Political Correctness and Media Censorship: The Case of Sweden and Immigration

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Ian Gordon

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MARGARET WENTE

Sweden’s ugly immigration problem

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/swedens-ugly-immigration-problem/article26338254/

... Sweden has the most welcoming asylum policies and most generous welfare programs in the European Union.... Sweden takes in more refugees per capita than any other European country, and immigrants – mainly from the Middle East and Africa – now make up about 16 per cent of the population. The main political parties, as well as the mainstream media, support the status quo. Questioning the consensus is regarded as xenophobic and hateful. Now all of Europe is being urged to be as generous as Sweden.

So how are things working out in the most immigration-friendly country on the planet?

Not so well, says Tino Sanandaji. Mr. Sanandaji is himself an immigrant, a Kurdish-Swedish economist who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden when he was 10. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and specializes in immigration issues. This week I spoke with him by Skype.

“There has been a lack of integration among non-European refugees,” he told me. Forty-eight per cent of immigrants of working age don’t work, he said. Even after 15 years in Sweden, their employment rates reach only about 60 per cent. Sweden has the biggest employment gap in Europe between natives and non-natives.

In Sweden, where equality is revered, inequality is now entrenched. Forty-two per cent of the long-term unemployed are immigrants, Mr. Sanandaji said. Fifty-eight per cent of welfare payments go to immigrants. Forty-five per cent of children with low test scores are immigrants. Immigrants on average earn less than 40 per cent of Swedes. The majority of people charged with murder, rape and robbery are either first- or second-generation immigrants. “Since the 1980s, Sweden has had the largest increase in inequality of any country in the OECD,” Mr. Sanandaji said.

It’s not for lack of trying. Sweden is tops in Europe for its immigration efforts. Nor is it the newcomers’ fault. Sweden’s labour market is highly skills-intensive, and even low-skilled Swedes can’t get work. “So what chance is there for a 40-year-old woman from Africa?” Mr. Sandaji wondered.

Sweden’s fantasy is that if you socialize the children of immigrants and refugees correctly, they’ll grow up to be just like native Swedes. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Much of the second generation lives in nice Swedish welfare ghettos. The social strains – white flight, a general decline in trust – are growing worse. The immigrant-heavy city of Malmo, just across the bridge from Denmark, is an economic and social basket case.

Sweden’s generosity costs a fortune, at a time when economic growth is stagnant. The country now spends about $4-billion a year on settling new refugees – up from $1-billion a few years ago, Mr. Sanandaji said. And they keep coming. Sweden automatically accepts unaccompanied minors. “We used to take in 500 unaccompanied minors a year,” he said. “This year we are expecting 12,000.”

Yet Sweden’s acute immigration problems scarcely feature in the mainstream media. Journalists see their mission as stopping racism, so they don’t report the bad news. Despite – or perhaps because of – this self-censorship, the gap between the opinion elites and the voters on immigration issues is now a chasm. According to a recent opinion poll, 58 per cent of Swedes believe there is too much immigration, Mr. Sanandaji noted. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party is now polling at between 20 per cent and 25 per cent.

Sweden is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes that Europe is capable of assimilating the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who are besieging the continent, or the millions more who are desperately poised to follow in their wake. The argument that these people are vital to boost the economy – that they will magically create economic growth and bail the Europeans out of their demographic decline – is a fantasy.

It’s really very simple, Mr. Sanandaji explained. You can’t combine open borders with a welfare state. “If you’re offering generous welfare benefits to every citizen, and anyone can come and use these benefits, then a very large number of people will try to do that. And it’s just mathematically impossible for a small country like Sweden to fund those benefits.”

Things will get worse before they get better...
 
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And I'm just as certain that I could find at least as many by individuals who hold a very different perspective.
Go ahead. I'd be interested in anything showing that the facts brought up in those pieces might be wrong. (And, btw, The Globe and Mail is one of Canada's two national newspapers, very mainstream and pretty centrist, I'd say, with the other, The National Post, being more to the right. I also think it's fair to say Canada is pretty much akin to Sweden in its tolerant and welcoming polices towards immigrant refugees.)

New Swedish Law Criminalizes Anti-immigration Internet Speech
23 April 2014
Written by Selwyn Duke

You’re free in Sweden to be critical of immigration, those in power, or people identifying as “LBGT” — at least within the confines of your mind. But dare express those views, even on the Internet, and you can now be more easily prosecuted under a new law taking full effect after Christmas.

We recently learned about how anti-immigration Internet commenters in Sweden were tracked down and persecuted. As journalist Pamela Geller wrote:

One of Sweden’s biggest newspapers, Expressen, used criminal hackers to break into Disqus and get the email addresses and identities of commenters online, and to reveal the persons behind the nicknames or anonymous user IDs. The newspaper sent a reporter and a cameraman to one person’s home and asked them about things they had written on different websites. Expressen published the names and photos of some people, which led to at least one person losing his job.

But Sweden’s new law adds another layer of hate-speech prohibition to the social ostracism. As Fria Tider (Free Times) reported (translated electronically from Swedish and then edited for grammar and word usage) in a piece entitled “New Law Makes it Easier to Prosecute Those Who Offend Immigrants or Those in Power,” “The crime of ‘insult’ will be prosecuted — but only for giving offense to immigrants, LGBTQ persons or authorities ... [under a] common insult to the public prosecution.” The law has been pushed by Swedish parliamentarian Andreas Norlén, who said, during what Fria Tider described as “an unchallenged debate on the issue in parliament,” “I do not think it takes very many prosecutions before a signal is transmitted in the community that the Internet is not a lawless country — the sheriff is back in town.”

And unchallenged is precisely how Swedish authorities — and many other Western governments — want their leftist agenda to be, with immigration in particular enjoying sanctified status in Sweden. As CBN reported earlier this month in a piece entitled “Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World”:

Sweden’s leftist establishment and media believe a cornerstone of their perfect society is multiculturalism — large-scale immigration from some of the poorest, most backward nations on Earth — and Swedes who disagree with that plan risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi. “Immigration is the starting point and the finishing point. It's the most important point to prove you're friendly toward foreigners, you're friendly toward immigration," Danish journalist Mikael Jalving, author of the book Absolut Sweden, said.

And if it can be “proven” that you don’t support immigration, “you’re out of the game,” says Jalving. (...)



Sweden: Limit on Asylum Seekers Reached, Measures to Cope with Influx

(Nov. 12, 2015) On November 5, 2015, the Minister of Migration and Justice, Morgan Johansson, announced that Sweden had reached the limit on its capacity to receive asylum seekers, stating, “all countries have a limit – this is where we are now.” After utilizing all available evacuation housing, the government could not guarantee, he added, that asylum seekers arriving in Sweden would be given a roof over their heads.



Sweden's Self-Inflicted Nightmare


By BENJAMIN R. TEITELBAUM New York Times November 13, 2015

Sweden’s message to migrants in Europe is clear: Don’t come here. “Even we have our limits, and now they have been reached,” a defeated-sounding migration minister, Morgan Johansson, explained during a press conference on Nov. 5. “Those who come to our borders may be told that we cannot guarantee them housing.”

That message, nailed down this week when the government announced that Sweden was reintroducing border controls, was a sudden shift from an administration that had claimed there were “no limits” to the number of refugees it could accept. The reversal testifies not only to intensifying challenges Sweden faces abroad, but also to the dysfunctional nature of its immigration debate at home. (...)

(...) Indeed, responding to the Swedish government’s cries for neighboring states to take some of their refugees, the Danish migration minister, Inger Stojberg, said her country would not be coming to the rescue, and added: “Sweden has had an irresponsible refugee policy for years. They have put themselves in this situation.”

Sweden, a country of 9.6 million, lately has been absorbing 10,000 asylum seekers per week, and expects the total number coming into the country this year alone to reach 190,000 — a population greater than that of its fourth largest city. Since the intensification of the immigration crisis in September, municipalities have complained that they lack housing, teachers and classroom space, and doctors for the newcomers. The police have acknowledged that they’ve lost the ability to monitor the whereabouts of foreign nationals within the country. Migration agencies have signaled that they can no longer ensure that unaccompanied minors passing through their offices will be transferred into acceptable living conditions. And leaked emails have shown that government officials are panicking over how they will pay for associated costs. (...)

The government’s slow response to all of this seems baffling. But the seeds of the current debacle were sown earlier, when immigration became an untouchable centerpiece of Sweden’s politics. For the past five years, the nationalist Sweden Democrats party has been the only force opposing the country’s refugee policies. Born in the late 1980s through the fusion of an anti-tax populist party and a neo-Nazi activist group, the Sweden Democrats have grown exponentially since entering Parliament in 2010. Their rise has nonetheless been condemned and hotly contested by a mainstream weary of seeing the country’s reputation for tolerance tarnished. Far from introducing new restrictions to immigration, the Sweden Democrats have caused the political establishment to entrench itself: Any move to restrict immigration is now seen as a concession to paranoid nativism.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has called the Sweden Democrats “neo-fascists,” and like all other mainstream party leaders — on the left as well as the right — he has refused to communicate with them. But on the heels of his administration’s about-face on its own immigration policy, his past attacks on the party seem awkward. When members of the Sweden Democrats began criticizing his policy months ago for its blindness to logistical and economic pitfalls, he dismissed them. The party also argued early on that money for humanitarian purposes would be more efficiently and equitably spent through foreign aid than immigration, and he disregarded their argument as a convenient excuse for a xenophobic agenda. He may have been right, but so were they.

And therein lies the problem. The real nightmare for Swedish politics is not that it now includes the kind of continental-style far-right party it once thought itself immune to. It is rather that mainstream forces have surrendered all critical perspectives on immigration to a party with which they can neither collaborate nor bear to see affirmed. Had a transparent and dynamic public discussion been taking place in Sweden during the past months — a discussion that acknowledged both the need for human solidarity and the limitations of the country’s infrastructure — a more sustainable immigration policy might have emerged. Instead, it seems ill-fated policies will not be altered until the country brings itself to the brink of collapse.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/14/opinion/swedens-self-inflicted-nightmare.html?_r=0
 
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Sweden has a population density of only 22 people/sq km. They've got lots of room for more people. Compare that to Germany which has 228 people/sq km.
 
MARGARET WENTE

Sweden’s ugly immigration problem

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/swedens-ugly-immigration-problem/article26338254/

... Sweden has the most welcoming asylum policies and most generous welfare programs in the European Union.... Sweden takes in more refugees per capita than any other European country, and immigrants – mainly from the Middle East and Africa – now make up about 16 per cent of the population. The main political parties, as well as the mainstream media, support the status quo. Questioning the consensus is regarded as xenophobic and hateful. Now all of Europe is being urged to be as generous as Sweden.

So how are things working out in the most immigration-friendly country on the planet?

Not so well, says Tino Sanandaji. Mr. Sanandaji is himself an immigrant, a Kurdish-Swedish economist who was born in Iran and moved to Sweden when he was 10. He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago and specializes in immigration issues. This week I spoke with him by Skype.

“There has been a lack of integration among non-European refugees,” he told me. Forty-eight per cent of immigrants of working age don’t work, he said. Even after 15 years in Sweden, their employment rates reach only about 60 per cent. Sweden has the biggest employment gap in Europe between natives and non-natives.

In Sweden, where equality is revered, inequality is now entrenched. Forty-two per cent of the long-term unemployed are immigrants, Mr. Sanandaji said. Fifty-eight per cent of welfare payments go to immigrants. Forty-five per cent of children with low test scores are immigrants. Immigrants on average earn less than 40 per cent of Swedes. The majority of people charged with murder, rape and robbery are either first- or second-generation immigrants. “Since the 1980s, Sweden has had the largest increase in inequality of any country in the OECD,” Mr. Sanandaji said.

It’s not for lack of trying. Sweden is tops in Europe for its immigration efforts. Nor is it the newcomers’ fault. Sweden’s labour market is highly skills-intensive, and even low-skilled Swedes can’t get work. “So what chance is there for a 40-year-old woman from Africa?” Mr. Sandaji wondered.

Sweden’s fantasy is that if you socialize the children of immigrants and refugees correctly, they’ll grow up to be just like native Swedes. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Much of the second generation lives in nice Swedish welfare ghettos. The social strains – white flight, a general decline in trust – are growing worse. The immigrant-heavy city of Malmo, just across the bridge from Denmark, is an economic and social basket case.

Sweden’s generosity costs a fortune, at a time when economic growth is stagnant. The country now spends about $4-billion a year on settling new refugees – up from $1-billion a few years ago, Mr. Sanandaji said. And they keep coming. Sweden automatically accepts unaccompanied minors. “We used to take in 500 unaccompanied minors a year,” he said. “This year we are expecting 12,000.”

Yet Sweden’s acute immigration problems scarcely feature in the mainstream media. Journalists see their mission as stopping racism, so they don’t report the bad news. Despite – or perhaps because of – this self-censorship, the gap between the opinion elites and the voters on immigration issues is now a chasm. According to a recent opinion poll, 58 per cent of Swedes believe there is too much immigration, Mr. Sanandaji noted. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party is now polling at between 20 per cent and 25 per cent.

Sweden is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes that Europe is capable of assimilating the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who are besieging the continent, or the millions more who are desperately poised to follow in their wake. The argument that these people are vital to boost the economy – that they will magically create economic growth and bail the Europeans out of their demographic decline – is a fantasy.

It’s really very simple, Mr. Sanandaji explained. You can’t combine open borders with a welfare state. “If you’re offering generous welfare benefits to every citizen, and anyone can come and use these benefits, then a very large number of people will try to do that. And it’s just mathematically impossible for a small country like Sweden to fund those benefits.”

Things will get worse before they get better...
A comment below the article on the website...

- Oh it's much worse in Sweden. As an example: earlier this year there was a two hour gun battle involving approximately 50 people in the city center of a minor Swedish city. Two people dead, dozens wounded, police reinforcements had to be called in from other cities to quell the unrest and protect the ambulance crews collecting the wounded. This was not reported in Swedish media until three days after the event, and then only briefly, in passing, and without mentioning that the battle was a turf war between two rival Syrian mafia families. Because Swedish media do not report news which might encourage anti-immigrant sentiments. Criticizing immigration or ridiculing islam was recently made illegal in Sweden, and is considered hate crimes.

- Reply to this comment: Where is this info to be found? Why isn't it available to all?
 
A comment below the article on the website...

- Oh it's much worse in Sweden. As an example: earlier this year there was a two hour gun battle involving approximately 50 people in the city center of a minor Swedish city. Two people dead, dozens wounded, police reinforcements had to be called in from other cities to quell the unrest and protect the ambulance crews collecting the wounded. This was not reported in Swedish media until three days after the event, and then only briefly, in passing, and without mentioning that the battle was a turf war between two rival Syrian mafia families. Because Swedish media do not report news which might encourage anti-immigrant sentiments. Criticizing immigration or ridiculing islam was recently made illegal in Sweden, and is considered hate crimes.

- Reply to this comment: Where is this info to be found? Why isn't it available to all?
I have to press you a little, Ian:

What do you make of this on the whole? Why haven't there been immigrant crises before? It's not as though this need popped up yesterday. Why the media onslaught to cover up problems and emphasize the need for more immigration now? If there were 50 people involved in this and it were covered up, how do we square that with Charlie Hebdo which concerns much less people? . . . yet Charlie Hebdo was covered far and wide in the Western Press. If we conclude that it's all trying to drum us up for war, even if those reasons are phony and contrived, then we still haven't made an ounce of sense of it: afterall, couldn't these immigration problems just as easily be spun into a story that would drum us up for war? (It seems everywhere - in Europe and the U.S. - we have this diametrically opposed diachotomy between "Islam isn't all bad/accept the immigrants" and "Islam is the root of all evil/terroism." If it were all to get us into supporting a war, then this is obviously not a necessary. It could just as easily be made into a homogenous "Islam = terrorism = let's go to war" thing.)

At present, though I'm really trying to get away from reading all this depressing shit, I'm trying to understand when the idea of "destablizing countries through immigration" originated. No matter how this is initially taken by one, this is a very real idea! . . . one that, as far as I understand it, has been implemented with "success." I posted a link earlier in another thread concerning Kelly Greenhill's paper. Here's the (highly biased towards the mainstream) google search link: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=kelly greenhill weapons of mass migration

I fully believe, like Greenhill talks about, that this whole thing is coerced and engineered. Do you have any suspicions along these lines or do you think it's wholly organic?

(I strongly suggest reading this first link from the above google search, specifically the second paragraph: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100627270)
 
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But even if we take all this as what we've been told on the surface: it's organic and obviously not conspiritorially engineered, it still brings up issues I've (very hesitantly) tried to bring up here before. I suppose it's just not the place to do so. The issue is whether or not living in a physical body (as a primarily spiritual being) could entail anything that diverges from a fully progressive 'anything goes' ethic . . . put another way, does a fully progressive ethic, which includes "accept the immigrants," equal spirituality? I think not. This is why I love the Gita and (for instance) Steven Pressfield's extremely spiritual, historical warrior ethos novels. They frame up a very different way to see spirituality, in my opinion. That way is much truer, I'm convinced. Yet it's not an attached view nor hateful nor lacking in compassion in any sense whatsoever.

Anyway, regardless of the above, I find it jaw-dropping oustanding that things like "accept endless immigrants" has been equated with a progressive/democratic view . . . but muchless with a/the spiritual viewpoint.
 
More about right-&-left political parties & media collusion on the issue.

Swedish economic researcher Tino Sanandaji. (If his hypothesis about where the sociopsychological source of where this development comes from, it's ironic: well-meaning hyper-secularism leading to a massive religious minority - perhaps to eventually become a majority...)

 
We all know one, or know of, one - or even have one in our family. A individual who is overly kind, lenient, naive, credulous, gullible, and compassionate - to the point of self-harm. Someone, who people around him - with less noble intentions - imminently takes advantage of.

A person like that always think that the people around him also is of equal mind and intention. This person is almost always led astray, and are easily manipulated of other peoples influences - to the point where they can mould him to whatever their purposes is, and make him alienate his family. And rarely - not until up on the very end - he cant see that they use him, abuse him, and ultimately harm him. Then - when he has nothing more to give them - they toss him away, and look for the next victim.

This Scottish girl knows what I mean, because her brother was exactly like that - and he got severely abused by his "friends", and led astray. She hasn't seen her brother in a while and made this video to try to reach out to him, for him to come to his senses - and to come home.

I implore you to watch it.

My Brother







-

 
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The RT article mentions in the first paragraph that the attackers were described by witnesses as young drunk men of Arab or North African origin.

The BBC article's first mention of "migrants" is favorable to and defensive of the "migrants" and way down in the 17th paragraph: "But he also warned against simply linking the crimes to the issue of migrants and refugees."
 

Seems like it is epidemic>>> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&u=http://24kalmar.se/2016/01/01/gang-borjade-tafsa-pa-tva-flickor-bildade-ring-runt-dem/&edit-text=

PS: The auto-translate makes it almost incomprehensible - but the gist of it is; that it was a similar case of sexual harassment and rape-attempt, like in Cologne by very large groups of new immigrants roaming around the city looking for girls/women to harass.
 
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The whole meme of "white" women being raped by "dark" men was played to death in the Southern United States following the Civil War. Is this something similar? How does one get to the truth of anything being published anywhere today?
 
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