I just wanted to understand whether this plays right into the far right playbook once more.
The far right thing comes into play because Swedes are notoriously bad at complaining about things in public (one of the few things you can tell Germans and Swedes apart by aside from the quality of the beer), so as things began to get ugly it was taboo to talk about, it was allowed to fester. In come rightoids who have no qualms about breaking unspoken social norms about welcome culture and such things, actually naming the topic head-on.
Had the broadly SocDem majority be able to address the issue, even just silently, “let’s increase funding for youth programmes and social mobility and not say why specifically we’re doing it” things wouldn’t have gotten out of hand, and the right wouldn’t have had its opportunity.
I think you have expressed my fear quite well. Maybe it is as I feared. I don’t know much about Sweden, but I do have the feeling that the far right everywhere gets brownie points for just naming things the left will leave untouched (with a huge amount of hyperbole, racial hatred and scapegoating to be sure). I’m not in any way trying to force an “immigrants bad” argument, just fearing that a surge in crime involving migrant populations benefits the far right disproportionately, especially if the rest of the political spectrum seem unable to effectively address the issue in a more socially productive and progressive manner.
It’s not just immigration policies, those are just a common ignition point. Say, in Germany after reunification the east lost lots of people, looking for opportunity in the west as the west sold off and destroyed the eastern economy for scrap, people grumbled, now there’s immigration into those areas from outside of Germany, and not just from the neighbourhood (Poland, Czechia, etc) either, at ultimately quite low levels but at a higher speed, as a percentage of population, than has ever been the case in the west. And people do more than grumble.
Which is to say: Yes, a part of the population has been replaced with immigrants. That much is demographic fact. It is not large, there are no signs of it ever getting actually out of hand but it’s there, it’s noticeable, and it’s still growing. Failing to acknowledge it just plays into the hands of the right who then can spin all sorts of conspiracy theories about it. People want it addressed because it makes them uneasy, fearing to become a minority in their own ancestral home, and, sure, why not: Invest in those places so that the youth doesn’t flee it any more, and that people who went away to work return. Integrating the newcomers isn’t actually anywhere close to the main issue, while anti-immigration sentiment is quite high, anti-immigrant sentiment is not – people like Abdul from the corner store earning a honest living. They’re not worried about new things they are worried about the decay of the old and familiar, those are very different things.
And oh boy has there been decay under neoliberalism.
it’s not replacement, it’s expansion. our population has grown by about 2%. also, since we pivoted to a “service economy”, we are down on entry level jobs, which are being taken by immigrants because 1) the higher-education jobs all have stricter requirements and 2) they have more work experience and are willing to work for less than swedish teenagers.
none of this matters to the people who fear them taking over. it’s pure populism.
I was talking about East Germany, I’m not deep into the Swedish data just as a note though expansion and replacement don’t necessarily exclude each other. From the anecdotes I heard though Sweden has basically been breeding Banlieues, which by definition aren’t replacements but new developments, and then there’s the country side where there might actually be replacement but nobody cares because Acke is happy that an Indonesian nurse now works in the hospital because she’s cute and all the Swedish women went to the city.
The most dastardly thing I heard is the situation of Swedes with immigrant background who were in their early twenties or such when shit started to hit the fan: Previously they were perfectly well integrated, now they get lumped up with the problematic folks.
On the upside: Every country seems to go through a phase of messing it up. In Germany first we didn’t care about integration of e.g. Turks at all, assuming that they’ll go home one day – then they started to open greengrocers and Döner shops, they’re an enterprising bunch. Then we told them to make sure to talk German with their kids at home, with disastrous results: Kids ended up speaking neither proper German nor proper Turkish: If you don’t become properly proficient in a language – any language – as a kid your overall language processing capabilities are going to stay stunted forever, and we did that to a whole generation while thinking we were doing good. The right advise to give is to tell parents to speak their native language at home, the kids will learn German playing on the streets, in kindergarten, at school, no issue. Now we’ve progressed to more advanced fuck-ups, like not screening refugees for PTSD: If we don’t, ISIS will be happy to do it with less than desirable results.
Swedes simply seem to have more talent at messing it up than even us. As said: Start to complain early, before shit hits the fan. Leave it to a Swede to be shocked at a German complaining about a pothole, “but we’ve got procedures for that I’m sure the town knows about it they’re terribly busy you really shouldn’t say anything they’ll get around to do it”…
And that really, really doesn’t mesh with a government which doesn’t go out of its way to figure out what people are worried about, thinking they could know what’s up by looking at statistics.
The far right thing comes into play because Swedes are notoriously bad at complaining about things in public (one of the few things you can tell Germans and Swedes apart by aside from the quality of the beer), so as things began to get ugly it was taboo to talk about, it was allowed to fester. In come rightoids who have no qualms about breaking unspoken social norms about welcome culture and such things, actually naming the topic head-on.
Had the broadly SocDem majority be able to address the issue, even just silently, “let’s increase funding for youth programmes and social mobility and not say why specifically we’re doing it” things wouldn’t have gotten out of hand, and the right wouldn’t have had its opportunity.
I think you have expressed my fear quite well. Maybe it is as I feared. I don’t know much about Sweden, but I do have the feeling that the far right everywhere gets brownie points for just naming things the left will leave untouched (with a huge amount of hyperbole, racial hatred and scapegoating to be sure). I’m not in any way trying to force an “immigrants bad” argument, just fearing that a surge in crime involving migrant populations benefits the far right disproportionately, especially if the rest of the political spectrum seem unable to effectively address the issue in a more socially productive and progressive manner.
It’s not just immigration policies, those are just a common ignition point. Say, in Germany after reunification the east lost lots of people, looking for opportunity in the west as the west sold off and destroyed the eastern economy for scrap, people grumbled, now there’s immigration into those areas from outside of Germany, and not just from the neighbourhood (Poland, Czechia, etc) either, at ultimately quite low levels but at a higher speed, as a percentage of population, than has ever been the case in the west. And people do more than grumble.
Which is to say: Yes, a part of the population has been replaced with immigrants. That much is demographic fact. It is not large, there are no signs of it ever getting actually out of hand but it’s there, it’s noticeable, and it’s still growing. Failing to acknowledge it just plays into the hands of the right who then can spin all sorts of conspiracy theories about it. People want it addressed because it makes them uneasy, fearing to become a minority in their own ancestral home, and, sure, why not: Invest in those places so that the youth doesn’t flee it any more, and that people who went away to work return. Integrating the newcomers isn’t actually anywhere close to the main issue, while anti-immigration sentiment is quite high, anti-immigrant sentiment is not – people like Abdul from the corner store earning a honest living. They’re not worried about new things they are worried about the decay of the old and familiar, those are very different things.
And oh boy has there been decay under neoliberalism.
it’s not replacement, it’s expansion. our population has grown by about 2%. also, since we pivoted to a “service economy”, we are down on entry level jobs, which are being taken by immigrants because 1) the higher-education jobs all have stricter requirements and 2) they have more work experience and are willing to work for less than swedish teenagers.
none of this matters to the people who fear them taking over. it’s pure populism.
I was talking about East Germany, I’m not deep into the Swedish data just as a note though expansion and replacement don’t necessarily exclude each other. From the anecdotes I heard though Sweden has basically been breeding Banlieues, which by definition aren’t replacements but new developments, and then there’s the country side where there might actually be replacement but nobody cares because Acke is happy that an Indonesian nurse now works in the hospital because she’s cute and all the Swedish women went to the city.
The most dastardly thing I heard is the situation of Swedes with immigrant background who were in their early twenties or such when shit started to hit the fan: Previously they were perfectly well integrated, now they get lumped up with the problematic folks.
On the upside: Every country seems to go through a phase of messing it up. In Germany first we didn’t care about integration of e.g. Turks at all, assuming that they’ll go home one day – then they started to open greengrocers and Döner shops, they’re an enterprising bunch. Then we told them to make sure to talk German with their kids at home, with disastrous results: Kids ended up speaking neither proper German nor proper Turkish: If you don’t become properly proficient in a language – any language – as a kid your overall language processing capabilities are going to stay stunted forever, and we did that to a whole generation while thinking we were doing good. The right advise to give is to tell parents to speak their native language at home, the kids will learn German playing on the streets, in kindergarten, at school, no issue. Now we’ve progressed to more advanced fuck-ups, like not screening refugees for PTSD: If we don’t, ISIS will be happy to do it with less than desirable results.
Swedes simply seem to have more talent at messing it up than even us. As said: Start to complain early, before shit hits the fan. Leave it to a Swede to be shocked at a German complaining about a pothole, “but we’ve got procedures for that I’m sure the town knows about it they’re terribly busy you really shouldn’t say anything they’ll get around to do it”…
And that really, really doesn’t mesh with a government which doesn’t go out of its way to figure out what people are worried about, thinking they could know what’s up by looking at statistics.