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Comment by zahabat | Hacker News Reader

> they have also largely escaped the social ills that plague America.

That is not a fair assessment. The social landscape in both regions is very different. The nordic region does not have the same influx of immigrants as North America. And increasingly, North African and Middle Eastern (primarily Muslim) immigrants (and born-citizen second generations) are being marginalized [1].

I wonder how the Nordic nations will react when more and more immigrants start moving there to start businesses, if that turns out to be the case in the future.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/world/europe/14dutch.html?...

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"According to Washington-based Refugees International the U.S. has admitted fewer than 800 Iraqi refugees since the invasion, Sweden had accepted 18,000 and Australia had resettled almost 6,000."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_Iraq

I do not question the charity and helpfulness of these nations. Neither do I find any issues with their foreign policies. My point was directed more to how the society (not the government) deals with the immigrants [1].

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/world/norwegian-schools-segregation-sp...

Can you summarize how you interpret that article?

For example, do you think that is common practice in Norway? I read elsewhere that the policy was quickly abandoned once it was made public. Do you think the 50 students who demonstrated in protest show that this was an unexpected practice? Might the comment of "school captain Helena Skagen" .. "what they did was wrong because you can't split the students according to their culture" might indicate that this was an unusual event, and hence newsworthy?

Except that the immigrants there are not starting businesses. They do not integrate and instead are a drain on social services. Sweden's immigration policy with regards to refugees has been far too liberal, and now they have problem ghettos in Stockholm and Malmo.

There is a real trojan horse here. In the last two decades the Arab population has swelled to over 600,000. They hive the highest birth rate of any other group. They live in neighborhoods where police all but refuse to go. Fiercely anti-semitic, some attack the Jewish community in Malmo--to the point where Jews are leaving.

The've let in a population of people that has no interest in learning the language, integrating, or adopting local customs. The next decade will be interesting to see how this is handled.

Please do more research. Your views may have been true two generations ago. They are not now.

Sweden has accepted a huge number of people from the Middle East. I live in Sweden. Today I went to a hamburger place owned by someone from Iraq. Another person there came from Lebanon. My wife just went across the street to get a pizza, where the owner is also from the Middle East.

Sweden started opening up to immigrants (as I understand the history) back in the 1970s. They took in people fleeing the dictatorship in Chile. (They also accepted US draft dodgers in the 1960s and people fleeing the Soviet bloc.) There are currently some 126,000 people born in Iraq who now live in Sweden, and 64,000 from Iran. That alone is 3% of the country. The total immigrant (non-Sweden born) population is about 1.5 million out of 9.5 million, or 16%.

That's about the same as the US, where about 12% of the population was born in another country.

And why did you post that link to the NYT? That talks about The Netherlands, which is not a Nordic country. ("Amid Rise of Multiculturalism, Dutch Confront Their Questions of Identity")

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