Sweden accepted 163,000 refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan in September 2015. At that time, it was the largest number of refugees allowed in Europe compared to the population.
At the time, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven of the left-wing government of the Social Democratic Party said, “There are no walls in my Europe,” and asked other European countries to follow Sweden. Sweden, a “humanitarian superpower,” has implemented such a “big” refugee permit policy over the past decades, accounting for 2 million foreign-born people out of a population of 10.5 million.
However, Sweden, which failed to integrate these foreign immigrants into society and was one of the most peaceful countries in Northern Europe a decade ago, has now become the second-highest crime rate in Europe after Albania, including gun killings by gun and drug trafficking gangs led by immigrants from the Balkans and the Middle East.
In September last year, Sweden’s Ministry of Justice said, “Children from families whose parents are both foreign immigrants have 3.2 times higher crime rates than children from families whose parents are Swedish-born.” In April of the same year, Magdalena Andersson, then prime minister of the Social Democratic Party government, promised an active social integration policy, saying, “We live in one country now, but we live in a completely different reality,” but the situation worsened.
“Sweden is on the verge of an imposition,” the European Conservative, a conservative European newspaper, said in October, while several news outlets in the U.S. and Europe recently reported that Sweden has become “a paradise for gangsters” (Daily Telegraph), “gangs harm Sweden’s peaceful image” (BBC broadcast), and “Europe’s gun-murder capital” (Wall Street Journal).
Ultimately, Wolf Christerson, the prime minister of the right-wing coalition, who entered September last year with the support of right-wing populists who opposed immigrants’ crimes, announced in late September that he would “mobilize the military,” but its effectiveness remains unknown.
◇ Failure to integrate the influx of refugee population… becomes a hotbed of clashes between criminal groups
So far this year, there have been 319 gun crimes in Sweden, with 50 deaths. In addition, 139 grenade-throwing and bombings occurred. Most of them were power struggles and retaliatory crimes over drug trafficking among immigrant criminal organizations.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
