"Sweden is Set to Burst"

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Baron Bodissey

The illustration above is Swedish play on words: En Svensk Håller Truten means "A Swede Holds a Gull", but it also means "A Swede Holds His Mouth Shut", a reference to the well-known Swedish taboo against saying anything that contradicts the social consensus.

In this case, the Swedes being asked to hold their mouths shut are Karl-Olov Arnstberg and Gunnar Sandelin, who will shortly publish a book about immigration into Sweden. They submitted the summary article below to every major MSM outlet in the country, but were turned down by all of them. As the introduction notes, "this is an issue that is not to be discussed."

The article was eventually published by Human Rights Service in Norway. It has been translated for Gates of Vienna by our Norwegian correspondent The Observer, and will also appear in a slightly different version in the next issue of Dispatch International.

The Observer sends these remarks:

This is an important article, and people outside the Scandinavian countries should be given the opportunity to read what is happening. Sweden is truly a strange place.

Unfortunately, we're all on the same path.

The translated article:

Sweden is set to burst — the question is when

Sweden issued approximately 110,000 residence permits last year. In a soon to be released book the costs of the immigration is estimated to be as high as SEK 110 billion a year. 60 percent of those who arrive in Sweden have only a rudimentary education. The housing situation is alarming, as is the case with unemployment and the ever-increasing segregation. The welfare state will fall apart within a few years if this situation is allowed to continue. But this is an issue that is not to be discussed.

The silence that envelops the Swedish nightmare is exemplified by the fact that Professor Karl-Olov Arnstberg and sociologist/journalist Gunnar Sandelin, who will soon release a new book about the consequences of immigration, Invandring och mörkläggning, are not even able to publish an op-ed about the alarming situation in the [Swedish] MSM. As a result, they decided to publish this op-ed on the website newsmill.se instead. The situation in Sweden will obviously also have repercussions for Norway.

Sweden cannot cope with this much immigration

A professor of ethnology and a sociologist/journalist: Swedish politicians have lost control of immigration. The costs are escalating, the housing situation is desperate, unemployment is on the rise and segregation may be described as dramatic.

In 2012 the Migration Board (Migrationsverket) issued approximately 111,000 residence permits. Relative to 2011, the number of asylum seekers increased by 48 percent. Compared with our Nordic neighbours, Sweden issued eight times as many residence permits a Finland, five times as many as Denmark and more than twice as many as Norway. In Europe only Germany and France received more asylum seekers than Sweden.

Sweden received nearly half of all the Iraqis who fled to Europe during the Iraq war. We have accepted more Somalis than any other country in the Western world, and now we are the largest recipient of Syrian refugees in Europe. On a per capita basis, of all the countries in the Western world Sweden is the one that receives most asylum seekers, and we have held this position for several years now.

With regards to 2013, the number of family reunifications has been downgraded slightly as the number of Somali family reunifications is not expected to be as large as previous years. However, the figures are uncertain and could rise if the civil war in Syria intensifies or the conflict spreads to other areas. The Migration Board's forecast for this year is a minimum of 100,000 new asylum seekers and family members.

Many illiterates

Immigration has gradually changed. An earlier wide spectrum of immigrants has been replaced by asylum seekers from mainly Muslim countries such as Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan. These asylum seekers are ill-equipped for life in the high-tech Swedish society. Employment statistics show that over 60 percent of the new arrivals and their relatives have a very "rudimentary education", which means that many of them are actual or practical illiterates. This makes it particularly difficult for them to find employment. According to Eurostat, only 2.5 percent of the jobs are available for them [based on their qualifications — translator] compared with other EU countries where jobs for workers without any formal qualifications amount to 17 percent. This means that there are extremely few jobs on offer for asylum seekers and their dependents who are allowed to stay in Sweden. As a result, the already large employment gap of 27 percent between domestic-and foreign-born persons aged 25-64 is increasing (SCB, 2012). The prestigious English magazine The Economist noted in February that a large proportion of the non-European immigrants that are allowed to settle in Sweden end up living on the dole.

21 percent are refugees

Every asylum seeker is described as a "refugee" by the media. This is not true, because the definition of "refugee" is tied to the Geneva Convention and the Immigration Act. Of all the asylum seekers that were allowed to stay in Sweden under Fredrik Reinfeldt's prime ministership, up until 2013, only 21 per cent were refugees. If we go as far back as 1980 the corresponding figure is considerably lower, only 10 percent. Nearly half of the asylum seekers were allowed to stay on humanitarian grounds, while about a quarter were granted political asylum (the Migration Board's statistics are incomplete during the first half of the eighties).

In recent years the number of individuals that have managed to obtain family reunification visas is three times higher than those that have been granted political asylum. The majority of the family reunification applications involves newly established relationships. In other words, it's not family reunification per se, but rather partners who are being brought over from the applicants' former homelands. It should also be noted that Sweden, as far as we've been able to determine, is the only country that allows welfare recipients to bring over relatives to Sweden who are also very likely to end up living on welfare. The general rule in the rest of Europe is that anyone who brings over family members or partners is financially responsible for them. According to Minister of Immigration Tobias Billström, fewer than one percent of those that are issued with family reunification visas manage to provide for themselves.

Sweden is also the country that receives the largest amount of so-called unaccompanied refugee children. In 2012, 3,600 refugee children applied for political asylum. More than two-thirds of those were issued with permanent residence permits. No other country even comes close to such figures. These young asylum seekers arrive mainly from Somalia and Afghanistan. "Young asylum seekers" is a more accurate term, because before a review of their cases has been carried out, no one knows whether they are unaccompanied, are eligible for refugee status, or are minors. That the latter is not always the case has been proven in our neighbouring countries following X-rays of their wrists and teeth.

Smuggling of asylum Seekers

The migration of people from poorer countries to Europe is a large-scale and standardized operation, which means that those who are seeking political asylum in Sweden have almost always paid human traffickers. Rikskriminalen (National bureau of Investigation) estimated in 2010 that approximately 90 to 95 percent of all the asylum seekers that arrive in Sweden were aided by human traffickers. The asylum seekers come mainly from Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. The traffickers provide believable refugee stories that the asylum seekers can present to the immigration authorities. Asylum seekers are also advised not to show passports or other appropriate ID documents. Subsequently almost nine out of ten applicants have at the time of application not produced a valid passport to Swedish authorities. The refugee policy cannot be referred to as a humane policy as long as Sweden keeps eroding the right of political asylum for the truly needy by granting political asylum to people who are unable to reveal their true identity and their true intentions. The government remains silent and pretends that the problem doesn't exist, or it is ignorant. Both scenarios are equally bad.

Local politicians are warning about untenable situations

In September 2012 fifteen local Social-democratic politicians in the Stockholm region raised the alarm about the housing situation. They encouraged all municipalities in the Stockholm region to "hunt high and low" for housing association apartments, to locate apartments scheduled for demolition, refurbishment and any other temporarily vacant dwellings." The reason, of course, was a severe lack of housing. According to the Migration Board, 6,000 persons with residence permits were still living in asylum centers in 2012. The number for this year is estimated to be close to 9,000, and for 2014 the figure is expected to rise to 16,000. The Director General of the Swedish Migration Board admitted that this is an unacceptable situation. But it's not just the lack of housing that is problematic. If we leave the Stockholm area and take a look at Katrineholm, the Social Services statistical database shows that of the foreign-born citizens in the city, which in 2011 accounted for 14 percent, 67 percent were on municipal income support. This is a representative figure. In 2011 the foreign-born living on income support (including establishment allowance) were over-represented on the statistics by a factor of 8.6 (or 860 percent), compared to native Swedes.

What is the cost of the immigration?

The figure that is usually cited is that immigration is costing Sweden approximately SEK 40 billion per year. This figure is outdated. When government investigator Jan Ekberg made the latest estimates in 2006 the costs were somewhere between SEK 43 and 58 billion per year. When other economists' have estimated the costs the figure has ended up in the three digit billion area. Associate Professor of Economics Jan Tullberg, who teaches at the Stockholm School has, in our upcoming bookInvandring och mörkläggning (Debattförlaget) ["Immigration and blackout", Debate Publisher], upgraded the costs to just over three per cent of GDP, which is around SEK 110 billion per year. This is almost half of the overall cost of Swedish health care, or an additional annual net income of SEK 23,000 per employed person.

Tullberg believes that Sweden should curb immigration and do more to get the unemployed back into the workforce. The labour migration from outside the EU / EFTA states largely confirms this: In the last four years, according to the Swedish Migration Board, 43 percent of all the job migrants come to perform unskilled work, while at the same time half a million people are unemployed in Sweden.

Summary

In an interview in Dagens Eko ("The Daily Echo") the economist Assar Lindbeck stated that Sweden is not prepared for major immigration and that we are moving towards a situation where the municipalities won't be able to provide housing or employment for the immigrants. He's right. Swedish politicians have lost control of the immigration. The costs are rising, the housing situation is desperate, unemployment is on the rise and segregation is dramatic. When Tobias Billström, the only politician in the government [willing to speak out], suggested that "we need to discuss volume", i.e. the amount of immigration, he was met by massive media criticism and was not even supported by his own party leader. There is only one possible conclusion. Unless the trend described above is altered, Sweden's status as a welfare state will soon be history. We describe this in great detail in our book which is set to be released in March. The book looks at the extremely critical situation that our country is in due to comprehensive asylum and family reunification.

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