In migrant-surged Sweden, now it’s the Swedes who are fleeing
By Monica Showalter
AmericanThinker.com
October 2, 2019
Sweden has drawn praise for opening its doors to thousands of fleeing Middle Eastern and African refugees and migrants, in numbers comparable only to Germany:
When it comes to refugees, [UN Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres praised Sweden for being “absolutely exemplary” and said Europe had failed to provide support by taking coordinated action to ensure equal distribution in the area.
“Instead, Europe was totally unable to find solidarity for this kind of integrated European solution. There was no European solution. As there was no solidarity at all, two countries, Sweden and Germany have essentially been the ones receiving the overwhelming majority of the refugees, which is absolutely unfair, which doesn’t make any sense.”
Turns out that wasn’t such a bright idea, given that Swedish cities such as Malmo have turned into Muslim-dominant no-go hellholes, which Swedes now find unliveable. The migrants freely admitted to Sweden have placed about as much value on that entry to Sweden as the price they paid for it, which is nothing.
Now it’s the Swedes, who are fleeing, setting off a second refugee wave of sorts as Swedes move away to either the Swedish hinterlands or else to other countries, according to this Gatestone report.
“As a parent, you become angry, desperate… The result is that those who can, and can afford it, move…. To a quieter part of the country or abroad. Those who do not have the same opportunities [to move] remain where they are. It’s devastating…” — Former Minister of Labour Sven Otto Littorin, who now lives and works in Dubai, on Facebook.
“About 13 percent of the population in Sweden experience problems in their own residential areas with crime, violence or vandalism. It is one of the highest proportions in Europe.” By comparison, the other Nordic countries were placed among the countries with the lowest percentage of the population who experience such problems….” — Statistics Sweden, April 25, 2019.
Swedes are on the move. Problems in many municipalities are prompting Swedes to leave for other areas with fewer socioeconomic problems. The issue has recently gained the attention of the Swedish mainstream media.
They’re calling it a ‘population exchange’ which isn’t exactly a gain. According to Gatestone:
Take the small, picturesque town of Filipstad (population 10,000), for example. Swedish television recently made a documentary about the town, which finds itself in both a financial and an existential crisis. “We are experiencing a population exchange. You can think of that what you want… But it is simply a statement of fact that this is actually what we are going through and we have to deal with it”, Jim Frölander, integration manager in the Filipstad municipality, says in the documentary. Between 2012 and 2018, 640 native Swedes left the town, and 963 foreign-born people moved into the town. Those leaving are people of working age (20-64), which means that the municipality’s tax revenues are shrinking, exacerbating town’s financial crisis.
Oh sure, the idea of taking in thousands of unassimilated and hostile Muslims into Sweden’s cities may have sounded great to the country’s central planners — it own population after all, is in a death spiral as a result of its past socialist policies which created a high-cost, low-marriage, low-child, graying country with a potential pension crisis. But Sweden also wanted to virtue-signal to other countries as it opened its gates to all comers and drew all that UN praise.
What this report signals is that Sweden ended up exchanging its well-educated, law-abiding, and high-social-capital population for an unemployable, uneducated, lawless, and low-social capital one. The central planning here – and as this excellent New York Post article notes – it is a country with a lot of central planning — didn’t quite work out the way they thought it would. Sweden isn’t gaining the population its social engineers thought they would gain from this top-down manuever, its actually losing its most productive citizens as an unintended consequence, because for every unassimilated refugee coming in, a Swede is moving out.
Now it’s the Swedes who are voting with their feet. Countries that fought from keeping high numbers of unvetted, unassimilated, and hostile migrants from entry to their shores drew a lot of opprobrium, but at least they aren’t seeing this kind of flight. It all boils down to migrants placing about as much value on the country they are admitted to as the price they actually paid for it.
The Rest…HERE
