8 ms·

"There is no consensus on the main cause of this surge in violence" If I am not misunderstood, the consensus in Sweden and globally is that the situation is ca

"There is no consensus on the main cause of this surge in violence" If I am not misunderstood, the consensus in Sweden and globally is that the situation is caused by lax immigration policies and taking in too many immigrants who have not been able to integrate to the society.

mac_iver 2y ago
Immigration policy is one factor, but it's too easy to blame everything on a single group in society. While Sweden's immigration debate gets lots of attention abroad, other problems like our corrupt private school system and cocaine use among the wealthy don't make as many headlines.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  I'm sure that poor people would love to have some cocaine too if they could afford it.
redeux 2y ago
Are you saying that the violence is caused by the immigrants directly or indirectly? I can’t say for Sweden but in the Texas immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than citizens[1]. There doesn’t seem to be a good source of data for the US as a whole. 1. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...
- mihaic 2y ago
  The profile of the average Swedish immigrant is different than the average US one. Many EU countries have counted and have seen immigrants commit disproportionally more crime.
  - nielsbot 2y ago
    Is there a study I can read for this?
    - knallfrosch 2y ago
      To stay on-topic and on-source: "[Gang violence] is concentrated in highly segregated immigrant neighbourhoods. In Husby, a suburb of Stockholm, more than 80% of the population are migrants or the children of migrants, most of them from Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Turkey." https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/11/28/why-sweden-struggles-to-curb-gang-violence https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/11/28/why-sweden-strug... Do you have a counter-factual source showing that immigrants are not more violent in Sweden?
      - eesmith 2y ago
        That does not show that immigrants are more violent. Gang violence is not the only form of violence. Are there really no forms of violence which are concentrated in highly segregated ethnic Swedish neighborhoods? And there are non-violent crimes. Another question is, are the numbers of immigrants who do not live in highly segregated immigrant neighborhoods with gang violence? It looks like over 1 million people in Sweden were born outside of Europe, or 10% of the population. They can't all be involved in violent crimes. The Wikipedia entry for Husby points out the crime rates increased 'after the closure of the closest police station to Husby, in Rinkeby, in 2014. The station was reopened on the first of September 2023.' The Economist article you linked to was written in 2020. Which leads me to wonder if immigrant neighborhoods were under-protected, which would place at least some blame on government failure rather than the people living there.
      - nielsbot 2y ago
        I don't. I did find a publication from the Swedish government about this: https://www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migration-and-crime-in-sweden/ https://www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migra... They say people with 2-foreign born parents are overrepresented in the statistics of crime suspects. Does that translate to guilty of crimes? Maybe, but I would place money that racism and discrimination especially in more homogenous societies plays a part. People generally are averse to change and it's understandable that they feel loss and apprehension when they see their society under transformation, especially by people who look different than them, dress differently, speak a different language and eat different foods. But immigration can be a gain in other ways.
- dartos 2y ago
  To nitpick a bit. That article is about _arrests_ not crimes committed. Undocumented folk are arrested less frequently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean fewer crimes are committed. It could just as likely be that undocumented folk probably live in areas with fewer police stations. Or that crimes caused by undocumented folk to other undocumented folk go unreported and don’t lead to arrests. Unfortunately nothing is cut and dry when it comes to crime stats :(
- cm2012 2y ago
  The data suggests that immigrants to America have lower crime rates than Americans but European immigrants have higher crime rates than Europeans. This reflects the relative criminality of all four groups.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    It's not that straightforward, though. US is much better at attracting highly educated and highly productive workers because of considerable higher wages and demand for labour than in Europe. While Europe is more of a fallback options for people who can't do better (I mean relatively of course as proportion of all immigrants).
- dijit 2y ago
  It’s… difficult. I live in Sweden and the issues of lack of integration are eerily similar to those that affect the UK (where I was born and raised 80s-10s); pockets of extremely isolated cultures living in essentially parallel societies. First, migration is too inclusive and too exclusive of a term. For example it would exclude a second generation individual- and if we are suggesting that religion is an issue, those tend to be more radical than their migrant parents. It would also include people who already have a job and then move to Sweden. In the UK, second generation migrants are often more spoiled and act worse than their comparatively entrepreneurial and industrious parents. Then, to conflate matters even further there’s the issue that these parallel societies typically are poorer than the middle-class areas of the host country; and a correlation between wealth and crime is really strong. So, it’s too reductive to claim anything relating to migration here. It’s an impossible conversation, and filled with conflicting personas in data and it is therefore difficult to contextualise with statistics.
  - Yeul 2y ago
    It's too easy to blame this all on immigrants. Let's not pretend the native population actually wants to mix.
    - dijit 2y ago
      Thats a separate problem, one I would agree with you on. But I don’t think using statistics (badly) is a way of having that particular conversation. Its too easy to end up in a conversation about nothing.
    - rosmax_1337 2y ago
      Is it the fault of the native population for not wanting to mix? A weird fact about Sweden is that if a popular vote was ever held on immigration alone, we would never have had this situation. The polls on the issue have always been in majority "against" mass immigration. So for some reason democracy doesn't work over here. Maybe you've had better luck where you're at.
  - rosmax_1337 2y ago
    No, it's not too reductive to claim that immigration has lead to problems. It's quite plainly obvious at this point. The only reason why ones mind will struggle to grasp this is because you understand that there are severe consequences for openly criticizing immigration. Your mind will conjure "nuances" to allow you to avoid confronting the idea that something has to change, and allow you to remain socially, financially, even legally safe. As you live here in Sweden you will be aware of the number of people sentenced to prison for criticizing immigration, due to the hate speech legislation here.
- bjornsing 2y ago
  Sweden is the opposite to Texas in many ways. One of them is that here immigrants do commit far more violent crime than natural citizens, on a per-capita basis.
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  In Germany the opposite is true[1]. I don't think it's wise to lump "immigrants" together as a group. The composition of immigrant populations varies a lot between countries (or even cities) and as with any individual criminality depends on factors like socioeconomic background. The specifics of immigration matter. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466
  - knallfrosch 2y ago
    The article is outdated (2018.)
    - Jensson 2y ago
      2018 is extremely recent in terms of demographics data.
- Dig1t 2y ago
  Saying that all immigrants behave the same across the world is like saying all groups of people are the same. The failure of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi immigrants to integrate into Swedish culture is well documented. They exist almost as a separate society within Sweden now, unlike immigrants in Texas. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/28/sweden-records-record-high-number-of-shooting-deaths-in-september https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/28/sweden-records... >In a national address on Thursday night, the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said it was “a difficult time for Sweden”, blaming “political naivety” and “unsuccessful integration”.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    > unlike immigrants in Texas. Would successful integration be like in Texas where most Anglos have little knowledge of Tejano culture? Or perhaps you mean the Anglo immigrants who moved to Mexican Texas and promised to follow Mexican law and become Catholic but after they gained power they declared independence as a pro-slavery country, then after economic failure decided to join a neighboring country? The Amish are successfully integrated into Pennsylvania, right? Even though they exist almost as a separate society?
    - Dig1t 2y ago
      From the article: >The impulse behind it is a sense of helplessness over a long-term rise in violent crime. Ten years ago Sweden, with 10m people, had one of the lowest rates of gun violence and murder in Europe. It now has one of the highest, averaging a shooting a day. In 2022, 62 people were shot dead; last year it was 53. The Amish are not shooting people or forming violent gangs, comparing the two is not really a good example. In fact your comparison makes the point that the real reason for the problem in Sweden is the culture of the immigrants and not just the fact that they are immigrants or live as a separate society. The Amish are deeply non-violent, and have no problem existing alongside the rest of the country. The same is not true in Sweden. >Or perhaps you mean the Anglo immigrants It wasn't colonized by only people of Anglo-Saxon origin, but people from all over Europe including Eastern Europe. But yes, Texas was created in the same way that Mexico itself was created and that almost every other nation was created. I think almost every Swede would consider it to be a bad thing if the same thing happened in Sweden.
- tlakern10 2y ago
  I think that may be because Texas gets Hispanic immigrants, whereas Europe gets immigrants from Islamic regions that have been disrupted by either the U.S. or Russia (mostly the U.S. though). There should be an UN resolution that says: "You start a war, you take the immigrants."
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Sending Ukrainian refugees to Russia would be highly unproductive. And where do you send the refugees from civil wars?
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > There should be an UN resolution that says: "You start a war, you take the immigrants." "We need the natural resources, not the people" /s
    - MrHamburger 2y ago
      For dying off Russia, it might be both.
- tim333 2y ago
  A lot depends on who the immigrants are. You are obviously going to get more problems if they are say criminals from some war zone as opposed to PhDs coming to teach at the university etc.
- permo-w 2y ago
  the US is very demographically different to Sweden
VariableStar 2y ago
[flagged]
- jMyles 2y ago
  Drug _consumption_ causes "drug related criminality?" The evidence is quite strong that _prohibition_ causes criminality. Consumption in the absence of prohibition requires no illicit market or cartels.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    It isn't a contest. Both contribute.
  - hammock 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that if OxyContin was available without a prescription that we would see less theft, car breakins, vagrancy, indecent exposure, etc?
    - nawgz 2y ago
      Are you suggesting that OxyContin related addiction isn't itself known to be caused by effective pain medication like marijuana being illegal?
      - kube-system 2y ago
        People both get addicted to and commit crimes under the influence of marijuana too. As they also do with alcohol.
    - NullPrefix 2y ago
      Yes. Widely available and affordable Oxy would reduce thefts, because junkies wouldn't have to steal so much to afford it
  - spookie 2y ago
    I think you might be conflating lower risk drugs with cocaine and pals.
rurp 2y ago
Is that based on any evidence? I'm not familiar enough with the situation to know what the causes are, but I am aware of the long long history of scapegoating immigrants for any and all problems, so I'm inherintly a bit skeptical of that assumption.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the opposite effect of being afraid to acknowledge crime by immigrants is also present. It looks like the government is unwilling to publish data that would resolve that question but here are some clues from Wikipedia [1]: "58% of men convicted of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were immigrants born outside of the European Union" "of 100 suspects of murder and attempted murder using firearms, 90 had one parent born abroad" "Most of the increase is related to gang violence in vulnerable areas in Sweden which are areas with [...] a large immigrant population" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden
  - Yeul 2y ago
    If you take men from the dark ages and drop them into a deeply secular and free society you are asking for problems. It took Europe a century to leave Christianity behind.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > It took Europe a century to leave Christianity behind Maybe you should make a visit. Or do you mean, behind the corner ? (see Notre Dame for the most recent example)
    - eesmith 2y ago
      I think we have different ideas of what it means to leave Christianity behind. The Church of Sweden was the state church until 2000. I think the monarch is still required to be Lutheran. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark is the state church of Denmark. The King of Norway was the head of the Church of Norway until 2012, and "separation ... remains incomplete" quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway . Spain didn't separate church and state until the 1970s. Ireland gave special status to the Catholic Church until the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution Act 1972, and Church influence over schooling remains an issue. Charles III is the titular head of the Church of England. "In 1984, following a revised accord with the Vatican, Catholicism lost its status as the official religion of the Italian state[3] and Italy became a secular state." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Italy Monaco de-secularized in 2020 and now Catholic Christianity is the state church.
rosmax_1337 2y ago
This is the consensus. Not even left-wing parties are currently willing to openly condone mass immigration any more.
- dartos 2y ago
  I don’t think the 2nd sentence proves the first.
  - rosmax_1337 2y ago
    It doesn't need to.
    - dartos 2y ago
      No, but one shouldn’t take high impact statements about what the “consensus” is on any issue from random comments on the internet without any justification.
      - rosmax_1337 2y ago
        The second sentence is justification. I don't mind if people don't just accept my conclusion based on the comment, it's just a comment, a small piece of the puzzle in someones mind.
        dartos 2y ago
        It’s not a justification though. That’s what I’m saying. Just because the left doesn’t mention an issue, doesn’t mean that a consensus is reached. No political party really talks much about school shootings in the US nowadays, but that doesn’t mean the consensus is young white men are naturally school shooters.
        rosmax_1337 2y ago
        Do you think all comments need to be articles in length? My original comment contains an idea, and a justification. It really is almost platonic in how simple it is actually, schoolbook example. You might feel that the justification is inadequate, but instead you began talking about how my comment doesn't "prove" anything, and now that it doesn't contain justification at all. Part of the reason why this justifies the idea that a consensus actually has been reached, is that the left used to extol in length the benefits of immigration, and how Swedes are terrible people that need diversity to get anywhere. It turned out that was wrong, and now the country is heading away from reasonably being called a developed country any more. The focus of the leftists in control is instead to feverishly moderate the discussion so no one begins talking about __mass remigration__, what Sweden actually needs, and they do this by talking about limiting migration, even deporting some criminals. (the consensus, ding ding)
huuhee3 2y ago
The problem is not immigration or too many migrants, but rather the fact too many of them lack educational background you need to be successful in modern Western society. Mostly it's young men who arrived as asylum seekers without much education who fail to integrate and get marginalized.
- jaco6 2y ago
  [flagged]
- rosmax_1337 2y ago
  I think that's an unnecessary distinction.
  - huuhee3 2y ago
    Not really. I'm yet to see statistics which show highly educated migrants who come for work causing major issues. It's only a particular type of migration that causes issues with crime.
    - rosmax_1337 2y ago
      And "migrants" are simply not highly educated in this situation, they come from the Middle-East, and Africa. Sweden's problem with mass immigration isn't related to some Japanese dude who moved here to work with steel manufacturing.
dalke 2y ago
If I'm not mistaken, the decades of economic liberalism and dismantling of social support systems has made a lot of people very worried about their future, and as usual the rich and powerful blame immigrants (or some other weak minority group) as a slight-of-hand to distract from the actual issues.
- permo-w 2y ago
  the two things are both true. mass immigration is causing problems and elites are using as a distraction to push through right-wing economic reforms
  - dalke 2y ago
    Just because two things cause problems, that doesn't mean they are equally problematic. Like, it took over a year to build the new storm sewer system in town. It caused problems, like having blocked off roads and sidewalks and construction noise. Yet I wouldn't equate that to the systemic problems in the rail system caused by privatization while also over-funding the road network.
    - permo-w 2y ago
      this is true, but equally just because something is less problematic does not mean it should not be fixed. stopping elites abusing society is a fairly intractable problem. shutting the borders to societies with pre-modern values is not

mac_iver 2y ago

Immigration policy is one factor, but it's too easy to blame everything on a single group in society. While Sweden's immigration debate gets lots of attention abroad, other problems like our corrupt private school system and cocaine use among the wealthy don't make as many headlines.

Wytwwww 2y ago
I'm sure that poor people would love to have some cocaine too if they could afford it.

redeux 2y ago

Are you saying that the violence is caused by the immigrants directly or indirectly? I can’t say for Sweden but in the Texas immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than citizens[1]. There doesn’t seem to be a good source of data for the US as a whole. 1. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...

mihaic 2y ago
The profile of the average Swedish immigrant is different than the average US one. Many EU countries have counted and have seen immigrants commit disproportionally more crime.
- nielsbot 2y ago
  Is there a study I can read for this?
  - knallfrosch 2y ago
    To stay on-topic and on-source: "[Gang violence] is concentrated in highly segregated immigrant neighbourhoods. In Husby, a suburb of Stockholm, more than 80% of the population are migrants or the children of migrants, most of them from Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Turkey." https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/11/28/why-sweden-struggles-to-curb-gang-violence https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/11/28/why-sweden-strug... Do you have a counter-factual source showing that immigrants are not more violent in Sweden?
    - eesmith 2y ago
      That does not show that immigrants are more violent. Gang violence is not the only form of violence. Are there really no forms of violence which are concentrated in highly segregated ethnic Swedish neighborhoods? And there are non-violent crimes. Another question is, are the numbers of immigrants who do not live in highly segregated immigrant neighborhoods with gang violence? It looks like over 1 million people in Sweden were born outside of Europe, or 10% of the population. They can't all be involved in violent crimes. The Wikipedia entry for Husby points out the crime rates increased 'after the closure of the closest police station to Husby, in Rinkeby, in 2014. The station was reopened on the first of September 2023.' The Economist article you linked to was written in 2020. Which leads me to wonder if immigrant neighborhoods were under-protected, which would place at least some blame on government failure rather than the people living there.
    - nielsbot 2y ago
      I don't. I did find a publication from the Swedish government about this: https://www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migration-and-crime-in-sweden/ https://www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migra... They say people with 2-foreign born parents are overrepresented in the statistics of crime suspects. Does that translate to guilty of crimes? Maybe, but I would place money that racism and discrimination especially in more homogenous societies plays a part. People generally are averse to change and it's understandable that they feel loss and apprehension when they see their society under transformation, especially by people who look different than them, dress differently, speak a different language and eat different foods. But immigration can be a gain in other ways.
dartos 2y ago
To nitpick a bit. That article is about _arrests_ not crimes committed. Undocumented folk are arrested less frequently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean fewer crimes are committed. It could just as likely be that undocumented folk probably live in areas with fewer police stations. Or that crimes caused by undocumented folk to other undocumented folk go unreported and don’t lead to arrests. Unfortunately nothing is cut and dry when it comes to crime stats :(
cm2012 2y ago
The data suggests that immigrants to America have lower crime rates than Americans but European immigrants have higher crime rates than Europeans. This reflects the relative criminality of all four groups.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  It's not that straightforward, though. US is much better at attracting highly educated and highly productive workers because of considerable higher wages and demand for labour than in Europe. While Europe is more of a fallback options for people who can't do better (I mean relatively of course as proportion of all immigrants).
dijit 2y ago
It’s… difficult. I live in Sweden and the issues of lack of integration are eerily similar to those that affect the UK (where I was born and raised 80s-10s); pockets of extremely isolated cultures living in essentially parallel societies. First, migration is too inclusive and too exclusive of a term. For example it would exclude a second generation individual- and if we are suggesting that religion is an issue, those tend to be more radical than their migrant parents. It would also include people who already have a job and then move to Sweden. In the UK, second generation migrants are often more spoiled and act worse than their comparatively entrepreneurial and industrious parents. Then, to conflate matters even further there’s the issue that these parallel societies typically are poorer than the middle-class areas of the host country; and a correlation between wealth and crime is really strong. So, it’s too reductive to claim anything relating to migration here. It’s an impossible conversation, and filled with conflicting personas in data and it is therefore difficult to contextualise with statistics.
- Yeul 2y ago
  It's too easy to blame this all on immigrants. Let's not pretend the native population actually wants to mix.
  - dijit 2y ago
    Thats a separate problem, one I would agree with you on. But I don’t think using statistics (badly) is a way of having that particular conversation. Its too easy to end up in a conversation about nothing.
  - rosmax_1337 2y ago
    Is it the fault of the native population for not wanting to mix? A weird fact about Sweden is that if a popular vote was ever held on immigration alone, we would never have had this situation. The polls on the issue have always been in majority "against" mass immigration. So for some reason democracy doesn't work over here. Maybe you've had better luck where you're at.
- rosmax_1337 2y ago
  No, it's not too reductive to claim that immigration has lead to problems. It's quite plainly obvious at this point. The only reason why ones mind will struggle to grasp this is because you understand that there are severe consequences for openly criticizing immigration. Your mind will conjure "nuances" to allow you to avoid confronting the idea that something has to change, and allow you to remain socially, financially, even legally safe. As you live here in Sweden you will be aware of the number of people sentenced to prison for criticizing immigration, due to the hate speech legislation here.
bjornsing 2y ago
Sweden is the opposite to Texas in many ways. One of them is that here immigrants do commit far more violent crime than natural citizens, on a per-capita basis.
AlexandrB 2y ago
In Germany the opposite is true[1]. I don't think it's wise to lump "immigrants" together as a group. The composition of immigrant populations varies a lot between countries (or even cities) and as with any individual criminality depends on factors like socioeconomic background. The specifics of immigration matter. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45419466
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  The article is outdated (2018.)
  - Jensson 2y ago
    2018 is extremely recent in terms of demographics data.
Dig1t 2y ago
Saying that all immigrants behave the same across the world is like saying all groups of people are the same. The failure of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi immigrants to integrate into Swedish culture is well documented. They exist almost as a separate society within Sweden now, unlike immigrants in Texas. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/28/sweden-records-record-high-number-of-shooting-deaths-in-september https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/28/sweden-records... >In a national address on Thursday night, the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said it was “a difficult time for Sweden”, blaming “political naivety” and “unsuccessful integration”.
- eesmith 2y ago
  > unlike immigrants in Texas. Would successful integration be like in Texas where most Anglos have little knowledge of Tejano culture? Or perhaps you mean the Anglo immigrants who moved to Mexican Texas and promised to follow Mexican law and become Catholic but after they gained power they declared independence as a pro-slavery country, then after economic failure decided to join a neighboring country? The Amish are successfully integrated into Pennsylvania, right? Even though they exist almost as a separate society?
  - Dig1t 2y ago
    From the article: >The impulse behind it is a sense of helplessness over a long-term rise in violent crime. Ten years ago Sweden, with 10m people, had one of the lowest rates of gun violence and murder in Europe. It now has one of the highest, averaging a shooting a day. In 2022, 62 people were shot dead; last year it was 53. The Amish are not shooting people or forming violent gangs, comparing the two is not really a good example. In fact your comparison makes the point that the real reason for the problem in Sweden is the culture of the immigrants and not just the fact that they are immigrants or live as a separate society. The Amish are deeply non-violent, and have no problem existing alongside the rest of the country. The same is not true in Sweden. >Or perhaps you mean the Anglo immigrants It wasn't colonized by only people of Anglo-Saxon origin, but people from all over Europe including Eastern Europe. But yes, Texas was created in the same way that Mexico itself was created and that almost every other nation was created. I think almost every Swede would consider it to be a bad thing if the same thing happened in Sweden.
tlakern10 2y ago
I think that may be because Texas gets Hispanic immigrants, whereas Europe gets immigrants from Islamic regions that have been disrupted by either the U.S. or Russia (mostly the U.S. though). There should be an UN resolution that says: "You start a war, you take the immigrants."
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Sending Ukrainian refugees to Russia would be highly unproductive. And where do you send the refugees from civil wars?
- hulitu 2y ago
  > There should be an UN resolution that says: "You start a war, you take the immigrants." "We need the natural resources, not the people" /s
  - MrHamburger 2y ago
    For dying off Russia, it might be both.
tim333 2y ago
A lot depends on who the immigrants are. You are obviously going to get more problems if they are say criminals from some war zone as opposed to PhDs coming to teach at the university etc.
permo-w 2y ago
the US is very demographically different to Sweden

VariableStar 2y ago

[flagged]

jMyles 2y ago
Drug _consumption_ causes "drug related criminality?" The evidence is quite strong that _prohibition_ causes criminality. Consumption in the absence of prohibition requires no illicit market or cartels.
- kube-system 2y ago
  It isn't a contest. Both contribute.
- hammock 2y ago
  Are you suggesting that if OxyContin was available without a prescription that we would see less theft, car breakins, vagrancy, indecent exposure, etc?
  - nawgz 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that OxyContin related addiction isn't itself known to be caused by effective pain medication like marijuana being illegal?
    - kube-system 2y ago
      People both get addicted to and commit crimes under the influence of marijuana too. As they also do with alcohol.
  - NullPrefix 2y ago
    Yes. Widely available and affordable Oxy would reduce thefts, because junkies wouldn't have to steal so much to afford it
- spookie 2y ago
  I think you might be conflating lower risk drugs with cocaine and pals.

rurp 2y ago

Is that based on any evidence? I'm not familiar enough with the situation to know what the causes are, but I am aware of the long long history of scapegoating immigrants for any and all problems, so I'm inherintly a bit skeptical of that assumption.

foxglacier 2y ago
Unfortunately, the opposite effect of being afraid to acknowledge crime by immigrants is also present. It looks like the government is unwilling to publish data that would resolve that question but here are some clues from Wikipedia [1]: "58% of men convicted of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were immigrants born outside of the European Union" "of 100 suspects of murder and attempted murder using firearms, 90 had one parent born abroad" "Most of the increase is related to gang violence in vulnerable areas in Sweden which are areas with [...] a large immigrant population" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden
- Yeul 2y ago
  If you take men from the dark ages and drop them into a deeply secular and free society you are asking for problems. It took Europe a century to leave Christianity behind.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > It took Europe a century to leave Christianity behind Maybe you should make a visit. Or do you mean, behind the corner ? (see Notre Dame for the most recent example)
  - eesmith 2y ago
    I think we have different ideas of what it means to leave Christianity behind. The Church of Sweden was the state church until 2000. I think the monarch is still required to be Lutheran. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark is the state church of Denmark. The King of Norway was the head of the Church of Norway until 2012, and "separation ... remains incomplete" quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway . Spain didn't separate church and state until the 1970s. Ireland gave special status to the Catholic Church until the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution Act 1972, and Church influence over schooling remains an issue. Charles III is the titular head of the Church of England. "In 1984, following a revised accord with the Vatican, Catholicism lost its status as the official religion of the Italian state[3] and Italy became a secular state." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Italy Monaco de-secularized in 2020 and now Catholic Christianity is the state church.

rosmax_1337 2y ago

This is the consensus. Not even left-wing parties are currently willing to openly condone mass immigration any more.

dartos 2y ago
I don’t think the 2nd sentence proves the first.
- rosmax_1337 2y ago
  It doesn't need to.
  - dartos 2y ago
    No, but one shouldn’t take high impact statements about what the “consensus” is on any issue from random comments on the internet without any justification.
    - rosmax_1337 2y ago
      The second sentence is justification. I don't mind if people don't just accept my conclusion based on the comment, it's just a comment, a small piece of the puzzle in someones mind.
      - dartos 2y ago
        It’s not a justification though. That’s what I’m saying. Just because the left doesn’t mention an issue, doesn’t mean that a consensus is reached. No political party really talks much about school shootings in the US nowadays, but that doesn’t mean the consensus is young white men are naturally school shooters.
        rosmax_1337 2y ago
        Do you think all comments need to be articles in length? My original comment contains an idea, and a justification. It really is almost platonic in how simple it is actually, schoolbook example. You might feel that the justification is inadequate, but instead you began talking about how my comment doesn't "prove" anything, and now that it doesn't contain justification at all. Part of the reason why this justifies the idea that a consensus actually has been reached, is that the left used to extol in length the benefits of immigration, and how Swedes are terrible people that need diversity to get anywhere. It turned out that was wrong, and now the country is heading away from reasonably being called a developed country any more. The focus of the leftists in control is instead to feverishly moderate the discussion so no one begins talking about __mass remigration__, what Sweden actually needs, and they do this by talking about limiting migration, even deporting some criminals. (the consensus, ding ding)

huuhee3 2y ago

The problem is not immigration or too many migrants, but rather the fact too many of them lack educational background you need to be successful in modern Western society. Mostly it's young men who arrived as asylum seekers without much education who fail to integrate and get marginalized.

jaco6 2y ago
[flagged]
rosmax_1337 2y ago
I think that's an unnecessary distinction.
- huuhee3 2y ago
  Not really. I'm yet to see statistics which show highly educated migrants who come for work causing major issues. It's only a particular type of migration that causes issues with crime.
  - rosmax_1337 2y ago
    And "migrants" are simply not highly educated in this situation, they come from the Middle-East, and Africa. Sweden's problem with mass immigration isn't related to some Japanese dude who moved here to work with steel manufacturing.

dalke 2y ago

If I'm not mistaken, the decades of economic liberalism and dismantling of social support systems has made a lot of people very worried about their future, and as usual the rich and powerful blame immigrants (or some other weak minority group) as a slight-of-hand to distract from the actual issues.

permo-w 2y ago
the two things are both true. mass immigration is causing problems and elites are using as a distraction to push through right-wing economic reforms
- dalke 2y ago
  Just because two things cause problems, that doesn't mean they are equally problematic. Like, it took over a year to build the new storm sewer system in town. It caused problems, like having blocked off roads and sidewalks and construction noise. Yet I wouldn't equate that to the systemic problems in the rail system caused by privatization while also over-funding the road network.
  - permo-w 2y ago
    this is true, but equally just because something is less problematic does not mean it should not be fixed. stopping elites abusing society is a fairly intractable problem. shutting the borders to societies with pre-modern values is not