Sweden is one of the few European countries that have welcomed migrants with open arms. Previously, over decades, refugees have seamlessly integrated into Swedish society, filling the shortage of workers and without violating the cultural integrity of the country. However, new migrants do not want to assimilate, instead preferring to live in their own ways, which causes conciderable irritation among the local residents.
One such case is a city of Malmö, which over the years have turned into an unofficial migrant capital of Sweden: they make up about 40 percent of the local population.
“The previously dull, gray blocks of workers quarters have turned into noisy streets with cafes and restaurants of oriental cuisine. The captivating aromas of vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger have filled the air. Earlier, you were able to buy a hamburger or a sauerkraut on every corner, now there’re falafels, doners, kebabs,” one of the Swedish locals describes the situation.
With open arms
According to him, at the beginning of migrant crisis, many Swedes brought food, medicine, warm clothing and toys to refugee centers and stations where migrants arrived. Some even opened doors of their own homes to them.
Sweden has always been proud of its generosity towards foreigners. It started at the height of World War II. Sweden has not been destroyed and has retained its industrial potential, its economy continued to develop.
The Kingdom needed manpower, so immigration laws were as soft as possible. The Norwegians fled to the country from the Nazis. Baltics, Jews came next. Then came Iranians, who fled from the persecution of Shah Pahlavi, and the Chileans who hid from Gen. Pinochet. Then came the Eritreans, Somalis and Kurds.
Sweden began to build a social democratic state, and loyalty to newcomers became part of Swedish identity, a symbol of devotion to their moral principles. The state system provided social benefits not only to the native Swedes, but also to refugees: housing, health care, quality education, parental leave, unemployment benefits – they had everything.
By the early 1990s, the kingdom was accepting 40,000 refugees a year. Everything changed in 1992. After the war in Yugoslavia, almost 700,000 people applied to Western European countries for asylum. Traditionally, Stockholm responded first, but was forced to tighten immigration policies, limiting the possibility of obtaining a residence permit and entry into the country. As the American magazine Foreign Policy writes, the Swedes were afraid of the arrival of the Yugoslavs: “People thought that they would bring their war to the Swedish suburbs. Neo-Nazis began to march in the streets. The economy was at its lowest since the 1930s.”
But after a while they, like other refugees, organically blended into the Swedish society, replenishing the shortage of workers. The cultural integrity of the kingdom was not affected. “Some Bosnians now work as ministers in our government, others are treating us,” Lisa Pelling of the Arena Group think tank, which studies refugee problems, explains.
When the migrant crisis broke out in Europe in 2015, most of the refugees flocked to Sweden and Germany. Germany, still feeling the guilt for World War II, proclaimed an open door policy. Despite this, Sweden still received the largest number of migrants per capita.
However, the behavior of newcomers was very different from the usual. Migrants settled in the outskirts of large cities, did not integrate with the locals, littered the streets and committed petty crimes. In some places, their share reaches 80 percent of the total population, writes Deutsche Welle.
Unemployment became another serious problem. Narrow specialization prevails in Sweden: in order to work you need a high qualification, which migrants do not have. In addition, you need to speak Swedish.
From love to hate
But latest polls show Swedish patience is drying up – a poll conducted in autumn of 2017 showed that 41 percent of local citizens believe that Sweden accepts too many refugees, while in the middle of 2016 it was only 29 percent. Journalists and politicians refuse to discuss these issues in fears of being labelled as racists and xenophobes.
Meanwhile, among ordinary Swedes, calls for changing immigration laws are getting more vocal. Refugees have the right to retrain at the expense of the state, but in the past year only 30 percent of migrants who have completed the integration program were able to find work or continue their education. On average, Sweden spends about four billion dollars a year on migrants, although until recently this amount was less than a billion dollars. It is theorized that a country with population of 10 million people will face economic problems soon, if it continues to accept dozens of thousands migrants per year.
As Ivar Arpi, columnist for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet writes – “people bring it up, lose friends over it, but it’s still there”
“Last summer, my grandmother nearly died of hunger in the hospital, and these migrants receive food and medical aid for free. I think the state should take care of its own people first, and only then help others if something remains”.
Women are also massively displeased with the law, by which migrants with children under seven get several years of paid maternity vacation, regardless of whether they work or not. This law doesn’t apply to Swedes themselves though – they can receive 450 days of paid vacation, but only if they have been employed at the time.
Crime rate has also grown steadily, but the authorities refuse to disclose data on the ethnicity of the suspects, as not to link it with the steady growth of migrant numbers.
With the crime wave spreading across Sweden, number of sexual offences also rose, especially in the southern city of Malmö. At the end of January this year, a young Swede was beaten after she rejected an immigrant advances at the Babel nightclub in the center of Malmö. Sophie Johansson, 19, felt the hands on her buttocks and then between her legs. The girl hit a man so that he fell behind, but was then punched in the face.
She decided to avoid conflict and headed for the exit with her friends but the offender caught up with them and hit Sophie in the head with a bottle. “I thought it was liquid from the bottle flowing in my face, but my friend told me it was blood. I was in shock,”, the girl said. At the end of 2017, several rapes occurred, it was reported that one of the girls genitals were set to fire.
In August 2015, two Eritrean immigrants attacked other shoppers in IKEA in city of Västerås (approximately 100 kilometers from Stockholm), brutally stabbing a 55-year-old Swede and her 28-year-old son.