Soul-searching in Scandinavia over Syrian refugees
Posted by Ann Corcoran on September 20, 2014
Wow! This is a very enlightening piece. And, it’s in the New York Times no less!
Stockholm under siege in May 2013 as Muslim migrants riot.
http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/452746/fourth-night-fires-unrest-stockholm.jpg?w=480&h=270Swedish counter-terrorism expert:
We are righteous. But sometimes the righteousness doesn’t meet reality.”
Seems that as Sweden opens its doors to Syrians (and the public is expected to stay quiet), in Norway the government is not going to swing its doors open and the “anti-immigrant” political forces are encouraged to discuss their concerns and fears about excessive immigration. (I wonder did Anders Breivik have something to do with the new-found openness?)
From The New York Times (emphasis is mine):
THE narrow victory of the left-leaning Social Democratic Party in Sweden’s elections last Sunday marked a broad shift in its politics. But a new coalition government is unlikely to reconsider one of the country’s most challenging policies: its response to the Syrian civil war.
Sweden has taken an open-door approach to people fleeing the conflict, accepting more Syrians than any other European country.
Never mind that Sweden has double-digit youth unemployment. That there have been riots in immigrant neighborhoods in Stockholm. That there is a severe housing shortage for new arrivals. Or that the Swedish Migration Board, which handles asylum seekers, needs a drastic budget increase — almost $7 billion — to cover soaring costs over the next few years.
And never mind that the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats won 13 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election, their best showing ever. They more than doubled their seats in Parliament — from 20 to 49 — and are now the third-biggest party in the country.
“We are the moral guardians of the world,” Magnus Ranstorp, a specialist in counterterrorism at the Swedish National Defense College, told me a few days before the election, referring to Swedes. “We haven’t fought a war in 200 years. We are righteous. But sometimes the righteousness doesn’t meet reality.”
As the Syrian conflict has turned into a regional humanitarian crisis, more European countries are accepting Syrian refugees preselected by the United Nations. But apart from Germany, a much larger country, only Sweden is welcoming tens of thousands of Syrians who come on their own and request asylum.
Some 40,000 Syrians have arrived in Sweden since the conflict began. And following a decision to offer permanent residency to all Syrians, Sweden is expecting more than 80,000 asylum seekers in 2014, many of them from Syria.
In its largess, Sweden diverges from countries like Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark, which have taken in far fewer Syrian asylum-seekers — generally granting them only temporary residency — and just several hundred United Nations-sponsored refugees each. Even more dramatic is the contrast with Norway……
There is much much more, read it all.
All of our posts on Sweden (chronicling its death spiral) are here.
Watch for it! We are going to learn that open borders in a welfare state will result in chaos and ultimately death for the country.
Reminder! The US is about to welcome tens of thousands of Syrians!
http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/
