What to make of Sweden and its forthcoming election? This
piece from Donna Laframboise has a concise angle on the scale of the Swedish immigration
debacle which has shaken the political establishment.
Twenty-five years ago a majority of Swedish voters had already soured on immigration. But journalists who dared say so out loud lost their job.
The elites – politicians, celebrities, bureaucrats, media companies – have instead continued to welcome newcomers with open arms. This extensive report explains that “Sweden alone accepted more asylum seekers than France and the UK combined” in 2015. While Sweden’s population is 10 million, France and the UK have 133 million between them.
Twenty-five years ago a majority of Swedish voters had already soured on immigration. But journalists who dared say so out loud lost their job.
The elites – politicians, celebrities, bureaucrats, media companies – have instead continued to welcome newcomers with open arms. This extensive report explains that “Sweden alone accepted more asylum seekers than France and the UK combined” in 2015. While Sweden’s population is 10 million, France and the UK have 133 million between them.
It is not easy to understand why any government in the
developed world would attempt to assimilate unwieldy numbers of immigrants with
no compelling history of successful assimilation. Why do it? Why not tread
carefully and be far more selective? It seems likely that there are other narratives which
do not pass through the mainstream media, but speculation along those lines risks
venturing into conspiracy theories which are not much help either.
To my mind current Swedish political problems do at least
suggest that there are conspiracies in the sense that there are government
immigration narratives which do not reach the public via mainstream channels.
Of course there is also the simple observation that those
who make immigration decisions are drawn from social classes which escape the
consequences. People lower down the social scale are those who have to live
with those consequences, the disturbing anecdotes and the permanent threat of future
consequences. All in all an extraordinarily foolish situation to have entered
voluntarily, especially as perception is supposed to be the heart of political life.
3 comments:
If as nations we survive the next 20 years I hope somehow we get an accounting of the betrayals we have suffered.
One interesting feature common to most European countries is that when there is a nasty right-wing reaction to immigration, the liberal left and the mainstream media pathologise the individuals, rather than the situation. They are "deplorables", or psychopaths who are the heirs of Hitler. There is rarely any analysis of the background to the disturbances or ugly racism. It simply cannot be the fault of the immigration policies.
As you say, conspiracy theories lead to some distinctly unfruitful lines of thought, but it is now obvious that something rather odd is going on.
Did someone decide that accepting huge numbers of immigrants from the Third World into Europe would somehow "ease the pressure" a little, by reducing the inequalities? That's difficult to believe, because there are hundreds of millions more, and even the numbers we have seen have made little difference.
Or did someone decide that European culture and nationhood ought to be broken, or at least eroded? That doesn't explain why the benign Sweden, of all places, has to be trashed. Swedes were the untroublesome hard-working social liberals all the European left admired.
That leaves the law of unintended consequences. Blair and Bush destroyed North African and Arab dictatorships because they were clueless about world politics; this allowed millions of oppressed unskilled to move; and the social liberals in the EU are so terrified of being called racist or intolerant that they cannot even articulate reasons why rape gangs should not operate with impunity.
As Thud says, I would dearly love to hear some answers...
Thud - so do I but a don't think we are likely to get it.
Sam - there are times when it certainly feels like the law of unintended consequences and that could be down to incompetence. To me it also feels like decline. Maybe this is what decline is like from the inside, the inability to rediscover cultural robustness, the constant drip, drip, drip of failure dressed up as something else.
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