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Gang crisis shaking Sweden

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Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#161

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While Sweden absolutely can be much stricter with background checks, in my experience in Scandinavia, y'all are racist jerks. I'm a brown guy who's grown up in North America their entire life, and day-to-day conversations with people there suck. There absolutely seems to be a mentality that if you don't fit a specific trope you can't be Swedish. No amount of token representation in Scandinavian TV will change that. T…

If people there are such jerks, why do you want to be in their country, or have day-to-day conversations with them? What gives you the right as a foreigner to force "persistent societal change" in a country on the other side of the world? Haven't Americans violently tried that already in a whole bunch of different places?

> if you don't fit a specific trope you can't be Swedish.

Swedes are an ethnic group, you can't be Swedish unless you're born Swedish. Just as you can't be Han, Inuit, Ukrainian or Bantu unless you're born with that ethnicity. American, Brazilian, Roman and a few others are nations that are not ethnically bound, but they are the exception.

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#162

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Unfortunately everywhere in the Western world there seems to be denialism about this. And I'm actually legitimately afraid to actually voice that opinion in-person. I can vent here anonymously. But in the circles I'm in in San Francisco, I wouldn't dare suggest that certain migrants may not be compatible. There could personal, social, career impacts. You're automatically branded a xenophobe of some kind.

Well, isn’t it some kind of xenophobia? Saying that some “types” of outsiders are bad news full stop and should be kept outside else they’ll ruin the country is at least xenophobia adjacent, no matter how true you think it may be (probably unsurprisingly, I disagree on it being true, but that’s beside the point).

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#163
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyway, the Right party pulled the balance of power from the Left and formed a centre/right coalition more than a year ago, because of all the bad people coming here and doing bad things. Weren't they going to fix this? While I do think problems are way overblown, I don't know if you realize, these issues take generations to fix. If there is one legitimate scary bit about immigration is that it has VERY long-reachin…

Why would you want to deport someone’s grandkid?

If you split people into two groups "us" and "them", you can start devising separate laws for each group.

But that's no longer an option in a couple of generations, because technically, they're one of "us" now.

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#164

> Those on the right largely blame immigration, which has added 2mn people to the country in recent decades. Those on the left point to social factors, including the privatisation of Sweden’s welfare system which has led to worse services in deprived areas. Probably both things are true. When countries take in large amounts of immigration, their generous welfare systems can become stressed. Sweden didn't balance the…

It's largely the result of an ideological deadlock, where legitimate logistical concerns about immigration and integration were lumped up with islamophobia and racism. Immigration was also seen as desirable in order to address the demographic crisis and low birth rates.

This in turn had the ironic side-effect of cementing a sort of structural racism where all these immigrants showed up and were given at best estate housing and a welfare check with very limited prospects for the same sort of quality of life as the natives.

Turns out very few people want to lead a shitty life doing menial jobs as a second class citizen. Isn't that weird?

Turns out if you give kids the career options of cleaning toilets or takeaway delivery (both for a pittance), a life of crime starts to look real appealing. Heck, it's a real testament to the humanity of these people that Sweden doesn't have more criminals than it already does.

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#165
post #91

Hungary and Slovakia, the only European countries that haven't allowed illegal immigration in, are at the bottom of that chart, while Sweden is getting rekt... Legal immigration is of course fine and necessary, as long as the state and socials systems can assimilate it... (Japan is a good example). But articles like this show concerning data points in western countries with uncontrolled migratory policies.

That charts paints a rather skewed picture by only focusing on firearms rather than murder overall. This is not a bad thing to highlight, but you should absolutely not confuse the two. Looking at [1], murder rate in Slovakia is comparable, and Hungary only slightly lower. Sweden isn't even near the top murder rate in the EU, and a number of other countries which accepted a large number of refugees have lower murder r…

When discussing a topic like gang violence why would you focus on the general societal homicide rate unless gang homicide's execution mirrored that of the society at large? The only useful attribute of your approach seems to be that it downplays the severity of what's being measured at a glance. The ranked approach is also strange considering that the obvious point of interest for most people would be whether the gang related murder rates in the countries that accepted refugees trended upwards or downwards from their past values within those regions. Comparing countries to each other instead of comparing them against their historical selves is just sleight of hand to excuse real human suffering as "exaggerated".

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#167
post #134
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That charts paints a rather skewed picture by only focusing on firearms rather than murder overall. This is not a bad thing to highlight, but you should absolutely not confuse the two. Looking at [1], murder rate in Slovakia is comparable, and Hungary only slightly lower. Sweden isn't even near the top murder rate in the EU, and a number of other countries which accepted a large number of refugees have lower murder r…

That chart is using data from 2021, while the gang crisis in Sweden began escalating in 2022.

So quite a while after the peak in immigration in the mid/late 2010s.

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#168

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So Berlin has a problem with gangs of Palestine/Lebanese background, especially around the area Nordneukölln/Sonnenalle. But if you look at the history, the issue is nearly entirely of german making - and the voices from the liberal left had been warning a long time that things would end up this way, if the convervative policies would continue:

A very large part of those people or their parents/grandparents came to Berlin during the Lebanese Civil war, or due to the Intifada in the time between 1975 and 1990. They‘d travel to Eastern Berlin and then take the S-Bahn to the West - that was easy, there were no border controls. Because having border controls on the West Berlin Side would mean acknowledging the border, and thus the GDR, and that was politically undesirable. And once on the western side, they‘d apply for asylum. Since they were fleeing a war zone, and not be classified as politically prosecuted, they‘d not get full asylum, but deportation into a war zone was prohibited by the Geneva refugee convention (Duldung, in german legal speak)

Now, they‘d have a grey zone status - no asylum means no social security, no work permit, no legal status. The only ways to earn some bits of money were illegal jobs. They were deliberately marginalized and kept at the fringes of society. There were no offers that would help them integrate into the German society, no language classes, schools and childcare would try hard to keep the kids out - which was legal, because their status implied that school wasn’t mandatory for those children. This changed in 1990, when school became mandatory. But instead of placing these kids in schools where they‘d receive suitable education, the Berlin Senate kept the schools underfunded and after the reunion staffed them mainly with teachers from East Berlin (those were public officials and could be ordered to teach wherever the senate wanted). Unsurprisingly, teachers with GDR education in an underfunded school in a school system that was new to the teachers were not well suited to deal with the task at hand. The entirely predictable result: Many pupils left without a proper education that would give them a chance on the labor market.

To make matter worse, the CDU (conservative) senate in the 1980ies primarily funded religious conservative groups in the Lebanese/Palestine expat communities - with the intention that they‘d strengthen the bond between the expats and their home culture and countries. Instead of rather funding the liberal non-religious groups.

Fast forward to now: We now have people in their sixties and seventies that came as young adults, never had a legal permit to work, their kids with no real chance at even basic eduction, all grown up in poverty, the third generation kids, grown up in a dysfunctional implementation of a school system, all of them deliberately marginalized, and at the same time being influenced by religious conservative groups supported by the government.

It is objectively true that we have a problem there. But it‘s been a long time coming and it stems to a very large extend from not acknowledging that these people exist, that they need to be given a chance to integrate because that would, as a first step, require acknowledging the fact that they are here to stay.

This is the Berlin example, but if you look at how the entire debate around the Turkish „Gastarbeiter“ went in the 1980/1990ies, the same pattern is visible.

See https://taz.de/Debatte-um-Berliner-Sonnenallee/!5965454/ (German), plus the documentary linked in the comments to the article and further reading mentioned in the article.

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#169

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Yes, because it is well know that Mohammad urged Muslims to create criminal gangs and start dealing drugs... Sorry, but what sort of stupid nonsense worldview do you have? There are certainly immigrants with non-western values and also immigrants who are criminals but why are you mixing these two demographics together? If anything the ones dealing drugs are likely to be the most westernized.

This is not a racial or a religious thing. It's a cultural thing.

There are migrants from the same countries that integrated well. The problem is mostly with the "asylum seekers" who never wanted to integrate.

Re: Gang crisis shaking Sweden

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because it is well know that Mohammad urged Muslims to create criminal gangs and start dealing drugs... Sorry, but what sort of stupid nonsense worldview do you have? There are certainly immigrants with non-western values and also immigrants who are criminals but why are you mixing these two demographics together? If anything the ones dealing drugs are likely to be the most westernized.

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