Swede here, shit is BAD, but this is relative to how things used to be before this shit started, so in relative global terms Sweden is still a damn good place to live.
That being said, this behavior should be seen as a warning to not take culture clashes lightly.
I am sure I am going to catch a lot of heat for this, but damn it, it needs to be said.
The gangs we see are a direct result of a terribly run migration policy.
We have taken in far, far, far too many migrants in a way, way, way too short ammount of time.
This combined with a integration policy that keeps failing over and over as we continously refuse to enforce even the most basic attempt by migrants to integrate. There are many migrants who has lived in Sweden for many years without speaking either Swedish or English, they still have a right to free interpretors when dealing with doctors and government services, this is fucking mental.
We have punnishments and laws fitting Swedes from the 1960s or so, they don’t do shit against the modern gangs.
So what needs to be done?
Start actually deporting criminals, log their DNA and give them a lifetime ban on returning, check all migrants against this database.
To those born in Sweden, start instituting extra long prison terms for criminals who keep reoffending.
Enforce learning the Swedish language and check compliance with in-person tests, and mandatory lessons. If you need an interpreter after 3 years, you have to pay for it yourself.
Wait, why would anyone have the right to free interpreters at any time? That sounds like such a waste of public resources and like you said, enables people to never even try to learn the language.
As an initial concept, it is resonable to help people get the care they need even if they don’t speak the language, but after 5 years of working to live here you should be expected to be able to communicate without an interpreter, even if it is not fluent.
I am down with this and even some more, except regarding having to pay for interpreters after 3 years. Working folks are hardly going to have the time to learn a whole ass language to proficiency in just 3 years, especially with kids to take care of
I moved to France,not able to speak a word, and within 3 years, I was working in a french only environment. It’s difficult, and I won’t pretend that everyone will have my luck, and opportunities,but it’s not unreasonable either.
Good for you, but an older person, especially near retiring age would not be able to pick up a language that quickly normally. Especially with the depth required to handle complex legal or medical matters, while also working full time just to make ends meet. And if on top of that, they are taking care of kids, which is a very common scenario for older migrants, that seems like too much of a stretch.
I agree, it’s very difficult to change habits as you get older, but the hardest thing is to put yourself out there, and not be afraid of making mistakes, and actually put in the monumental effort required to integrate. Older people who I have met, are more likely to find a bubble of people who speak the same language. I was lucky, I was only 28 when I arrived, and my wife is french, hence why I am lucky.
It is not so much a matter of changing habits, often migrants such as my parents take their elderly with them to the new country, leave their kids with them, and go to work, so their elderly parents get stuck in a new country, without speaking the language and being basically the only guardian their grandkids have.
Hell, my grandmother went from being a teacher in the old country, to a nanny who never managed to learn how to speak the local language, despite learning how to read and write in it, to a college level.
Most languages are far from phonetically true, and a lot of languages lack written accents. Things aren’t as black and white as you make them seem.
Our ability to learn simply degrades a lot even in our 30s-40s, and for elderly it’s just impossible. Read and write - maybe, but actually speaking - no, and it’s not a matter of effort.
I needed over 10 yeara before I was able to communicatd “OK”, 20 to be fluent in French.
Everyone isn’t a language god like you.
If you are fully immersed in another language, it shouldn’t take 10 years to have a coversational skill level. It’s on you.
Only if you are young. Why do people always have opinions, but don’t consider basics?
If you need to use a language for ten years in a fully immersed setting and have not learned conversational level skills, the issue is that you didn’t really try, no matter your age.
I can understand if someone has a learning disability, but that is a small fraction of people.
Wrong. Try and make your grandparents learn a new language in 10 years with them being 50-60 years old.
I can understand if someone has a learning disability, but that is a small fraction of people.
Judging by this thread you do.
Lets take this conversation to French.
I mean if you are not a little lying bitch :-)
Also you’re goalposting so hard, like now it’s having a “conversional skill”, go write some French lol.
D’accord. On peut parler en français si tu veux.
Imagine utiliser un ordinateur chaque jour pendant 10 ans et ne pas savoir comment l’utiliser. Est-ce que c’est un problème de l’outil qui est trop difficile ou un problème utilisateur?
Si pendant 10 ans , tu résides dans un pays sans en apprendre le langage, est-ce que c’est un problème du langage ou de la personne qui le parle?
Les vieilles personnes sont capables d’apprendre, bien qu’en vieillissant, notre capacité d’assimilation de l’information et de la connaissance diminue. Il faut donc mettre plus d’effort pour apprendre, mais rien d’impossible.
De mon expérience, les vieilles personnes qui n’ont jamais appris la langue de leur pays d’accueil, c’est parce qu’il se sont toujours fiés à quelqu’un d’autre pour traduire. Ce n’est pas un problème d’apprentissage, c’est un problème d’attitude. C’est acceptable au début lorsque la personne arrive fraichement dans le pays d’accueil, mais si après 10 ans, il te faut encore un traducteur pour commander au restaurant, c’est un problème de ne jamais avoir essayé.
Enfin, mon point initial a toujours été d’avoir un niveau conversationnel, pas technique.
Même dans notre langue maternelle, c’est normal de ne pas comprendre le jargon technique.
Edit: j’ai changé un mot pour que mon français soit plus neutre.
No, saying that Swedish integration policies suck while it has taken more immigrants than it should is fine.
So are solutions, only it’s a bit cruel to do that now to people already living in Sweden for many years.
So maybe enforcing learning the language (with maybe some cultural basics course) is fine, but deportations should come like 5+ years later.
Deportations, as in after commiting a crime, should be on the table instantly for violent crimes commited by migrants.
Note that I am not talking about general deportations of normal, well adjusted migrants, but migrants commiting violent crimes.
As for language and culture classes, we allready offer them for free to all migrants, Svenska För Invandrare, it is however critisized for only offering low quallity classes, which is a big problem that needs to be adressed.
My wife signed on for SFI after she moved, and found that the level and expectations were so low she had difficulty staying engaged with the classes and course material.
She looked into private tutoring and was fluent in Swedish in 4 months, and ended up teaching Swedish to highschool aged kids after just 2.5 years.
To this day she wonders if SFI wasn’t secretly designed to push anyone with any kind of ambition out of the system.
I personally think it’s a case of bigotry of low expectations, but it’s clear it really doesn’t work for the intended purpose.
This tracks with what I have heard about it, and also tracks with my expectations of the Swedish government in cases like these, they dumb it down to the lowest possible standard to get good stats on the usage and success rate of it.
OK, no disagreement.
Crazy how fucking over the rest of the world will bring them to you regardless…
This is dripping with racism
How has Sweden fucked over the rest of the world?
This happened in the 1600-1700s in Europe, I am not sure that this is relates to our issues with gangs today.
But fine, how would you solve the issue with gangs in Sweden?
That’s probably some ignorant American teenager thinking that every European nation had a colonial empire. I’m not sure he even tried to read that article.
Yep, feels like someone who just searched for Swedish Empire and sent the link without checking the context…
I asked Finnish colleagues what they thought of the situation in Sweden - and not just the latest events, but how the country has turned evermore violent and dangerous for the past 20 years. They told me quite unapologetically: “Well, the Swedes opened their borders wide to all kinds of people from wildly different cultural backgrounds coming from really troubled countries and the Finns haven’t. Now they have the problems those people brought with them and we don’t.”
I’m starting to think there’s some truth to this. But as a foreigner, whenever I go to Finland, the reverse - the lack of cultural diversity, the sea of whiteness and the absolute lack of non-Finnish-sounding names - is equally unsettling, rather stifling and feels genuinely bizarre sometimes.
I guess you can’t have the best of both worlds…
While I personally believe that immigration is both humane and necessary for the aging western economies, I think it’s safe to say that the purely optimistic, citizenship first and questions later mentality has proven a failure.
Without rules and a culture that demands assimilation instead of parallel existence in a separate microcosm, the new citizens have difficulties identifying with the new social order they are moving into, and naturally little respect for it either. Not to mention that by corralling immigrants into ghettos the formation of parallel structures is encouraged and the native population alienated.
While I personally believe that immigration is both humane and necessary for the aging western economies,
Oh, wow. Instead of solving the problem where people don’t consider it plausible to have at least 2 children, let’s bring in more people from poorer countries.
Without rules and a culture that demands assimilation instead of parallel existence in a separate microcosm,
Yeah, see, it’s fine to have separate microcosms for any sane society. Just some are toxic.
It’s simply about education and, yes, not letting in people you don’t want.
Where did I say bring in the poors to clean our toilets? Obviously I would prefer a not capitalist system where people can afford to have kids, and immigration can mean a lot of things. I also said the current approach to immigration is failing. As for parallel societies, no, those shouldn’t exist and the fact that they do is the result of failed assimilation.
Every town ideally is a parallel society.
Also either you have one social space for everyone accepting of all ideas and views, or you have cultural wars marginalizing and suppressing people unpleasant for you (like racists or religious nuts or whoever), in which case they will have their own space because they don’t really have to accept your domination.
I think we are arguing semantics here, subcultures are fine and normal. Parallel societies, like those that form around ghettos full of immigrants, with their own unofficial set of laws and rules certainly are not.
That’s more a failure of the integration policies of the host country though.
Well, I think there’s Christiania in Copenhagen?.. A different kind of that.
I guess you can’t have the best of both worlds…
Except you can, but it requires to let go of any ideas related to cultural purity or isolationism, while simultaneously not getting cold feet when it comes to turning back people who clearly can’t possibly integrate.
Which is kind of hilarious since Finland has a much higher murder rate than Sweden.
“Much” higher is stretching it. According to Wikipedia, Sweden has a homicide rate of 1.1 per 100,000 in vs 1.2 for Finland.
Meaning it would just take a couple of drunken Swedes with a fruit knife to put Sweden ahead.
Sweden has a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 in vs 1.1 for Finland.
Sweden has 1.1 and Finland 1.2
Yeah, the other way round 🙂 Fixed. Thanks!
…not for long if things keep going at this rate. In just a few years we’ve skyrocketed from having amongst the least violent crime in Europe to being up there with the Balkan countries - and it just keeps getting worse for every year.
“Much higher”
Notably, the murder rate in Sweeden and Finland is a full third below the lowest state in the US. And the US average is about 5 per 100k.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Sweden also is a sea of whiteness, beyond a small number of BAME immigrants often concentrated in banlieue-like outer suburbs and the adoption of kebab-meat pizza as a comfort food. Even in Stockholm, it’s a lot less diverse than, say, Paris or Berlin.
the reverse - the lack of cultural diversity, the sea of whiteness and the absolute lack of non-Finnish-sounding names - is equally unsettling
LOL. It’s unsettling for you that people’s names and faces don’t entertain your weird fetish?
Go to Kenia and compare, I think it’ll be even less diverse.
China hella Chinese
As a Swede, I sometimes wonder if I would feel more at home moving to one of the other Scandinavian countries - because I don’t really feel at home here anymore.
Maybe a compromise
So then don’t go to Finland, then you won’t be unsettled. Follow me for more common sense tips.
I guess you can’t have the best of both worlds
Of course you can, you just have to not maintain an exclusive society, because an exclusive society depends on excluding others, and when the “others” can’t be excluded anymore, that’s when the full blown racism kicks in. Knowing that people see racism as some inevitability rather than a deliberate system of oppression created and imposed by individuals who benefit from its existence (if to varying degrees) is pretty fucking terrifying.
The idea that there was no crime before immigration, or that the Finns (or Nordic people in general, who all maintain a similar society and are facing similar issues with racism now that they can’t maintain their white supremacist exclusivity anymore) are innocent little lambs who have never committed a crime before the brown people arrived is not only absurd, it’s pretty racist and disgusting in its own right.
They love to laud themselves as the best most developed most progressive countries, but the reality is they’re just a couple of decades, if not a century behind the rest of Europe when it comes to integration (this does not equal equity or equality, just integration), and are following exactly the same route as the other countries have - capitalist government and the media that supports it need a scapegoat (who they’ve rigged the system against so they’d have to struggle by default, living in poverty, feeling excluded, attacked for their race) to shift blame and attention to, while they continue to exploit the people of their country (the fact that there are Nordic billionaires easily contradicts any claim to socialism they might raise, and you don’t need to look far to thoroughly debunk it altogether).
The fact that you’re an immigrant and are seriously considering there’s some truth in this racism is pretty fucking sad and scary, but mostly goes to show just how powerful the propaganda is (and how similar it is in all countries, which is probably why it hits a nerve with you even though you don’t live there).
It all comes down to Erdogan. He’s the one harboring the heads of these criminal organizations because they pay him well. The Turkish government essentially became a part of a drug empire.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Turkey is harbouring criminals and terrorists for pay.
Happens all the time. One person downvotes (probably from Turkey) then the rest follow blindly without even reading. I had hoped this mindset would stay in reddit but here we are.
What I have said is factually true. They created a system where anyone with $400K can get a Turkish citizenship (citizenship by investment). It was created specifically to build a safe haven for these people. And then when Sweden wants these criminals (e.g. Kurdish Fox), Erdogan says they’re Turkish citizens so they won’t be extradited. Just Google “Kurdish Fox” (the head of the criminal organisation in this article) and you’ll see. And he is one of many. I bet they keep paying to stay in Turkey.
Edogan has gone so far down the corruption line that he is now in bed with drug and human traffickers.
Edogan has gone so far down the corruption line that he is now in bed with drug and human traffickers.
This is not much different morally from what he started with, being a Turkish politician after all.
A friendly reminder that it’s a nation built on genocide and celebrating genocide today , with a fine legacy of fascist military coups every time they elected someone less of a ghoul.
(Also I have zero respect for people irritated by such reminders about Turkey.)
I though that part of Europe was suppose to be Utopian? I guess everyone focuses on the positive from an international perspective. Regardless, I still know nothing about Sweden other than it is the headquarters of Ikea
Privatisation of our schools is largely to blame.
Not anymore than the lack of youth centers. It’s a tired old myth that has no basis in reality.
Europeans are so crazy racist.
Edit: lmao, yall cant even defend yourself.
Ok, I’ll bite, how would you solve the current problem with gangs in Sweden?
This is a giant clash of cultures, covering you wars and shouting “Racist” over and over will acchive nothing.
So let’s hear it, how do you suggest solving the current situation?
Or have you just come to whine?
In America migrants just want to be as American as possible as quickly as possible. We don’t have the experience to help you with this one thing. Americans also just learn Spanish for the largest foreign group between their broken English and our broken Spanish we can work out most things no need for state sponsored translators that is a ludacris idea.
Ludacris is a rapper, ludicrous is the adjective.
How about identifying why these people are joining gangs rather than just “brown people join gangs because theyre brown”
Perhaps its because they are treated differently than their swedish compatriots or perhaps its a socioeconomic reason.
Sadly, i do not have the ability to conjecture without data. However, i can make one thing clear. Theyre not joining gangs “just because”.
Perhaps it’s because there was a country they could just go to without any supporting reason and live on welfare.
I live in Russia, I’m confident they’d have the same problem with Russian immigrants if there were a lot of them and if the same rules would apply to them. It’s definitely not culturally superior to Syria, LOL.
Ah, and to some extent you are right, Swedes are a bit unconsciously racist, I think I’ve seen anonymous polls etc about “whether you’d accept your daughter marrying a ME person” with surprising results. That’s a downside of non-inclusiveness being completely unacceptable in the public space, people are still racist, but there’s no chain of small steps for them to become less so.
The results of those polls arent surprising.
A lot of Europeans are racist. Full stop.
whether you’d accept your daughter marrying a ME person
Probably because the knee jerk reaction is that ME person ≈ muslim and even aside from islam, ME cultural values are highly misogynistic and very backwards when it comes to women.
To be fair, I’d probably be similarly concerned if my hypothetical daughter was looking to marry a deeply religious christian or hindu also.
Fair, but how do you tell that from racism then?
I mean, one could treat this question as if everything else were fine with that hypothetical person, without assuming something we weren’t old.
Honestly, it possibly is a bit racist - making assumptions based on probabilities and stereotypes.
I am and have been friends and coworkers with several people who were from the ME (muslim and not) and most were decent folks. There was one notable exception (ex of one of my friends) who turned out to be a real piece of work. I’d like to think that by being aware of my prejudices, I can disprove them by informing myself about people, and at least not writing them off until I’ve made myself aware of who they really are.
Either way, if I had a daughter, I hope I’d raise her well enough to be able to trust her to judge these sorts of things on her own once she became an adult.
Not even “possibly”, yall cant even hear yourselves.
Lmao what a weak bait…
Yeah, “bait”. sweden has one of the lowest crime rates in the entire western world and this article says “overwhelms”.
This is racial panic at best.
What? Organized crime rates have steadily increased over the years compared to our neighbors. What do you even know about Sweden? You know what, fuck it I don’t care, weak bait.
* Confused South European noises *
Only correct way to interpret all of the boomer comments
lol.
It’s not like you offer any suggestions on how to solve the situation. You are just whining.
And its not like europeans are offering any solutions beyond the right-wing-US style of thinking of these people are foreign and are bad.
