The immigration question: Sweden vs USA

If a visitor stays in central Stockholm, or central Malmo, he struggles to see what all the fuss is about. It is very different from Brussels. The buildings are all modern, the streets spotless, the shop windows, at night, achingly well lit. No way is Sweden turning into the next member of the Arab caliphate. No way has that Malmo deserved its nickname, Ramalmo. No way this city of 300,000 deserves its position alongside Marseilles as a hotbed of crime and Islamic extremism. Or does it?

Well, this is part of the problem. Sweden does take in a lot of immigrants, but they are not visible in the wealthy town centres, partly because they don’t have the kind of well-paid respectable jobs that would take them into the town centre as a matter of course. Instead, they are tucked away in the suburbs, where they live on social security. The employment statistics for immigrants in Sweden are astonishingly bad: after eight years, only one in four immigrants has a full time job and can pay his own way in society. After 15 years in the country, the figure rises to a third, according to statistics cited recently by Dagens Industri, Sweden’s equivalent of the Financial Times.ⁱ By some calculations, native Swedes will be in a minority in the next 15 years. If the immigrant population grows at current rates will continuing to pay as little aggregate tax as they do (compared to social benefits) then Sweden will face a very dark economic future.

To see how Sweden’s demographics are changing fast, it is advisable to visit one of the suburbs – in Stockholm, Rinkeby, or Tensta, or Skarholmen, in Malmo, Rosengard or Seved; or just about anywhere in Sodertälje, Bjorn Borg’s birthplace. In smaller towns all across Sweden, there are dozens of immigrant suburbs now. Signage in Arabic everywhere, schools where there is barely a native Swede and pass rates low in schools regularly subjected to arson attacks. Sweden is now one of the worst school performers in the international schools standards comparison rankings called the PISA tests, administered by the OECD, way below France, Britain and Denmark (none of them stellar performers themselves). A lot of it has to do with the large scale immigration. In Rosengard, few who pass through high school get the kind of grades that would allow them into university or embark on an apprenticeship. Sixty thousand young men arrived from the Middle East classified as “refugee children” last year; many, perhaps most, are older than 18. One Swedish newspaper posed a man-boy with a teddy bear and took Mohammed’s word for it that he was 16; actually, he looked about 30. Swedish people see through these absurdities and are becoming increasingly cynical and angry about the naivete of the Swedish authorities. These “refugee children” are housed expensively in hostels, hotels or blocks of flats. (In one instance, at the cost of 4,000 pounds a month.) The Swedish Migration Agency hired a cruise ship in order to house 2,000 refugees, but every local authority along the Swedish coast refused the ship mooring rights. So the ship remains unoccupied and moored in the Baltic, with a full crew; the whole fiasco cost the taxpayer a billion kronor – and the refugees have had to be housed elsewhere.

The Migration Agency is full of pro immigration activists who spend the taxpayers’ money like water and there is no accountability. A new breed of entrepreneur, the “asylum housing barons” are winners from the most profitable industry currently in Sweden. There is no way to check the “boys’” stories and it is hard to tell where exactly they are from: are they genuinely fleeing America’s and Saudi’s wars in the Middle East, and are they just from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, or do they come from peaceful countries or peaceful parts of those countries and just fleeing poverty – but how then could they afford the thousands of pounds people smugglers charge? Are they economic opportunists or proxies for economic opportunists, so called anchor children for families that will come later – or the rest of the village that will come later? Or are they refugees genuinely fleeing devastation and bombing? Many are; some are not. Some apparently, while born in, say, Iraq, have lived in Turkey or Europe for some years previously and so are not technically fleeing oppression. Several arrived in Sweden well dressed and carrying iPhones. The Finns, less politically correct, sneered at the “iPhone refugees” and closed their borders. Sweden hasn’t done that. There is considerable anger on social media have been involved in molestations of young Swedish girls at music festivals and the like. The youngest girls have been about 12. There have been a couple of murders of inmates and staff at refugee centres; one of a young Swedish woman staff member by a boy who was allegedly 15 but who was revealed by the foreign press – where you have to go to find out these things – to be a man of 22..

People on social media point out that the Prophet Mohammed married a girl of six. Swimming baths are a point of contact between bored arrivals and natives. I see few teenage girls anymore at the swimming baths I frequent. Instead, I see the jacuzzi permanently occupied by these boy men of the Middle East. Several Swedish swimming baths have appointed anti harassment guards, native Swedish girls of an older age who keep a beady eye on the young Muslim men so that they don’t misbehave against young girls. Many Swedes are terrified of the growing influence of Islam. The Syrians escaping the America’s war in the Middle East may be the best of the lot: relatively westernised looking, urban professionals, many Christian, and Syria having once been a mid-income country. But Sweden has also been receiving immigrants (of both sexes) from other, much poorer, countries, where Somalia and Eritrea stand out. Illiteracy is common among Somalis and I speak to teachers of the compulsory Swedish for immigrants courses who say it is very, very difficult to teach illiterates how to read.

Many Swedes don’t like what they hear about Sharia laws: thieves that get their hands chopped off, stonings for adultery, women who have to wear the veil. (Muslim women in Swedish swimming baths have started wearing burkinis.) They look at the purges of the Christian populations of the Middle East that have followed Islamist takeovers of Iraq, Libya and parts of Syria and wonder whether, if one day Muslims were to become a majority in Sweden, native secular and Christian Swedes would suffer the same fate. Muslim intellectuals talk themselves about minority rights as long as they are in a minority, but in countries where they are in a majority, there are no minority rights, Swedes worried about mass immigration say. US ally Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow the import of bibles or the set up of Christian churches in their kingdom (and doesn’t take in any refugees for the wars.. Meanwhile they cry Islamophobia when Europeans object to the expansion of Saudi-funded political Islam into Europe.

You have so-called balcony girls – Muslim teens shoved off balconies by the family because their boyfriends are not Muslims – and a couple of honour killings which have made headlines.. The elite in media and politics continue to talk about innovation, liberal individualism, and the enriching dynamism produced by a mixed society. Just look at the United States! But the USA has almost no Muslims. The reputation of the Swedish media is very low among many Swedes I talk to. Liberal left journalists refuse to see the dangers of Islam: for instance, they said it was a “lorry” that ran down and killed the 84 people in Nice. Then they blamed the man’s psychological instability; feminists blamed it on men in general. You had to go to alternative blogs to find a spade called a spade: the man was a Muslim connected to ISIS and that was why he ploughed his truck into the crowds on the Nice promenade.

It is strange how Sweden has become such a Trojan horse for globalist values in Europe when Sweden wasn’t bombed in world war 2 or re-engineered after it. The Swedish elite, aware they live in a peripheral location of their country in the scheme of things, have always looked to the hegemon of the moment for cultural inspiration – currently the social model is the USA – and are perhaps blind to the essential, deep values, rooted in the peasant, that have made the country the success it is the industrial era. The Swedish business right has always been very internationalist, while the fashion conscious Stockholm intellectual left has uncritically swallowed thinkers in other countries advocating the end of the nation state and the benefits of mass migration. The internationalism of the business class – and the need to export, because they cannot rely on the home market – has blinded the business elites to the fact that their success relies on a domestic bedrock of solid Swedish laws and values.

The Swedish elite say that migrants bring the kind of dynamic, hard-working approach that has helped America to flourish. But Americans speak a world language and don’t have a developed welfare state – the migrants have to work, they cannot lean back on a generous welfare state like migrants to Sweden can. That forces people into work; while the Swedish welfare state is a barrier to getting people into work – as well as causing huge resentment among high tax-paying natives at these “free-loaders”. AN important fact in Sweden today is the power of women. America forged its values at a time when masculine values dominated. Swedish feminists are naive about what motivates males and the rules needed to bind the young There is a tendency to treat the incomers as substitutes for children and always engage in dialogue and reach-out – regardless of whether this works or not.

Sweden gets Muslim immigrants, radicalised by America’s warmongering in the Middle East. While the USA gets Hispanic immigrants – better. Language is more of a barrier in Sweden: There are widespread complaints from teachers than migrants are not bothering to learn Swedish in the language courses the government provides for free. Further, America is a more business friendly country: Sweden’s high taxes don’t exactly encourage small businesses; the immigrant who tries to start his own company in response to not breaking into the job market faces an uphill struggle. That is why Sweden has the largest employment gap between native-borns and migrants in the EU. The Swedish elite want Sweden to be like America – without paying heed to the fact that Sweden is different society, so immigration will have a different effect. And annual immigration, in proportion to the population, is much higher to Sweden than it was to the USA in the heyday of Ellis Island, critics say. You have to be able to talk about volumes and absorption capacities.

I spend a lot of time in a Swedish town called Skara, population 10,000, a small town idyll of slow traffic and wooden villas, and not a single traffic light. I would say about half the people on the street are non white. As individuals, of course, immigrants are just anyone else. But the bright gloss put upon the influx by the local paper – lots of smiling Arab kids on the front page – does not impress the locals who hear from shopkeepers they know that break-ins are on the rise and, and that new arrivals haggle for everything and sometimes steal bits of fruit and hide under their clothes. Wrapped up Somali mothers and their kids are everywhere. People are annoyed when immigrants cause a fuss on the bus and invariably don’t have the correct change. One man I know who works as a car mechanic says the only thing his white staff and the white customers talk about is immigration. White middle aged males talk of forming “civil guards” against the migrants.

Sweden is not only the country that has taken in more refugees per capita than anyone else in the current crisis (and second in numbers overall, after Germany). It is also a toxic brew of feminism, post nationalism and alienation between political elites and their electorates that may be more extreme than elsewhere in Europe. These three factors, combined with a history of a strong state that drives through social engineering projects on the elite’s say-so, have ensured the large scale immigration we see today.

 

Trump against the oligarchs

The mainstream media in both Europe and the US celebrate Clinton and excoriate Trump. It’s reminiscent of the 1980 election: Reagan was dismissed as a maverick fool while the biens pensants rooted for Jimmy Carter.

Even though the media coverage makes the most of Trump’s apparently repeated gaffes, he is still within striking distance of the establishment darling Hillary Clinton, just three percent off, according to a poll conducted by the news agency Reuters. Three percent is within the margin of error. What this shows is that there is a strong groundswell of support among the American people for Trump, despite the almost uniformly negative coverage he is receiving.

The situation surrounding this US election is actually repeated all over the Western world, in that there is widespread public distrust against anything that the mainstream media, TV as well as press, have to say. That sentiment is coupled with a hostility towards the political establishments in all western countries.

I think the information revolution and especially the internet have played a major part in this: for the first time, the general public are able to get information beyond what is offered by the establishment’s carefully controlled media narratives. This has made people strongly aware of the fact that until now they have been served news and analyses that suit political and media establishments.

People living in the West who thought they lived in mature democracies have understood just how little power and influence they have over the political process. There is an acute sense of disappointment and cynicism about the privileged elites that rule them. Statistics in America, at least, show that the poor and lower middle class feel that they are much worse off than their parents’ generation. There are revolutionary sentiments afoot and these nourish the rapidly growing protest movements. There is no equivalent anger in those parts of the world that have never experienced or believed in the myth of democracy.

In America, there are two candidates who represent this new groundswell: Bernie Sanders for the Democrats and Donald Trump among the Republicans. Both of them have challenged the elites of their respective parties. Their main opponent is Hillary Clinton, who is supported by those political, economic and media establishments who don’t want to see the status quo upset. Clinton is backed by the richest of the rich, led by the international plotter and globalist George Soros as well as international interests such as the Saudi Royal Family.

The Social Democrat-flavoured Sanders was carried to a very good second place in the Democratic Primary race on a wave of indignation and rage, predominantly from the young – all aimed at the political aristocracy of Washington exemplified by Hillary. His successful election campaign was considerably assisted by small donations from the general public, so called crowdfunding. He was systematically opposed by his party’s elite, who had very early – and improperly – taken sides in favour of Clinton. If he had not been systematically diminished by the oligarchs’ media outlets, and if it had not been for manipulated opinion polls and strange occurrences during the primaries, he would arguably have been the Democrats’ candidate today. After Sanders had endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention he was booed out of the congress hall by his erstwhile supporters; the next day Sanders left the Democratic party, a move that suggests that not everything had been above board during the primary race. These events have not exactly represented the finest moments of American democracy.

On the Republican side, the billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump was an outsider with no political experience when he launched his campaign; but has managed to capture the public’s anger with the elites like no other figure. His promise is to return the working class jobs that have migrated to Asia back to America in order to give the working class and the poor hope of a better future. Apparently the official unemployment figures are understated for this group.

Like Sanders, Trump has been thoroughly undermined by the mainstream media and he therefore chosen a very controversial strategy to make an impact. His total lack of political experience combined with completely hostile media coverage have led to him making a number of badly judged and provocative remarks. The MSM paint Trump as a complete clown as a means to discredit him.

The opinion polls have tended to favour Clinton, but again biased forces may be at work here.

Reuters has been attacked for the way it conducts its surveys to favour Clinton but the final result may be different: the polling firms underestimated both Sanders’s and Trumps support in the primaries, partly because of the so called Bradley effect, a phenomenon that is actually familiar to psephologists. When voters favour a candidate regarded as controversial, they are less likely to tell a stranger from a poll firm that they are going to vote for him. In the UK, similarly, pollsters hugely underestimated the strength behind the anti-establishment Brexit Leave vote. It seems the public are telling the pollsters what the pollsters want to hear, rather than what they intend to do in the voting booth. Opinion polls no longer give an accurate picture of what is going on.

Trump’s campaign funds started to increase quickly in July, having lagged Clinton for a long time, perhaps because Sanders’s voters are transferring their loyalties. His ideology may turn out to be less important than the fact that, like Sanders, he has taken on the Washington oligarchy. He is not the ideal candidate, it has to be said: impulsive, inexperienced, narcissistic. But Clinton is the candidate of big business and choosing her will mean a tiresome continuation of bombing enemies into submission in defence of the globalist/US world order. There is huge potential for tensions with the BRICS countries, and the ever present nightmare possibility of a nuclear war with China or Russia, if Hillary does get elected.

If Trump gets elected, we may see a different world: more power to nation states and less power to the forces of globalisation.  This is the most interesting election in a generation.

The rage in Skara

Skara is a small town near Gothenburg that has fallen on hard times. The local agricultural university and the Scan meat manufacturing plant, the main employers, have all but closed down.
The Sweden Democrats, the only party that calls for restrictions in immigration, are big in the area, which is largely rural and agricultural, one of the breadbaskets of Sweden. The countryside around Skara is full of prosperous farms.

The Sweden Democrats despise Stockholm for imposing mass immigration and compulsory multiculturalism on Sweden and for conducting witch hunts against those who don’t agree with the elites’ mass immigration project. The Sweden Democrats are, in some polls, the largest party in the country, and the rural area centred Skara is one of their heartlands. The elites, living in posh central Stockholm, don’t actually have to bear the consequences of their mass-immigration policy.  Stockholm is very segregated. The diversity of the district of Sodermalm, where many journalists live and regurgitate their multiculturalist propaganda, is very specific: there are flamboyant homosexuals in the cafes. But no headscarves and few non-white faces. It is a different story in the suburbs – and, increasingly, in small town and rural Sweden.  The suburbs are worst: Sweden now has 55 no-go zones where the police fear to tread and over 150 “outsider areas”, immigrant districts characterised by low employment, high crime and low education.

It will be a while before rural Skara reaches the level of deprivation experienced by the migrant suburbs in the big cities, but the little town is certainly not heading in the right direction. The Swedish people, the people of Skara, did not sign up to this fundamental, inexorable, change in their society imposed from above, on a whim, not forced upon the country, by the politicians.

Like many small towns, Skara is experiencing the full consequences of Sweden’s open borders policy.  About 2,000 asylum seekers have arrived in the past 18 months, and it has transformed the town of 10,000. During the daytime, asylum seekers are visible beyond even their high numbers, since the native resident population is at work.  Asylum seekers – women in headscarves – are in every supermarket, loiter in squares and shopping centres.  At the end of the school day, a good 60% of the kids with satchels are non native Swedes.  At the local café, Nockes, which pumps out Christmas hits from Radio Mix Megapol and where Christmas lights frame the window to create the typical cosy Swedish Christmas atmosphere, groups of young men from Eritrea and Somalia sit nursing their cups of coffee while clicking away at their smartphones.  They have thin, suspicious, faces and are an exotic, slightly hostile, presence. It gets dark, rapidly, at 3 pm in December, the “midnight of the year”. They gaze out through the window at the square.

Some of the refugees are of course fleeing the unimaginable horror of the Syrian war, but clearly this lot aren’t. They are not remotely Syrian.  According to whistleblowers from the migration agency who have posted stories of fraud anonymously on the web, many are economic opportunists, fleeing poorer countries without absolutely pressing security problems. They are simply attracted to Sweden as sold on the internet by people smugglers as the land or promise, for the individual, to be followed by their families and eventually their extended families to settle in, and populate with their descendants, changing Sweden into a different country.

Of course they want to move and have a better life. That doesn’t mean Europe’s nation states have an obligation to let them in. Here, recent notions of universal human rights clash with the older of the nation state as a club, in whose values and accumulated assets the members have invested and to which not every outsider has the right to automatic access. Thanks to the internet and the smartphone social media bush telegraph, everyone knows exactly what to do and what to say to get into Sweden.  Claiming to have lost one’s passport is essential to prevent the Swedish authorities from being able to identify for certain the country the asylum seeker came from so they could send him back to it.

It is funny that the staff working for the Migration Agency haven’t been instructed to reject people who don’t travel with their passports, but political guidance has been lacking from a government and a political class that has refused to tackle the immigration question responsibly.

“Funny,” one local said to me. “The refugees always lose their passports on their ‘arduous journeys’ but they never lose their smartphones.” The smartphones of course keep the asylum seekers in touch with the next generation of arrivals, the people back home, the next wave waiting to come to Sweden.  These smartphones are migration facilities.  Because it is a mistake to think of them as refugees. They are migrants, and this is the era of great migration.

The costs of asylum reception are borne by the state for the first two years after the refugee’s arrival, but after that the local municipality pays for their upkeep and funds their lifestyle on social security. There is some extremely short-term thinking going on in the municipalities that were keen to receive refugees for the central grants they received in return.  In some cases they were able to make a small profit on the difference between the fixed grant per refugee they were given by the state, and the smaller sum of money the municipality paid to asylum entrepreneurs to house the arrivals they had been assigned.  But in the long run, any money gained that way is sure to be lost in the benefits that the municipality itself has to pay after the two years of state funding for their resident refugees are up.  What were the municipality’s officials thinking?

Since the refugees have been coming for over two years, the burden of the first batch has now been transferred from the state to the Skara municipality. Result: Skara’s residents have suffered  cuts to local services. The local hospital policlinic (vårdcentral) is closing down to save money, partly because of the costs diverted to asylum seekers, and the town’s 10,000 residents risk being without care unless a private healthcare actor takes over and offers much lower prices to the municipality’s healthcare buyer.

There is little prospect of even medium-term tax revenue from the incomers. “There are no jobs for us; Where the immigrants going to work?” people say. “They can’t even spell their names”.  Even the street cleaners in Skara are native whites:  they drive their machines around the Somalians, dawdling on park benches.

The State statistics board has just republished a study from the OECD survey of adult skills, called PIAAC, that appears to back up what to an outside observer may sound like blind native prejudice.  In all OECD countries there is a literacy gap between natives and migrants.  But in Sweden, the gap is larger than in any other OECD country: a 55 percent disparity between native adult and immigrant reading skills. In contrast, the gap in the UK is around 20%, in Ireland zero.  This is partly because Swedish natives do unusually well on this internationally standardised reading test – Swedish adults are an educated lot – but also because the quality of immigrants Sweden gets is unusually low. Other rich countries that act as migrant magnets have points systems that exclude the uneducated, while Sweden takes in all comers.  The likelihood is that there will only be further cuts, or the start of  tax rises, as more and more of the unemployable refugees that have been flooding into Skara in the past two years get transferred to the municipality’s tab.

The native population is turning to the Sweden Democrats, the anti immigration party which has even whispered that it wants to start a voluntary repatriation programme.  The leading members of the party in the region all seem to be women in their 30s and 40s: attractive, outspoken, earthy, it is hard pin the “Fascist” label on them, the way Swedish State broadcasting corporation sometimes seem to insinuate. They are more like Valkyries. They want their country back.  They didn’t vote for this fundamental change in their way of life, and they are convinced most Swedish people wouldn’t go along with it either. There are only two reasons why their popularity isn’t even greater than it is. (They are currently the biggest party in some national polls.) One, the Swedish people are lied to by their media as to the extent of the great migration taking place, and so far the influx is just about piecemeal enough to be deceptive.  The immigration affects places like Skara which have little clout in the national debate.

Second, the extreme degree of ostracisation and negative propaganda to which the Sweden Democrats are subjected by journalists. This means that the popularity of the Sweden Democrats tends to be underestimated by pollsters – who on earth is going to tell a perfect stranger, a pollster, that they support the Sweden Democrat, these political pariahs? It also persuades some people not to support the Sweden Democrats, out of fear that their reputations or job prospects would suffer if their sympathies became known.

None of  the Sweden Democrats’ proposals stand a chance of becoming law for as long as the political class in Stockholm continues to ostracise the party and revile everything it stands for.

Meanwhile, in Skara, a childcare assistant tells me of traumatised children that don’t speak Swedish and demand a lot of attention. They are a disruptive presence in the nurseries. She works extremely hard, and the municipality can’t afford to hire more preschool staff. They can’t afford overtime either.  She is at the end of her tether.

A local commuter, Jorgen, takes the bus to work in the nearby town of Mariestad.  En route, they pass the spa resort, called Lundsbrunn, whose historic 19^th century hotel and spa complex has been turned into an asylum centre to the intense chagrin of the local residents, who disrupted a local meeting with angry protests.

Jorgen says: “There is always a lot of faffing around when the refugees get on the bus.  They can’t pay for a ticket, they won’t pay for ticket.  They don’t understand what they are supposed to do. Always a lot of shouting and they don’t do what they are told.” The bus is always delayed while the faffing around goes on. One on occasion two women refused to stop a child running around in the aisle while the bus travelled on the motorway. Despite repeated requests from the bus driver, the parents wouldn’t scoop the child up until the driver parked on the side of the road and threw the women off the bus.  Another delay: my friend, an accountant, was late for work that day.  These are the first signs of social chaos, perhaps, as Sweden takes in more and more people from failed states.   Will the organised Sweden he grew up with, where everyone knew exactly what to do, stood obediently in queues and recycled their garbage, last another generation. Two generations?

A third friend, a retired teacher, lives in a leafy street. At the end of the street there is a fancy apartment block, where the top floor five bedroom flat has been given over to a Somalian family with six children.  It is a luxury flat, what have they done to deserve it? At the same time, his mother, who received elderly care in the home, has seen the services given to her suffering cuts.  Every day the Somali kids blithely walk past his window, trailing the mother in full Muslim covering dress.  Every day, he finds himself beside himself with rage. Five children, five little undeserving creatures. Living in a luxury flat. In twenty years’ time, will they become working tax payers and pay for his old age? Will they? Don’t count on it. More likely these children will turn into adult welfare state consumers as their mother is a welfare consumer.  Perhaps each of the five will bring a wife over from Somalia, and have five kids who, in turn, will live off the state for their entire lives. It can’t go on like this, it can’t. What sort of bankrupt Sweden full of nonworking Somalis will his grandchildren grow up to inherit?

He reads alternative news websites which collate stories about the costs of immigration to Sweden. One found that woman can get backdated social security money for the time they lived in Somalia.  These people – who have never paid taxes in their whole lives, never will, and who barely speak Swedish.  Teacher friends who work in adult education say these people couldn’t point to Sweden on the map, and if they learned to spell their name after three years that was an achievement. If the  Swedish elite could have designed something to make normal Swedish people hate immigrants, they couldn’t have gone about it in a better way than they have done, a generous no-questions-asked welfare state that contains no incentives for incomers to get into the work and contribute to generations of embedded capital the Swedish natives have built up.

A fourth friend complained that every time she goes to the local swimming baths, there are Muslim boys there who refuse to do as they are told. They don’t get out of the Jacuzzi during its cleaning session between bubble sessions. Many of them say they can swim even if they can’t swim. (They are not allowed into the adult pool area of they can’t swim.) They wear their underwear into the swimming pools  even though they are explicitly warned against it.  There are fights and trouble.

Yesterday I met Bert Carlsson at the municipal swimming pool. Carlsson is a local celebrity who likes to take the pulse of the common people, so visits the swimming baths once a week, usually on Tuesday evenings.  The Aufguss sauna sessions are well-attended. In Sweden, he is still remembered for his career as a record producer of a virtual music factory of Eurovision winners in the 1980s- 1990s.  Sweden’s biggest pop stars, like Carola Haggkvist, were part of his stable.

Then he resaddled as an anti immigration politician and then has resaddled yet again, in his seventies, as Sweden’s most notorious “asylum baron”, owner of dozens of former youth hostels, hotels and other locations all over Sweden where refugees are housed on arrival.  One of the biggest reception centres is in Skara, Carlsson’s hometown.  Located in a former TB hospital some kilometres from Skara, it features in the media sometimes: the local newspaper published regular reports of the fights that take place there. One migrant smashed dozens of windows when told he would have to leave Sweden because application had been refused. (A rare case of rejection).

There are frequent fires at the asylum centres, but unlike the claims from left wing activists and the media, it appears that these fires are started by the migrants themselves, bored out of their minds. According to a report on Swedish Radio, the security police haven’t found a single instance attributable to that bogeyman beloved of the media, the white racist vigilantes.  While overstating Swedish native racism, the media completely blank out the possibility that it might not be a good idea to take people who have just fled a savage war in the Middle East, and come from different sides, and put them all in the same reception centre.  The Shias don’t get on with the Sunnis, the Somalis don’t get on with Eritreans, and everyone hates the Christian refugees.

Some Muslim women who get too uppity from the whiff of freedom Sweden seems to offer pay the price: one young woman was pushed from a third floor window and crashed into the asphalt below, causing serious injury. No culprit could be identified. One friend whose husband works there is a social worker says the police are called the centre, often, far more often than you’d think from reading the newspapers.

The newspapers have their skewed agendas. So for instance today’s local paper mentions the crisis meeting between the regional council officials. The officer in charge of refugee questions, Leif Isberg, tells reporters that the pressure on “the social services and on schools is enormous. Many municipalities have signalled that they have reached the point of exhaustion.” Another official, Staffan Cavefors, says “the situation is very serious in the hospital clinics, and children’s clinics but also dentist clinics”. The paper publishes stories like this – but it was in the inside pages. More prominent displayed in the newspaper was a cutesy story headlined: “New times ahead for Lundsbrunn” , accompanied with a picture of  happy, lolling migrant children. The propaganda is so transparent you can tell it has been put out by inexperienced (but still fervently right-on) local journalists.

One journalist friend of mine who works at a local paper in a neighbouring town says that when she suggests examining immigration critically her words are left hanging in the air as her newspaper editor moves with icy politeness to hear the next reporter’s ideas.  When historians apportions blame for who lost Sweden, turned it into a ungovernable, corrupt third world country, journalists will bear much of the blame.

The refugees stay in his centres until their case is processed.  Once they have been granted the permanent right to , they move into Skara and are given paid for flats, initially paid for by the national budget. As said, after two years, the responsibility is taken over by the local taxpayers.  (The Swedish tax system differs from the British one in that the lion’s share of taxes is raised, and spent, locally, so the tax rate can vary from municipality to municipality. )

Carlsson is a pro, and he manages to be all things to all people, even at the swimming baths. He pleases any left wingers who might be present by saying that many councils are “full of racists”. They use planning permission restrictions very creatively to prevent Carlsson from opening as many refugee centres as he wants: which is why some municipalities are very much more populated with  asylum seekers than others. This forces councils into short term solutions like proper hotels, since Carlsson’s venues are full to capacity.

Carlsson also appeals to the immigration sceptics, since he is honest about what is wrong with the system. He admits the migrants in his care are not learning Swedish – and don’t allow their sisters to either. He tells us there should be age tests of the young men who come and claim asylum as minors. (“Single refugee children” in the Swedish parlance)  This is because minors get fast tracked applications and a better chance of permanent residence permits.  Sweden has refused to conduct wrist-bone X-ray age tests on the minors to confirm that they are under 18. Denmark has done so and finds a good proportion lying about their age. Swedish left wingers says that to conduct age tests would “breach their human rights”. Swedish social media have made fun about the “world’s fastest 14-year-old”, a photo of a man in his twenties running in a school gymnastic race for middle teens.  “Of course many are over 18,” booms Carlsson genially when I ask him. But the migration agency makes the decisions: he just obeys them.  He charges a smaller premium than nearly everyone else for taking them on.  Which gives him smaller profit margins than some actors in the refugee centre market, about ten percent. According to an investigation by Aftonbladet, some of the players in the industry are international risk capital companies, who pay their taxes in London and Zurich, and whose profit margins are over 50% on each refugee.  Money that goes from the Swedish taxpayer to the global capitalists, getting rich on Sweden’s demographic self abnegation.

Carlsson also says that there should be a crackdown on family reunifications, which means that each arrival – and there are ten thousand migrants a week arriving at the moment – will eventually bring many relations in, legally  “That is why they send their eldest sons to Europe,” says Carlsson. “The rest of the family follows on.” That means that the final immigration figure to Sweden will be  higher than the headline figure for asylum arrivals, which is high enough as it is, currently running at 180,000 on a yearly basis.

How large is this figure?  It is true, as immigration enthusiasts say, that this is very small in relation to Europe’s total population, or low compared to the numbers in camps in the Middle East. Another way of looking at is that is the equivalent of 18 Skaras every year. Or rather, if the 180,000 asylum seekers are spread out across the country, then 90 towns the size of Skara (pop 10,000) will have their demographics as transformed as Skara’s have been. Ninety towns.  Every year, cumulatively. Don’t bet on the posh parts of Stockhilm being one of them anytime soon, though. That is a pity. If the social engineers, the politicians and the journalists actually had to experience the consequences of mass immigration up close, they might be less enthusiastic about it.  Sweden is undergoing a novel experience, something never seen before in Sweden’s peaceful, well run twentieth century. Swedish people are beginning to hate their politicians. And in some places outside Skara, I have heard, locals are forming vigilante groups.  This means war.  Swedes are prepared to fight for their way of life.

 

 

Nina’s story

What is journalism these days?

Nina Drakfors is a native Swedish social worker in her early forties, but looks ten years younger.  An economics graduate who has travelled widely, she has children with three different fathers, one from a Swedish background but also two from a Gypsy background and another from Korea.  As a social worker, she deals with refugees a lot, and complains about the corruption in the process. A lot of the arrivals are pretty hopeless. As individuals, she feels sorry for them at the same time.
“I don’t think you can call me a racist,” she says. “One of my children is half Asian. The other is half Roma.”
But she also wants her country back. The media elite in Stockholm live in a different moral universe from the people out in the sticks. Week after week, the elite worry about issues like gay marriage and the rights to free dental care of asylum seekers who entered the country without papers and don’t learn Swedish. Meanwhile there are no jobs in the countryside and no one talks about that. The old white working class are confused, and angry, angry at politicians and the elite, more so than at the poor immigrants.
In her spare time, she works for a radio station that makes reportages that have a critical edge against immigration and the elite journalists and politicians who minimise the challenges.

This has reached the attention of a local Swedish state radio station. Both regional state radio and regional newspapers are struggling for their existence and this seems to have bred an aggressive insecurity in local news reporters which manifests itself in a holier-than-thou political correctness that sometimes even exceeds that found in journalists in the capital.

The local state radio station reporter did a story linking her to a “race ideological website” and asked her bosses whether this engagement was compatible with her job as a social worker. To my knowledge, the news organisation, Granskning Sverige  is a prominent radio programme on the alternative media scene that delights in ringing up journalists and other people in power and asking them faux innocent questions and tape-recording their answers. They also break really good stories, like one about the policeman who was asked to stop investigating passport forgery networks in Gothenburg.

Nina Drakfors is not taking it lying down. She denies it is a “race ideology” site and argues the journalist fails to provide proof for this serious allegation. She says her bosses have looked over the comments on her Facebook page and found no cause for disciplinary action. She is calling the reporter back to interview him, about his attitudes. What, these days, is a journalist? She wants to record his responses and put it out as a show on the internet.  Granskning Sverige may easily have as many listeners as a Swedish Radio local station. Many, many, Swedes are turning to alternative news sites. Some are hostile to immigrants, some gloomily social conservative, others just contrarian and rude about power.
But the reporter won’t talk to her. He represents officialdom, power, state radio. “I am the one who  asks the questions” he tells her. He hangs up, and neither nor his boss is available to talk to Nina for the rest of the day.  She is not the real journalist. He is. But what is a journalist, and what is media power in these days of social media? Within 24 hours, Nina has made a radio reportage about her “harassment” and out in youtube for Granskning Sverige, She spread her story to her hundreds of Facebook followers, and it has quickly spread to  other alternative anti-immigration media websites, where her story in turn earns numerous comments. Her supporters, for all I know, will have bombarded the named local Swedish Radio reporter with hostile emails.  One Facebook commenter writes: “Je suis Nina”.

Full length book on Swedish immigration crisis

http://amzn.to/1NXVesw

Bruges group publishes immigration pamphlet

http://www.brugesgroup.com/eu/sweden-immigration-crisis.htm?xp=comment

They come, the multitudes

They come, the multitudes, on trains, in the holds of trucks, in the backs of vans, or walking along the sidings of Europe’s motorways. They are coming from Africa and the Middle East, They are passing through Europe’s passport free Schengen area. And their final destination, the word on their parched lips, is Sweden.

Official asylum applications to Sweden are on course to be around 200,000 this year, but the real numbers could higher because it doesn’t  account for those who have been slipping into the country from the rest of Europe without declaring their presence, If eurosceptics wanted an argument against Schengen, they need look no further than Sweden,

But even that higher-than-200,000 figure doesn’t tell the whole story, since the average successful asylum seeker – and 70% are successful – brings, in the years to come, on average two relatives from home over – legally – once they have their permanent residence permits.  While there has been a desperate official turnaround in the last fortnight to try and halt the influx by tightening the asylum rules, it is salutary to realise that Swedes would be a minority in their own country in six or seven years if nothing is done to slow down this immigration.
The Swedish asylum reception is stretched to its capacity as it is; there are enormous housing shortages, and Sweden has a very high unemployment rate among asylum seekers – the employment rate gaps are the highest in the OECD. So the new arrivals will be a fiscal burden on Swedish society for many years after they have been shifted out of the reception system and into their paid-for flats. Combined with the generous benefits the Swedish state grants to the needy, the whole thing is expected hit especially the municipalities, which raise the lion’s share of taxes on individuals yet have little clout in national policymaking and thus immigration policy. The respected business magazine Affärsvärlden (Business World) writes about immigration its latest issue under the headline “Prepare for a real blow”: It talks about the difficulties of integrating the arrivals into the labour market and the shortage of hundreds of thousands of housing units. The government’s fiscal surplus goals are now a distant memory and the article warns of a possible return to Sweden’s financial crisis in the 1990s unless a far greater proportion of migrants get into work.

Mutual trust between the Nordic countries is at a low ebb. Sweden is extremely irresponsible in its immigration policy and has been irresponsible for a very long time, said Inger Stojberg, Danish minister of immigration, recently. If Sweden does close its borders, the refugee trail will have been well established and the refugees will just go elsewhere in Europe, shifting the burden to other countries in Europe, like Denmark, which didn’t want Europe to be a magnet in the first place.
An economics researcher called Tino Sanandaji argues that it is pull factors rather than push factors that account for the numbers, which are ten times greater than a few years ago: Sweden is acting as the magnet rather than war acting as a push factor.  Only a third of the arrivals in Sweden are from wartorn Syria. Sweden is very generous in interpreting asylum cases: young people from Eritrea are granted asylum for fleeing military service. Apparently, type in the word “asylum” in Arabic into Google and Sweden comes up as the top result.  Websites and Facebook pages run by people smugglers in the Middle East like to titillate the region’s young men with the claim that Swedish girls are lonely.
Although Swedish ministers talk the liberal talk, the numbers might have been even larger but for the effective barrier to completely open immigration represented by the barriers of the Mediterranean sea, the policing effort of various EU navies and makeshift solutions such as the border fence to the Balkans erected by Hungarian president Viktor Orban. Orban is a hate figure in the Swedish mainstream media.  There is rank hypocrisy here, because Orban is offering some protection to Swedish welfare system
There are some Swedes who argue Sweden should hand out visas at embassy in Damascus and Kabul, in other words: cut out the people smugglers, and help migrants avoid crossing the sea at great risk. Of course many more would come, but there are think-tanks and even mainstream party leaders, such as the Centre Party’s Annie Loof, who would be happy to see Sweden become a country of 40 million, never mind it would be a completely Muslim, non Swedish-speaking society with a severe dilution of of the know-how and education that made Sweden prosperous. Logic is not a characteristic of Sweden’s pro-immigration fanatics. They genuinely seem to believe that such a country would be an innovation superpower. Yet the PISA studies that compare educational attainment of 15-year-olds in different countries show Sweden falling precipitously over the past decade,  partly due to the influx of teenagers from very poor countries, like Somalia and Afghanistan, where poor schooling is widespread, combined with the poor results of the children born in Sweden of some immigrant backgrounds.
About a tenth of Sweden’s arrivals are under 18, or claim to be under 18. There is a lot of fraud here. They are nearly all boys, and claim to be sixteen or 17, but x-ray tests on bone structure in Denmark shows a third of this boys to be over 18, some in their twenties or even, in some cases, thirties. Sweden – where in contrast to Denmark actually checking the ages of these boy-men is a complete taboo – spends a million kronor a year on each “lone refugee child” (Ensamkommande flyktingbarn), a label that appeals to Sweden’s ignorant and sentimental feminist elite.  They come in their thousands, and when they arrive, get privileged treatment in care homes usually reserved for social service cases.

This money would go much further in the camps of Syria and Jordan, run by the UNCHR, who have issued cries for more funding. The costs lavished on one “lone refugee child” in Sweden could keep 100 people supplied with food and shelter for a year in camps situated in the region of conflict. And it is here that the truly needy, women and children, are stuck. It is a strange feature of the Swedish ideological debate that the only party to advocate this common sense, constructive solution, is the right wing Sweden Democrat party, is regularly labelled neo-fascist by its opponents.

 

 

 

Politicians ignore passport racket

Is Sweden a security risk for Europe?

Sweden’s passports are forged, stolen, declared lost and sold by people smugglers to refugees from the Middle East. It is a real racket.  According to Swedish police statistics, two individuals have lost 20 passports in a short time; they quickly get new ones. There are no legal methods to stop this. The men lose them sequentially: that is, they “lose” them, one at a time, and after each occasion apply for a new one. No questions are asked from the Swedish police – who handle  new passport issues in Sweden –  when issuing a new travel document whether these men are genuinely losing their passports or are losing them on purpose. Nearly 900 men have lost three passports, according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter,  There are 200,000 genuine Swedish passports on the loose. The Swedish government does not block them.  It costs just 350 kronor (about £30) to get a new passport.  A passport sold to passport racketeers can earn a person 80,000 kronor (£6,500) say Swedish police.  These passports are smuggled out of Sweden to locations in the Middle East, Istanbul, Damascus, Amman.

The Swedish passport, which invariably belonged to a Swedish person of migrant origin, is distributed  in Istanbul or Damascus to a “lookalike” among the migrants seeking to enter Europe.  It probably wouldn’t work for getting into a country with an e-passport system – which electronically scans passport photo at passport control and compares it to a photo scan of the passport holders face – it is common at British airports –  but is clearly successful enough to fool many European passport control checks to be a common method, according to a recent programme in the Swedish TV4 documentary series old Facts (Kalla Fakta.) Migrants use these genuine passports to fly into the Schengen zone, say Berlin, flash their genuine Swedish passports to the German passport official, then head over to Sweden by train. Once in Sweden, they seek asylum, claiming to possess no travel documents, in the usual manner. It remains to be seen whether the new stricter border controls introduced by Sweden in the past week will have any effect on this; the passports are, after all, genuine.

Using someone else’s Swedish passport  is far less risky than the alternative: entering Schengen illegally, by boat to Greece, say, and then travelling in the back of a truck through the Balkans to Sweden.  Travelling this way, people drown or suffocate. It is unpleasant, dangerous and the risks of being discovered and turned back are everpresent.

Passports declared lost or stolen are not always, perhaps not even often, checked against Interpol’s database of lost passports when people go through passport control at European airports (I didn’t know this), but to avoid even that possibility, Swedish newspapers say, the passport racket involves the original person who “lost” the passport not declaring it missing  until the migrant lookalike has passed through border controls into Europe.  The successful migrant throws it away and the original owners can now safely go to the police, says. he has lost his old passport and that he needs a new one

Another option is to travel on a genuinely forged passport.  There are workshops in Sweden that forge passports.  A Swedish local newspaper interviewed passport officers at Stockholm’s Skavsta airport and said that migrants were frequently caught out when the extremely shoddy forgeries,  which won’t even reflect patterns when shone with a UV lamp. The good ones by definition are not caught. In March, Swedish police rolled up a  passport forgery workshop located in the town of Sodertalje, which is heavily immigrant, and number of men are now awaiting trial

But despite the odd story like that,  journalists and politicians have complained that Sweden has done far too little to combat passport fraud for far too long.  Goran Larsson is a policeman based in Gothenburg, He and his unit  tracked criminals in the migration racket by tapping their phones. Their raids uncovered a complete portable workshop for manufacturing forged passports, large numbers of completed forgeries, USB sticks with information that would be the basis for fake diplomas and certifications, a machine for the production of identity cards and half a million kronor in cash.  Fifteen people were given  jail sentences; and three criminal groupings were broken up. Alas, as Larsson has said, the police leadership closed the investigations down, officially because the investigations were “too expensive”, but Larsson says the cost of the police investigation was no higher than security costs of policing “two high-risk football matches”. The leadership were simply mindful of the way political winds were blowing. The  government was not interested in pursuing the passport racket.  Larsson also told a radio programme. “A lot of policemen are afraid of speaking out about the cover-ups. I am not afraid because I am close to retirement.”

The government’s passivity has manifested itself in even more public ways.  In 2009, moderate party (right of centre, liberal)  MP Elisabeth Svantesson made a proposal in the Swedish riksdag (parliament) that Sweden should tighten up regulations: before a new passport is issued, the question of how many passports the person has had previously has to be taken into a account.  Maybe people shouldn’t be allowed more than three passports in a five year period? Anyone who loses more than that clearly isn’t genuine.  The judicial affairs committee, dominated by right of centre MPs, turned down her proposal with the argument that the Swedish government was already doing enough, Another MP’s proposal encountered a similar fate when presented in 2014. Swedish journalist Thomas Gur blames the weakness of Swedish political journalism “The failure to do anything about the passport issues reveals a defect in Swedish politics. One of a government’s most important roles is to safeguard its borders. The fact that this is not raised and dealt with, year after year, and that neither the legislative nor the examining estate react over this is very sad.”

Whichever way the migrants enter Sweden, by forged passport, lookalike passport or no passport at all (the back-of-a-truck route), if they apply for asylum they will be granted it automatically if they are fleeing the civil war in Syria.  So there is an incentive for migrants to claim they are fleeing the civil war , even when they are not. Whistleblowers from within the Migration Agency claim many applicants are not coming from Syria at all, but Syrians legitimately resident in  other countries, eg Dubai, or Italy;  or Arabs from other countries in the Middle East, such as Morocco or Libya, but no one checks out their accents or asks test questions about Syrian conditions. This is another story of  astonishing Swedish slackness in issues relating to migration. How many are ISIS cells no-one knows.

Having been granted asylum, after a few years of Swedish residence these migrants will be legit and have genuine, real passports of their own, as Swedish citizens. (Incidentally there are no civic or linguistic demands on the applicant in order to be  granted that desirable Swedish passport) And then these individuals from “Syria”  can settle, and move, wherever they like in Europe, as genuine citizens of one of the world’s most respected countries.  Britain, because of the English language, and because the EU allows free settlement, is a favoured destination.

 

Financial Times says the benefits of immigration are questionable

The newspaper’s lead commentator, Martin Wolf,  is sceptical:

“The OECD looked at the fiscal impact of cumulative waves of migration in the past 50 years in member countries, and concluded it was on average roughly zero. The precise impact depends on the skill and other characteristics of immigrants and the flexibility of labour markets. Much the same is true of immigrants’ other impacts: are they complementary to current workers or substitutes; and, if substitutes, for whom?

What, then, can one say about
the economic impact? First, the immigration needed to have big effects, notably on dependency burdens, would be huge. Second, immigration has significant impacts on investment needs (in housing and other infrastructure) and congestion, particularly in already densely populated countries — though these are similar to those caused by natural increase.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/509c8f5a-65c3-11e5-a28b-50226830d644.html#axzz3rGkAKx94

Kristallnacht march in Umeå keeps out Jews

The Christian newspaper Varlden Idag reports that a Swedish  demonstration in memory of the awful events of Kristallnacht 77 years ago has excluded Jews from attending.

Also known as the “Night of Broken glass”, the Kristallnacht was a series of coordinated attacks against Jews in Nazi Austria and Germany on the night of 9-10 November 1938.  The SA, or Sturmabteilung, paramilitary forces, with the help of the general public, carried out the looting and destruction of hundreds of Jewish owned shops and synagogues, while the police looked on and failed to intervene.  According to professor Richard Evans, an expert on Nazi Germany, the death toll was in the hundreds.  Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and placed in concentration camps. A thousand synagogues were burned and seven thousand Jewish business damaged, according to a report in 2005 by the American Holocaust Museum.

Several Swedish towns annually organise antiviolence and tolerance marches in memory of that awful event, often with an antiracist theme.  The town of Umea in northern Sweden is one such town.  The organisers decided this time not to invite the local Jewish community organisation because “they might not feel safe”.

Jan Hagglund, a local town councillor, said: “They might find themselves in an unpleasant or unwelcome situation.” On a a previous occasion, some of those attending have held up the placards where the the Israeli flag is equated with the Swastika, he said. He added that, unlike a police officer, he did not have the authority to tell the person to take the placard down.

The move has been criticised in newspaper editorials.  Norrkopings Tidningar, a regional newspaper, said in an editorial “Who on earth participates in a demonstration whose presence creates uncertainty for people of the Jewish faith? Who has Hagglund invited in who cannot tolerate standing side by side with Jews in a protest against Nazism? It must be a very special kind of person. What is the point of a manifestation against Nazism where descendants of the victims are not invited? That  the situation is described as ‘insecure’ is absurd,” the newspaper wrote.

Councillors from the local Christian Democrat and Moderate parties  decided to stay away from the Kristallnacht event, out of solidarity with the town’s Jewish community.