[dep_b]

It's a bit weird that a country safer than the US now gets portrayed as a sodom and gomorra of rape and violence. The striking difference between Swedes and immigrants in terms of violent crimes (four times as much, five times for rape) is declared for a large part by the fact that Swedes on average are nice and peaceful people.

Fox and Trump blowing everything out of proportion shouldn't stop a healthy debate about what the benefits of the current wave of immigration for Sweden and the Swedes really are.

[willvarfar]

Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. It happens that the poorest people in Sweden right now are immigrants.

The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, every instance of abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict. As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse, and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.

Source: am living in Sweden in a "hotspot", am an immigrant but am rich and white. I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which shocked me. Sweden is a very safe nice country, and the alt-Right in Sweden (SD being big where I am) and abroad are misrepresenting it.

[kpil]

"Immigrants don't commit crimes"... Well, if you import a lot of very poor and unskilled people, the result will be more crime.

Actually, I think it's more complicated that that. I can't find the data but I remember a report that stated that Somali and Iraqi immigrants had 5 time higher conviction rate, and that more than 25% had been convicted for a crime, compared to ~5% of swedes.

I also remembered that immigrants from Sri Lanka -that have been a conflict zone for a very long time - had more or less half the conviction rate than Swedes, which is an interesting fact.

[Swedish article about statistics in Norway, with very similar demographics and culture, except way lower immigration: https://www.svd.se/brottslighet-bland-invandrare-borde-oroa-...]

[bobdole1234]

So, don't let them be poor.

[kpil]

I doubt that any other country gives more money in the form of subsidies or social assistance programmes, both per capita (giver and receiver) and in absolute numbers.

They also have free healthcare and enjoys free education up to university, including financial aid for studies and a home equipment loan.

There are also very few signs of structured racism, when looking at various ethnic groups with comparable education, etc, although it of course exists, just like all other biases and generalisations in a society.

There have been a substantial asylum related immigration for long enough that we can look at the second generation, and their level of education, crime, etc, and draw the conclusion that whatever we are doing, it's not really enough or possibly not even the correct things to do.

[kpil]

Personally, I think it's more related to that many immigrants have a hard time to understand the highly individualist society when coming from clan societies, the case that many of them have traditional and backwards values that is frowned upon in the rest of the society although it's never ever done in the open, the islamists and wahhabist propaganda that uses them for their own purposes, and even how we put them in areas where the brutalist architecture, disappointing, misguided, and dirt-cheap city planning amplifies the social group dynamic effects that could perhaps been kept in check in a more non-anonymous society (as explored by Philip Zimbardo.)

And class ( or socioeconomic background - there are related problems that are ignored ). And education. And the fact that we have not done anything to prevent this for the past 30 years.

[reitanqild]

?

[indlebe]

I think it's a misconception that the alt-right and Neo-nazis are the only ones applying scrutiny to the immigration policies of Sweden and Europe as a whole. A large portion of these concerns are coming from the existing poor communities that are seeing an influx of refugees into their neighbourhoods.

>Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. I would rephrase this as "high crime rates are associated with low-income demographics, which those immigrating to Europe as part of the refugee crisis fall into". Also, one could safely argue that the poorer the community, the higher the crime.

"Low-income" neighbourhoods in Sweden have changed, they've become much poorer as a result of the refugee crisis, therefore crime has risen in areas that used to be "safe". Therefore those who used to live in those areas have experienced a major change in their surroundings and find themselves in less safe environments. Again, the world's poor are the ones bearing the weight of this change.

Full disclosure: My source is anecdotal, from friends that have families in the poorer neighbourhoods in Malmo who are struggling to relocate to safer areas.

[reitanqild]

Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes. It happens that the poorest people in Sweden right now are immigrants.

Person living in Norway here:

No, being an immigrant doesn't make you a criminal.

However, statistically speaking certain crimes are very much overrepresented with certain cultures.

I'm not saying Europeans are perfect: a lot of bad stuff existed when I was young.

But there where certain things that just didn't exist.

It is scary to see the coming of a culture were rape is ok, honour killings are ok (as told by immigrants who speak up) etc etc.

[bobdole1234]

You think rape and murder are ever going to be normalized?

Really?

[reitanqild]

It is in some cultures, as long as it is against members of other groups.

[ptaipale]

>Immigrants don't commit crimes. Poor people commit crimes.

As I already wrote in in some other thread, Swedish national economist Tino Sanandaji (himself of immigrant background) has shown this is not the case: there is actually a problem of immigration-related crime in Sweden, not just poverty-related.

Sweden has had and still has very small income inequality. But in country-wide statistics, crime has still gone down generally while situation has worsened in some urban areas where there are regular shootings and grenade attacks, things that were completely unknown a couple of decades ago. In a word, there's less killings within a group of local men who have an argument about booze and kill each other with a knife, and there are more killings where a gang member is ambushed and shot or killed by a grenade.

Yes, Sweden is still a very safe society, on average. Much safer than the United States is on average. What's remarkable is, however, that the development has reversed: Sweden is no longer becoming safer, but United States is. During the time period 1990-2015 when homicide rate per 100 000 pop in Sweden has gone from 1.3 to 1.1, the United States has gone from 9.4 to 4.5. My native Finland, traditionally the most violent of Nordic countries, has gone from 3.1 to 1.3, and Norway from 1.1 to 0.4. Denmark is at 0.8. Sweden will soon be the most violent of the Nordic countries.

So Sweden does have a problem, it's not improving like other Western countries.

The U.S. situation is, of course, a thing where also Donald Trump's narrative is wrong: the U.S. has become much safer over the past 15 years, not less safe. There is still some reason for concern in the U.S. though, because the crime is concentrated in a few cities (such as Chicago, the home city of former president, even if some other similar cities like Baltimore and St. Louis are even much worse.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445237/sweden-crime-ra...

[baobrain]

I just want to point out that socioeconomic status is generally not an established correlate of crime, despite many thinking it is, though it's possible that the disparity may cause people to commit crime. It's probably not very accurate to attribute crime to immigrants being poor.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in criminology and also not very familiar with sweden's situation

[mercer]

> just want to point out that socioeconomic status is generally not an established correlate of crime, despite many thinking it is, though it's possible that the disparity may cause people to commit crime

Could you provide some evidence of this rather bold claim? I really am interested because many of my opinions are based on this assumption.

[dep_b]

Chinese people enter countries poor and usually do better soon. Other groups stay poor. I'm sorry to say it but the staying poor part might also be caused by those people themselves, not some external factor they cannot control.

> The rape stats are also way different from how they are portrayed in the media. In Sweden, if you are in an abusive relationship, every instance of abuse is counted individually, and as Assange learned, the law is very strict. As other countries tend to do far worse at reporting and prosecuting abuse, and as other countries tend to count all occurrences of abuse together as one crime, the numbers are not directly comparable to other countries.

Yet in Sweden they measure immigrants and Swedes in the same way and it's five times as much on average while some migrant groups singled out are doing better than native Swedes.

[nazgob]

I also have decent memories from Sweden, I've been living there for a few years. Apart from stolen bike (worldwide phenomenon) and housing scam (classic Uppsala) it was fine. But rising power of SD in Sweden is very worrying. On the one hand you have some immigrants that are not always on-board with advances that Swedish society did and on the other you have nazis. Not sure about SD support now but it was over 10% last time I checked and much more in the north.

[cancancan]

Perhaps you should move to northern Stockholm suburbs like Rinkeby and Husby where violent riots have become somewhat of a norm. Just a few days ago there was a five hour riot that included torching cars, throwing rocks at the police, looting shops and businesses, beating up journalists. The reason for riot? Police arrested a suspect on a drug charge. Same thing happened last August in the same part of Stockholm. Violent riots and 47 torched cars. Same suburb where more than 100 cars where torched during riots in May 2013.

Was there a single riot like that in Sweden that did not involve immigrants? How about honor killings?

Those are completely new categories of violence for Sweden.

> I saw nazis demonstrating in the local town center yesterday, which shocked me.

That's what you get when you bury your head in the sand and choose to ignore the reality.