Goodbye Sweden

Here in Denmark, in my opinion much of the worry is not based on first-hand experience with actual immigrants who have moved to your town and are not integrating well, but rather with a more generalized worry that the culture in some sense is threatened. That's harder to solve with practical measures like integration assistance, because it's not based on specific daily problems but more general ideological worldviews.

If anything it seems anti-correlated with presence of real live immigrants. The largest group of immigrants to Denmark go to Copenhagen. But Copenhagen isn't where you find the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment, as you'd expect if anti-immigrant sentiment were caused by contact with immigrants. Such sentiment isn't absent, but Copenhageners are comparatively okay with immigration and the majority take moderate views, focused on practical issues like programs to improve integration. The strongest worries and the more "militant" style of anti-immigrant politics comes from rural and small-town areas which do not really see large-scale immigration.

I believe this is also the case in a number of other European countries, for example in Austria and Switzerland, where immigrants go mainly to the cities, but anti-immigrant sentiment is concentrated in the rural areas and small towns. Some of this probably has nothing to do with immigration per se but is a result of preexisting cultural splits between cosmopolitan, liberally oriented cities, and more conservative countrysides (a 19th-century sort of romantic nationalism is very strong in rural Scandinavia).

As a Singaporean, I laugh at these low immigration numbers. 150K per year out of 9.8 million residents, that's a drop in the ocean.

According to the government, the total population of Singapore is 5.26M. Out of this, 3.27M are citizens, with 540K Permanent Residents and 1.46M non-residents. In other words, about 2M or 38% of the population were not born in Singapore.[1] Note that this is a conservative estimate since an immigrant can become a Singapore Citizen after 2 years as a Permanent Resident.

And yes, obviously there is great concern because a lot of foreigners do not assimilate well either.[2]

[1] http://population.sg/resources/population-composition/ [2] http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapor...

Assuming you're not trolling; the whole bit about immigrants is textbook xenophobia, couched in code words. The author uses the word "immigrants", but they don't use it mean all non-Swedish people from any other country. "Immigrants" in this context means the poor, dirty and lazy people of whatever country it's popular to hate at the moment. They're probably brown-skinned or at least non-Aryan.

And this reaction is exactly what makes any valid debate in pretty much most of Western Europe impossible.

Any time anyone dares to complain about the influence of ultra-reactionary immigrants on the quality and safety of public life, they are immediately branded "nationalist", "xenophobic" or "fascist".

Many of us, like myself, are from immigrant backgrounds. There is a world of difference between how our predecessors treated the country they immigrated to and what the recent waves of reactionary Islamists are doing.

People who aggressively and violently oppose the liberal values of our nations are not immigrants, they are invaders. And people of all races and political believes are getting tired of this shit.

Stop blaming the victims. We are not the aggressors, we are not the homophobic, antisemitic, anti-women criminal trash that terrorises public life.

We were once safe and progressive nations, and wanting to take that back does not make us fascist.

Singapore is very different though, with a long history of immigration.

Additionally, my understanding of Singapore's immigration laws (I looked into migrating there myself a few years ago) is that it's difficult to do so for anything other than economic reasons - you have to prove you have a job offer or can contribute substantially to Singapore's economy.