meine Deutschkenntnisse bleibt nur 'okay')
For the others asylum is not only an option to escape persecution but also a much better economic outcome
My suspicion is "as little as possible".
Additionally they could be working in the gig economy. I swear I have never had a delivery from uber eats where the person doing the delivery was the same as the photo on the app. What's happening there is they are renting the account for the day.
Don't get me wrong these people are being exploited, but they could be making more than if they were home.
The Syrian civil war reduced their GDP per capita from ~11,000 in 2010 to ~530 USD/year in 2022: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Syria+gdp+per+capita+20...
Even if someone is trying to game the system from a better position such as fleeing Ukraine, they're going to face competition from people *that poor*, who are otherwise in the same position.
Crucially, this is bellow the 24200 SEK (2.133,15 Euro) tax-free allowance where they wouldn't pay tax anyway.
> Don't get me wrong these people are being exploited, but they could be making more than if they were home.
Are you sure those people aren't trafficked, rather than in your country voluntarily? Such exploitation is also a problem, but I'd say a different one.
Weird switch: First you're saying "these poor bastards probably don't get paid much at all", and now it's "This might be so lucrative that it's profitable to traffic people to do it" -- how does that add up? Would you make a business of importing, say, Syrians or Pakistanis to Sweden, where they'll get social security in their own name, and can therefore easily get away from you and live on that?
Sure, many of them "have been traficked" in the sense that they've paid (what was at least to them) a fortune to be smuggled into Western European countries or at least up to their borders (for varying definitions thereof; like, say, the British border being in a camp on the French coast). But that's "traficking" in the sense of "price-gouging on travel tickets", not "being sold into slavery". People who pay a lot to get somewhere are pretty much by definition there voluntarily, aren't they?
One group of people that is apparently trafficked in the other sense are Roma (and probably Sinti, for all I know) from Eastern Europe, above all Romania, who are kept in ramshackle camps on the outskirts of cities and towns and set to begging more centrally all day long. But AFAIK they don't have any residential permits at all, neither permanent nor temporary. They're in the country not as refugees or any other kind of migrants, but under the Schengen open-travel rules, basically as tourists. If they get in trouble with the authorities they're often just rotated out for a while and then shipped in again. But not being official residents of the country they're not (AIUI) eligible for this migrant-go-home bonus, so irrelevant to this discussion.
Economics shift hugely if someone has to live 12 to a room and eat whatever they're given without caring about food poisoning etc.
> where they'll get social security in their own name, and can therefore easily get away from you and live on that?
That's presuming they are on the system. An actual asylum seeker is, a trafficked person probably isn't. And I may be willing and able to walk away, but I've not been moved to a mystery city without even knowing the language and where the only peers are in the same position as me.
That's where I think the problem is, not people who paid a lot for a ticket, which I don't count as "trafficked" but rather "scammed".
B) This is of course in addition to the social benefits you get being officially unemployed in Western Europe.
If you're registered as an asylum seeker, you get this: https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...
The largest of those numbers is €6.28/day, which may seem like a lot if you're coming from Syria, unless you look at the food prices. And if you're in a place with free food, the max is €2.12/day.
Low enough that Ukraine and Kenya look like economic powerhouses.
If you're from south (or east) of the Mediterranean and want easy money, there are many many easier and better ways to do so than travelling across half the continental EU to end up in one of the colder bits.
Lots of grey area in the middle of course.
Colloquially it's being used all over the place, but in legal contexts it's a very specific thing.
[1]https://www.quora.com/A-recent-poll-conducted-in-Sweden-foun...
As for integration, I don't see why people who are judgemental. There are tons of immigrants to the US who don't speak good English. Are you going to tell them to get the hell out of this country? What if they're parents of children who learn to speak English better than their native languages? That happened a lot.
People should be able to improves their lives. Sometime that means moving to a different country. Sometime that means struggling hard where they are.
In the meantime, we can take care of our own and they can take care of their own, if that’s their culture; which may not be the case and it’s up to them to shape their own society how they want. We had to shed blood to get where we are with wars of independence as well as a civil war. Time for them to man up and shape their own societies to their own customs and liking.
We don’t need to be the Nannie’s of the world. We need to take care of our own problems, of which there are many, including homelessness, drug addiction, depreciated wages often exacerbated by cheap labor. No, I’m with the Bernie of the early nineties.
People are judgmental because mass migration from high-crime countries transformed Sweden from one of the world's safest countries to having the highest rate of gun violence in the EU, and Sweden has been increasingly transparent about the situation.
Because of the political climate in most Western countries today, we can't have a rational discussion about negative effects of mass migration, or consider scenarios where the negative impact might outweigh the benefits. It's just a conversation we can't have without shallow knee-jerk accusations of racism and fascism and Nazism and so on.
It's important to understand that, particularly in Sweden, it was actually neo-nazis who opposed immigration for a long time.
This probably isn't the case anymore, but it's hard to convince people who remember and were there that it isn't the case. It doesn't help when people don't bring numbers to the table (or the numbers that matter). Some incredibly stupid people feel compelled to bring race or ethnicity to the conversation and that can be very tainting. There doesn't need to be a lot of them, just a few can discredit.
The obvious conclusion is that those subgroups are particularly disenfranchised. Meaning they're more likely to be impoverished, earn less on average on a household basis, are more likely to be discriminated against, are more likely to live in high-crime areas, etc.
But if you don't include those statistics alongside the one you have, then you give the impression that some subgroup is just "magically" pre-disposed to crime. uh oh. Now you'll have people saying darker skin colored people are more animalistic in nature, their blood tainted. And now we've gone to Eugenics and before you know it, we're in Nazi land.
So you do have to be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. And, if those conclusions COULD be drawn, you have to nip it in the bud. The absolute last thing neo-nazis need is fuel.
I think there's an opportunity here for some neo-nazi belief systems to get credibility from large organizations.
EDIT: THIS IS WRONG AND I AM AN IDIOT WHO DIDN'T LOOK AT THE NUMBERS CAREFULLY.
So net migration of about 25 000 people in 2023, not a quarter millon.
EDIT: According to the World Bank, the number 250 000 refers to the total refugee population in Sweden, not the number of refugees coming annually.
In fact it looks like Sweden only resettled 5000 last year, a decrease on previous years.
80% of “refugees” vacation back in their source country. If they were truly afraid for their lives they wouldn’t be doing that. They just want a better life. Can’t blame them. Who wouldn’t?
https://rmx.news/article/four-in-five-refugees-living-in-swe...
The downvotes are hilarious. No counter argument. Just “I don’t like it”. Well, I don’t either. But that’s how it is.
But of course a lot of refugees are not really in danger but just try the refugee way for better economic opportunities. This amount is high enough to perhaps appeal to those. I think the main reason it wasn't popular is that the amount was negligible.
I think overall it's a good thing, it's voluntary and they free up spaces for refugees that are really in danger.
Are they not able to be found?
If your goal is to send people home here’s how you do it. Hire 50 lawyers to help migrants apply for the grant and provide translation assistance. You’ll 100x the applicants and 10x the success rate. Anything else is useless chatter.
So just to be clear, a Neo-Nazi political group rebranded, and has successfully passed a law to use significant amounts of taxes to deport immigrants instead of using the same amount of money to integrate them?
On a macro level, moving people from functional, high-productivity countries to failed states makes even less sense. Totally hapless policy from Sweden here.
Depends who you're moving.
That's hardly more specific. In an attempt to steel-man - before you edited your comment (or left another one? hard to tell in the HN UI), you referred to criminals. Well, this incentive is pointed at all migrants, not just criminals. I struggle to understand how law-abiding immigrants don't benefit their host country, yet the Swedish government would like to see them leave as well.