One might say something here about the “best laid plans of mice and men,” except that there was nothing well conceived about Europe’s recent years’ admittance of waves of Muslim migrants. Just consider Sweden, which had led the world in absorbing the most migrants per capita (and in value signaling) and now finds that, sometimes, when you lead you bleed. And some Swedish cities — and to an extent the nation itself — are now bleeding native Swedes as they flee migrant-born crime and social ills.
Last year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned European migration policies, perhaps thinking about the Polish official who said in 2018, unabashedly, “We will not receive even one Muslim.” Yet Guterres had praise for Sweden and Germany for, as he put it, “receiving the overwhelming majority of the refugees.”
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It turns out that this wasn’t such a bright idea, however, “given that Swedish cities such as Malmö have turned into Muslim-dominant no-go hellholes, which Swedes now find unlivable,” writes American Thinker’s Monica Showalter. “The migrants freely admitted to Sweden have placed about as much value on that entry as the price they paid for it, which is nothing.”
Consequently, some native Swedes are now migrating. As the Gatestone Institute reported October 2, outlining the problem:
• As a consequence of taking in so many migrants within a relatively short time span, not only during the extraordinary migration crisis in 2015 but generally in the years 2012-2017, municipalities are fighting high unemployment, a rise in child poverty and rising social welfare expenditures, according to [public official] Jim Frölander….
• “As a parent, you become angry, desperate…. The result is that those who can, and can afford it, move…. To a quieter part of the country or abroad. Those who do not have the same opportunities [to move] remain where they are. It’s devastating….” — Former Minister of Labour Sven Otto Littorin, who now lives and works in Dubai, on Facebook.
• “About 13 percent of the population in Sweden experience problems in their own residential areas with crime, violence or vandalism. It is one of the highest proportions in Europe.” By comparison, the other Nordic countries were placed among the countries with the lowest percentage of the population who experience such problems….” — Statistics Sweden, April 25, 2019.
This is leading to what some call a “population exchange,” as Gatestone explains:
Take the small, picturesque town of Filipstad (population 10,000), for example. Swedish television recently made a documentary about the town, which finds itself in both a financial and an existential crisis. “We are experiencing a population exchange. You can think of that what you want…. But it is simply a statement of fact that this is actually what we are going through and we have to deal with it,” Jim Frölander, integration manager in the Filipstad municipality, says in the documentary. Between 2012 and 2018, 640 native Swedes left the town, and 963 foreign-born people moved into the town. Those leaving are people of working age (20-64), which means that the municipality’s tax revenues are shrinking, exacerbating [the] town’s financial crisis.
Matters can get worse, though — and have in some places. Just consider the tiny eastern German village of Sumte. Despite having had a population of only 102, the government swamped the locale with 750 migrants in 2015.
As for Sweden, what the Gatestone report signals is that the nation” ended up exchanging its well educated, law-abiding, and high-social-capital population for an unemployable, uneducated, lawless, and low-social-capital one,” Showalter writes.” The central planning here — and as this excellent New York Post article notes, it is a country with a lot of central planning — didn’t quite work out the way they thought it would. Sweden isn’t gaining the population its social engineers thought it would gain from this top-down maneuver; it’s actually losing its most productive citizens as an unintended consequence.”
In fact, it’s even losing some of its more productive transplants. One example is “a Croatian man who grew up in Sweden but recently moved to Poland with his wife and kids, saying he doesn’t ‘recognise the country [he] grew up in anymore,’” as I reported last year. Yet another, also a part of what has been called the “Swedish Diaspora,” is a woman born of a Hungarian mother who moved to Hungary because, she says, “There is no safety at all” in Sweden.
Then there’s the poetic aspect of this, the immigrationists hoisted with their own petards. For example, after “advocating an open-borders policy and demeaning its opponents as ‘racists,’ some Swedish feminists are now leaving migrant-heavy areas of their nation that they say are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists,” as I reported in 2017.
But at least, for a while longer perhaps, the Swedes can enjoy the moral preening. “Sweden has a very strong self-image of being a good country,” as Swedish journalist Elisabeth Asbrink put it to the New York Post last month. “It’s in the tradition of Sweden to put itself forth as a moral role model.”
“Of course it’s a lie,” she admits.
In other words, Sweden is Leftist Phoniness Central. This helps explain preachy, supercilious teen climate alarmist Greta Thunberg, and it helps explain importing migrants till it hurts. Perhaps Sweden would do well to remember, and would have a brighter future if it contemplated, a warning from a book its atheistic population now largely ignores. To wit: “Pride goeth before a fall.”
Photo: RPBMedia/iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus
