Sweden’s Immigration Debate

Sweden’s Immigration Debate


Ilmar Reepalu is the Mayor of Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city. He is a man on the move, trying to promote and develop Malmo’s position as a leader in green technology around the world. He can squeeze us in for an interview at 8:30 on a Sunday evening. Uncomplaining, he rides up to Malmo’s City Hall on his bicycle in the dark and rain to talk to us.

We are in Malmo, not to discuss sustainability and fair trade in the city, but rather its massive immigration, which some call a problem, others consider a gift.


One-third of Malmo’s population is foreign-born. Another 10 percent are of a different nationality. The biggest influx these days is from the Muslim world. Many of them are very traditional-- a small group is quite extreme.

Sweden has a population of 9 million — of those, 1.4 million are immigrants. Approximately 100,000 pour in each year. Ilmar Reepalu thinks that’s a good thing.

“Sweden needs lots of immigrants,” he says, “because otherwise we can’t keep up our welfare system. We, as most parts of Europe, have too few people. Within the coming 20 years, we will have a lack of labor force, so we need more people coming to Sweden. We don’t have enough kids from ourselves.”

Sweden has probably the most generous immigration, asylum and welfare policies in the world.

Some natives have had it with this bottomless funding pit. For the first time last year, voters elected the far right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats—giving them a handful of seats in Parliament.

MP Kent Ekeroth disputes the argument that immigration keeps Sweden’s welfare system afloat.

“What kind of immigrants do we take in? It’s people from Somalia who have done nothing but herd sheep their whole life and we expect them to benefit our society? It’s ridiculous.”

The Sweden Democrats advocate cutting back 90 percent on immigration, redirecting the money currently spent on housing and caring for refugees to programs to improve life in their home countries.

“If you bring one immigrant to Sweden, it’s expensive. It costs a lot of money. If you put that money to use in Africa or the Middle East or wherever, you can help hundreds more.” Ekeroth goes even further, “If you put this money over there to help them with food, with medicine, with education or whatever, you can help hundreds, maybe thousands, more. So what’s more humane? To help one person lead a life of luxury here in Sweden or to help 1000 to avoid starvation in Africa?”

The Sweden Democrats’ views have made them targets both of Sweden’s left, and of immigrants. Ekeroth travels with security.

The tensions that have come as a result of the swelling immigration have affected all sides.

Riots have periodically broken out in a largely Muslim neighborhood of Malmo, called Rosengard, sparked by the perception of mistreatment of residents by the police or other authorities. Firefighters at the scenes of some of these riots have been attacked. As a result, they will often refuse to answer calls to put out fires there without police escort.

There has been an Islamophobic backlash. Scandinavia’s largest mosque happens to be in Malmo. It was set on fire in 2004. The culprit was never found. An imam was shot on the premises. The head of the Islamic Center at Malmo’s main mosque, a man named Bejzat Becirov, regularly receives hate mail, adorned with pigs and pictures of Usama Bin Laden.

Becirov, a moderate Muslim from the former Yugoslavia, and hence, a European, from a community where women did not typically wear the veil, thinks the culprits behind these attacks on his mosque may be neo-Nazis, but may also be extremist Muslims who don’t like Becirov’s message of integration.

He thinks immigrants to Sweden should try harder to blend in.

“Since religion doesn’t say anything about how you should dress, maybe it’s a good idea to try to take a look at how everybody else is behaving, and try to present themselves and adapt to that,” he says. “And that would make it easier for them. Perhaps things start there."

Becirov acknowledges that it’s harder for non-Europeans to adapt to a liberal place like Sweden.

“If you look at Muslims coming from the Middle East, I think it takes 15 to 20 years before they are integrated—a generation.”

Becirov believes the number of Malmo Muslims who subscribe to extremist ideology is small, but that their recruiting methods are aggressive. In his words, python-like.

Ekeroth worries about how those extreme elements exercise their authority.

“There’s unofficial Shariah police going around Rosengard, checking how women dress, and there are unofficial Shariah courts in Malmo, being used,” he says.

Despite the controversy, Swedes we interviewed outside Malmo’s main station were supportive of their country’s immigration policies.

One young woman told Fox News, “I think we should take more. I know that not many people would agree with me.”

A young man adds, “I think it’s good. It creates great diversity.”

Another young woman, when asked about the face of Sweden changing dramatically due to massive immigration, said, “I think everything we call culture right now, it’s been so fluid throughout history. I don’t think it can be overruled like that. Everything that comes in, it just adds to the culture, it doesn’t take away.”

Sweden has taken in more Iraqi refugees than the United States has, the mayor of Malmo points out. That is something many Swedes are proud of. Mayor Reepalu believes that rather than cut back on immigration, Sweden should do more to help those coming to Sweden adapt to their new lives, especially the children.

“The challenge,” he says, “is to have teachers good enough to take this quite tough situation, where you have lots of children coming into the schools, coming directly from conflict zones in different parts of the world, carrying with them lots of trauma of course.

“To take care of that—to help those people get a good start in their lives.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/10/28/swedens-immigration-debate/?test=latestnews#ixzz1cAyw1zcc

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/10/28/swedens-immigration-debate/?test=latestnews


Let me get this straight. The Swedes need the Muslims because Swedes aren't making enough Swedes? Why not stop living like permanent children and raise families? They are ending up with a massive welfare state benefit burden because these Muslims aren't going to become the next Swedish generation of taxpayers. The Left in Europe is insane.

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I don't think it's that bad. When Sweden gets Sharia law the unemployment rate will decease with fewer women in the work force. If they can power through the increase due to the influx of unskilled workers until that bright shiny day it will be all good. Also over-population is great for the environment or at least that is what I have heard. If every city was as big as shanghai the world would be a better place and every native species would be as well off as the panda.

 

Immigration doesn't bother me perse, because we too in Belgium, need them and their children.

What bothers me, as was pointed out in this article too, is the rampid Conservatism of some of these immigrants and their so-called unofficial "zedenpolitie" or in English "moral police" (in the article it's called Sharia police).

When teenage girls of Muslim heritage get set on fire because they tell their parents they are gay, when peaceful homosexuals in Brussels or Antwerp get harrassed by these "Islamic moral police", when teenage girls of seemingly muslim heritage (not much of a difference between e.g. someone of Venezuela or Lebanon) get stopped and told to wear a headscarf...

Well, let me just say my blood is set to boil -- we need to take of these disturbing elements by being more selective at the borders, giving a thorough civil education, language skills, etc.

Edit: need to point out that what i'm talking about is the exception, not the rule. Especially the younger generation of muslim-heritage are very well integrated to the point that they are constantly up-in-arms with their conservative parents...

 

BTW -- the Don must stop to make a fair of his article. All the bells and whistles are very disturbing and distracting.

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Makes sense. I guess the progressives just want to reboot to the Middle Ages.

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That's odd, the Muslims that bombed London were young Brits. The parents are the respectful ones over there. BTW- those aren't retirees attacking police and firefighters in Sweden or Paris.


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instead of wasting money on the welfare system, the government could offer financial incentives to native Swedes to have more kids. But that won't happen because that would decrease the number of Brown people.

 

Despite the article's extreme slant, I will agree that Sweden should be more selective in its immigration policies.

There are plenty of people that would love to move to Sweden, but they should orient their policies to favor wealthy and educated immigrants.

You don't need waves of poor and uneducated people to keep your society afloat. No one needs that.

 

Of course , every country has the right to determine its own immigration policies. But happened to :

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"





...

 

That was a practical mindset when we had an agricultural and factory economy, but it's not practical for us now, nor is it for Sweden.

 

The golden door was scraped, melted down, and shipped to China, so that they would buy our bonds.

FYI- that was written by a socialist, and we had a nation to build.


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In some states, especially in the South -- e.g. Alabamba -- they have tens of thousands of farmer workers to little (in part because of strict immigration law). It even has come as far, that now farmers are using *forced labor* provided by inmates.

 

You still have -- your infrastructure is falling into pieces.

 

OF COURSE these countries want "poor and uneducated" people!

The BUSINESSES want CHEAP LABOR for dirty work! That cheap labor is EXACTLY what keeps your society afloat!

You can't export sewer cleaning, farm stoop labor, animal slaughtering, and janitorial work to China.

 

Meanwhile here the benefits of this massive non white immigration

Swedish girls dye blonde hair a different colour to avoid rape
Six Percent of Swedish Girls Raped Every Year? | The Brussels Journal

Ethnologist Maria Bäckman, in her study “Whiteness and gender,” has followed a group of Swedish girls in the suburb of Rinkeby outside Stockholm, where natives have been turned into a minority of the inhabitants due to immigration. The subjects “may encounter prejudices such as the idea that Swedish girls act and dress in a sexually provocative way or that blonde girls are easy.” Bäckman relates that several of the Swedish girls she interviewed stated that they had dyed their hair to avoid sexual harassment. They experienced that being blonde involves old men staring at you, cars honking their horns and boys calling you “whore.”
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4097

Rinkeby had 15,051 inhabitants as at December 31, 2007. 89.1% of the population of Rinkeby has a first- or second-generation immigrant background as of 31 December, 2007.

That's the area of Stockholm these girls live in, they are seriously out numbered.

Rinkeby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinkeby

That's how you know your country has been invaded.

 

you know you're town is invaded when every rapist is muslim

Father saves girl from Paki rape gang

this is right across Europe btw. not isolated to Sweden.
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t778247-2/#post8942424

Spot the Swede?

Children of Rinkeby.

Rinkeby Tensta Internationella FK
http://www.irinkeby.nu/Siteverktygdata/1/1/140/page3.htm

 

These people are not Swedes.

They are non white invaders with swedish citizenship.

I like to use google street view in cases like this. Let's you plop right down in the middle of it.
Rinkeby, Stockholm, Sweden - Google Maps
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sou...d=XdS-6alHf822hes-UUoN1g&cbp=11,207.78,,0,9.6

 

Immigrants in Sweden feel less safe: study - The Local

This is typical media trick. They feel unsafe as they have created 3rd world ghettos that are unsafe areas. They were safe and nice before they moved in.

http://www.thelocal.se/31954/20110210/

Now where are all the White Swedes raping these immigrants?

The dishonesty by the pro multiculturalists is simply astounding.

 

The best thing Sweden could do for it's non-ancestral European population would be to stop immigration from other third world countries. It's their best bet if they want to allow them to assimilate over time, and to prevent the rise of extreme ethnic-nationalist sentiments. Same thing with the U.S.

 

The best thing for Sweden would be to offer these immigrants repatriation money to go back to their own countries.

Then stop it from ever happening again.

These people offer not 1 benefit to Sweden.

 

We aren't using sod in 2011.

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What does this have to do with Muslims?

Blondes I know have complained about this from men of EVERY race, whites being the worst.

In fact, I note your quotes mention NOTHING about "Muslims"

FAIL

 

Are you trying to suggest Sweden has been "INVADED" because a particular apartment area, which looks a bit low-income, has a high percentage of "dark people" in it? People who are Naturalized citizens?

The term "racist" in the dictionary has YOUR picture next to it.

Fail.

 

You do realise that Sweden has had a right-wing Goverment since 2006? This isn't the Swedish left talking. It' s the swedish right. Our far right to be honest and believe me quite a few are not happy about it. I imagine SD might raise even futher in the next ellection.

 

We already have another thread about immigration in Sweden:
http://www.politicalforum.com/western-europe/203518-sweden-now-violent-muslim-country.html

(although it is a one-sided anti-immigration perspective)

As for why the right would be supporting immigration, you might see:
http://www.politicalforum.com/western-europe/214170-how-left-being-manipulated-immigration.html