Last August, a group in Sweden flew me over to Stockholm and Malmo for a week, to tour me around the country’s biotech industry, so that I could write about it in my magazine. I wrote all about it and posted some good pix:
here, here, here, here, here, and here.
What I didn’t write about at the time was my first day touring the businesses. I talked about social conditions in Sweden with my guide, a friendly, middle-aged woman who represented the economic development council that was sponsoring my trip. We talked about the social support network of the state, the economic incentives for IP/IT industries like bio-drug development, and generally chit-chatted.
Then I said, “In my guidebook, it mentioned that there’s a pretty significant percentage of immigrants in the country. Is that an issue, with integration and such?” Actually, I was even more polite and diplomatic in my phrasing, not wanting to come off as the cowboy-Amurrrrcan.
She replied plainly, “Arab immigrants are destroying our country and we need to deport them.”
I didn’t write about this at the time, because it would’ve wrecked the otherwise pleasant mood/mode I was in, bloggging from Scandinavia. But it prepared me for the responses I got when I asked the same question in Amsterdam in December. At the time, I was surprised by the plainspokenness of her response, that it was such a matter of course by now.
At the Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell writes about Sweden’s immigration issues:
Not all of these things are necessarily threatening. It is important to distinguish between, on the one hand, cultural shifts (like the presence of a mammoth mosque that stands across from the ice-skating rink in Medborgar Square, smack in the middle of southern Stockholm, or Bejzat Becirov’s Islamic Center, or the “Rosengard Swedish” that linguists detect among the urban newcomers, from which the sing-songy, heep-de-deep-de-doo intonations of the language have been purged), and civilizational outrages on the other. The latter include the dispiritingly steady stream of “honor-killings” that occur among the country’s immigrants, most of them committed by Kurds. These have generally involved girls executed by their brothers or fathers for wearing short skirts or dating Swedish men. Stockholm and Malmö both have a number of safe houses, of the sort that have long existed for the wives and companions of violent men, but which are now mostly inhabited by Muslim women fearing honor killings or domestic violence.
But in a country where, as the sociologist Ake Daun puts it, “people like being like each other,” there is evidence of profound exhaustion with immigration, whether the reasons for this exhaustion are rationally well-founded or not. In the moral-superpower context, it is the equivalent of “imperial overstretch.” Swedes tell pollsters they want no more asylum-seekers. (A common complaint is that prospective arrivals have figured out how to “game” the rules of asylum applications, and that the best way to render one’s story unchallengeable under the law is to destroy one’s identity papers.) A very low rate of mixed marriage is an indication that Swedes may not have been crazy about this immigration in the first place.