By Jürgen Fritz, Mo. 9. Jul 2018

In the 1970s, Sweden was the fourth richest country in the world, with unemployment just above zero. It was easy for the Swedes to be generous and to accept migrants from the Third World on a large scale. But what has become of this irreversible social experiment like no rich state has ever tried? The facts are so frightening that one tries to keep them under wraps if possible.

The former model country Sweden

Sweden, which is thoroughly social-democratised, was long regarded as a model immigration country. As early as 1975, the Scandinavians passed an immigration law under Social Democrat Olof Palme, and in 1976 they were the first country in the world to introduce municipal and regional voting rights for immigrants. The immigrants received free Swedish courses and some kind of introductory money. There was comprehensive social assistance and free medical care. And because all this was not enough, there was also financial support on top, for example for insurance premiums and household appliances.

But Sweden was not only special in terms of immigration policy. Swedish education policy was considered exemplary. There were guaranteed preschool places, nine-year compulsory schooling in the elementary school, secondary school, vocational training, an outstanding technical and digital infrastructure. A large part of the budget of the municipalities was invested directly in education.

After the introduction of OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) PISA studies in 2000, it became clear that Swedish students outperformed German students in all disciplines tested. Whole groups of teachers and education experts travelled to Sweden to see how the Scandinavians can only do it.

The Swedish system responded to the cultural differences in performance in schools with special support instead of selection in order to counteract the inequality of opportunities caused by cultural and social origin. The Swedes were therefore completely oriented towards the ideal of equality, not in terms of rights and promotion, but in terms of results. In the end, the aim was that the differences should be as small as possible.

But what has become of this huge experiment?

For many years now, the mood in Sweden towards immigrants has been deteriorating. In the end, many of the „invendare“ (immigrants) worked in the low-wage sector. But it is precisely there that jobs have been increasingly rationalised away in recent years, because they were simply not productive. 42 percent of the (long-term) unemployed are immigrants.

Immigrants account for 58 percent of social welfare benefits (!) – significantly

more than all Swedes put together. In 2016, the number of foreign unemployed exceeded that of domestic unemployed for the first time (162,500 compared with 160,600). Even 15 years after immigration, the employment rate is just 60 percent. Many immigrants remain underqualified forever and cannot be placed on the labour market. Of those enrolled after 2000, approximately 20 percent have a maximum of primary education.

The Swedes have never paid any attention to education, intellect or qualifications when granting residence permits for „humanitarian reasons“. It should have been clear to anyone who can add up three and three that this would not have been good for the labour market and the social system in the long run. But how did Pippi Langstrumpf sing?:

„2 x 3 makes 4, Widdewiddewitt, and three makes nine, We make ourselves

the world, Widdewidde as we like it.“

Caught up by reality

Sweden was probably one of the most social democratic countries in the world. But now more and more citizens woke up from their slumber or grew up and arrived in reality. The survey results of the Schwedendemokraten, the counterpart to the AfD, doubled from 2014 to 2017 to approximately 27 percent. The displeasure at the dissolution of the welfare state, massive immigration and growing unemployment is growing.

Since 2010, the rate of youth unemployment has been consistently above 22, in some cases up to 25 percent (!). Although the birth rate among the Swedes themselves is significantly higher than among Germans, Swedish society is growing mainly due to immigrants.

In the field of education, where Sweden has long been a role model, our northern friends already slipped in 2007, more than ten years ago. In no other country did the school level drop as much between 2006 and 2012 as in Sweden. In the area of reading literacy, Sweden has already fallen below the OECD average and is therefore already below average. The former role model is already below average! Has there ever been a more radical crash?

During this period, the proportion of students with foreign roots had risen from 16 to 22 percent. Every fourth to fifth person therefore already has a migration background. Among these, the proportion of school dropouts rose from 37 to 50 percent. The Swedish authorities have been able to establish a direct link between a) an increasing influx of immigrants and b) a drop in school levels of up to 85 percent. And in 2015, another massive mass influx from non-EU countries followed.

80 percent of Swedish police officers would like to resign – 50 percent of felons are immigrants

As early as 2014, the national police spoke of 55 crisis areas in 22 Swedish cities. These were characterised above all by a high proportion of immigrants, high unemployment and low incomes. An app has even been developed that warns of the most dangerous areas to prevent people from accidentally ending up in one. Gang wars are on the increase, but also burning cars, homicides in the streets, series of bomb attacks and hand grenades.

80 percent of Swedish police officers have already considered resigning. Reasons: Low pay and increasing danger in the job. Group rape and serious sexual assaults by immigrants were often concealed by the police and the media for a long time. This, too, may have put an additional strain on many police officers that they were stopped from above for silence and denial. Code 291 (Sweden’s police must not report crimes committed by migrants) is intended to silence Swedish police officers in connection with migrant crimes.

Within a decade, from 2006 to 2016, the number of sexual offences increased again by 56 percent (from 4,208 to 6,560 cases). 26 percent of the prison inmates are already immigrants. And among those serving prison terms of more than five years, as many as 50 percent of all prisoners are immigrants. So we are not talking here about petty criminals, who in the case of immigrants are often no longer consistently persecuted, but real criminals.

The idyll is over

Sweden, the Canadian daily The Globe and Mail wrote years ago, „opened its doors to a flood of people from some of the world’s most problematic countries – especially the majority Muslim countries Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq“. As early as the 1990s, up to 80,000 immigrants per year and in some cases even more. In 2009, the country set its first six-digit record with 102,000 immigrants. And it should remain at this level from now on. In 2012, about 103,000 immigrants arrived; in 2014, almost 100,000 and then came the peak, the year 2015 with 170,000 immigrants within twelve months. In relation to the number of inhabitants, this was even more than Germany had accepted. Sweden was the „Humanity World Champion“. But what effect did this have?

The integration of these crowds of people did not work out at the back and front and dragged the country down in almost all areas. And the failure of the integration efforts affects not only the first stage immigrants, but also the Swedish-born children of non-cultural immigrants. Three quarters of all children of Somali origin leave school without any qualifications. „For Somali immigrants, coming to Sweden is like being transported to Mars“, quotes The Economist, a Swedish journalist who volunteers for Somali youth in the problem district of Rosengard.

The Social Democrat Olof Palme started the great Swedish experiment in 1975. 40 years later, the Swedes are faced with a pile of shards. And they suspect: Even with closed borders, the large social experiment on family or clan reunification and high birth rates of the immigrant population continues in a direction that no sensible person can approve of.

In 1989 the Iranian Kurd Tino Sanandaji came to Sweden at the age of nine with his mother and brother. Now the former immigrant child in Chicago holds a doctorate in economics. One of the few cases in which the integration has worked out wonderfully. But Sanandaji warns his Swedish compatriots: „For many reasons – a long period of peace, a homogenous population – Sweden has experienced a unique combination of welfare, growth and equality. This idyll is kind of over now.“ He has been urgently advising for years to close the gates again.

The welfare state and open borders are impossible to combine

As early as 2013, two years before the 2015 flooding, the United Nations did not forecast any tingling development for Sweden with regard to the Human Development Index (HDI). Meanwhile, the IKEA country has pulled the emergency brake. Despite excellent framework conditions, the immigration story of „the Swedish superpower of humanity“ (Petra Paulsen) ended. In November 2015 it was decided in tears to reject migrants at the Swedish border and to deport thousands of asylum seekers.

The Swedes had to painfully recognize what everyone with common sense should have known before: the welfare state and open borders are impossible to reconcile. Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, already stated quite dryly: one could have a welfare state, one could also have open borders, but one could not have both at the same time. Or as historian Rolf Peter Sieferle put it:

„A continuation of the welfare state with simultaneous mass immigration is self-destructive. (…) Markets can be liberalised both internally and externally, but high internal social standards cannot be built up while at the same time opening up borders. One then acts like the inhabitant of a well heated house, which opens windows and doors wide in winter. If it cools down, he just turns up the heater. You don’t need to be an energy expert to realize that this won’t work in the long run.“

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