Sweden has recently been the focus of attention as a result of Donald Trump’s remarks on our problems with immigration. I therefore provide some details and some historical notes on the matter. I claim to make it self-evident that in these matters it takes a particular kind of stupid, or moronic, to be a Swedish parliamentarian, member of the government, or high-ranking bureaucrat. Thank heavens, this does not apply to all of them, but again with regard to immigration, it does so to the vast majority. It also applies to virtually all journalists within the mainstream media.
I have not dug into the precise details, but ”they are good enough for government work”; they are a good enough approximations of the truth to understand what has been going on.
I will get to the quote in the screenshot in a minute. But first, we’ll go back in time. The Swedish tax pressure was about 20 percent of GDP in 1950, 36 percent in 1964, and it reached about 50 percent in the early 1970s. This finally strangled the economy, and the tax pressure has not moved by much since; rather it has followed a see-saw pattern.
As a result of the earlier, less taxed and less regulated economy, after the war, Swedish industry was screaming for labour. Anyone could come to Sweden, provided they either had a job, or someone who vouched for them financially. No government support was provided. A large number of Italians and Yugoslavs arrived, among others.
But as the tax pressure and the increasing regulations began to strangle the economy, and as the labour unions acted as labour unions tend to do, the Social Democratic government stopped the free immigration of labour at the end of the 1960s. Henceforth, to claim refugee status became the easiest way to gain access to Sweden. A great number of genuine refugees arrived, fleeing from the dictatorships in Greece and in Chile, and many among them have made outstanding contributions to Swedish society.
Sweden prided itself in being a humanitarian superpower. Officially, anyone who applied for asylum would be favourably treated. But in reality, Sweden relied on its neighbours to see to that very few made it here.
In the 1980s, a new phenomenon appeared. People began to arrive ”without any passport”, a document that they ”had lost”. With the blue-eyed naïvety particular to my native country, politicians and bureaucrats pretended, or actually believed that someone from Lebanon, Iraq or Iran could be without the means of identification. This initial act, of what I would characterise as mind boggling stupidity, formed a cornerstone of what was about to come. Likely, not all among the immigration officials and journalists actually believed these tales of lost passports, but to any such government agency, and to any such area of journalism, activists tend to flock. Thus, at least outwardly, ”they refused to be so cynical” as to refuse to believe the new arrivals at their words. Swedes also tend to be rather socially conformist, and when you are liable to be branded a racist if you question the official account, most people keep their mouths shut.
Immigration continued to gradually increase; over the past 25-30 years, Sweden has received maybe 1.5 million non-Western immigrants, out of which about 1 million now live on welfare. It takes on average 9 years before half of the new arrivals work at least one hour per week. Those who arrive have different cultures, and many have no or very little education (maybe 2 years of schooling for Afghans, 4-5 years for Syrians or Iraqis, to a substantial degree illiterate for the Somalis).
The total cost is very difficult to ascertain, as the Swedish bureaucracy has stopped either gathering the statistics or evaluating it. An estimate from 2014 by Jan Tullberg was 250 billion kronor per year, or $28 billion, out of which half were direct costs, and the rest was due to increases in the cost of housing, in over-consumption of health care by immigrants, in higher crime rates among immigrants, etc. Half a year after the publication of Tullberg’s book ”Låsningen”, our European neighours suddenly stopped guarding the borders, and a huge additional influx took place. And yet further costs will be incurred in the near future, as many of the new arrivals will bring their spouses, children and other relatives. My guesstimate is that the total cost will be somewhere between 400 and 700 billion kronor per year in a few years time, or 10-18 percent of GDP annually.
It is far easier to gain asylum in Sweden if you are a minor. In Norway and Denmark, some 70 percent of those who claim to be minors turn out to be above 18. In Sweden, the pediatricians refuse to attempt to verify the age of the arrivals. In any case, as they ”have no papers”, our politicians and bureaucrats claim not to know who they are.
Sweden eagerly keeps accepting asylum applications, in case the refugees, real or pretended, make it to our borders, whilst desperately attempting to prevent them from doing so. Using liberal amounts of self-deception to maintain the self-image of being the world’s humanitarian superpower, the free travel without a passport to Denmark, that was a rule since the 1950s, has been suspended and the bridge to Copenhagen is heavily guarded.
A minor cannot be left unattended, so those who claim to be under 18 are put into special homes at the tune of 1 – 1.4 million kronor per year ($111-$156,000). It has been widely reported that anyone who looks younger than 40, and who claims to be a minor, should be taken at his word by the immigration authorities.
The quote in the screenshot above refers to this situation. Asylum seekers, classified as minors, who now have obtained permanent residence permits, request financial aid to bring their spouses and children over from their home countries. You can’t invent this shit…
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