Mullvads mission is about privacy and against mass surveillance. That mission has nothing to do with their co-CEOs personal stance on immigration. I don't necessarily see the conflict of interest that the blog talks about?
It is really not difficult to draw this line to spot contradiction between co-CEO's personal stance and the company's mission.
are you sure you don't just hate the victims of all that crime?
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
The party in question is a small local government party looking to primary get seats in their local government, but with aspiration to get into national politics under a special rule that provide a single seat (1 out of 349) in parliament if the party get enough votes in a local election. The politician in question has made some comments about national immigration policy during debates, which local government has no power over, and which is what the label ethnonationalist is exclusively based on. Last election they got 7 700 votes, and they would need around 20 000 votes to get that one parliament seat.
The specific quote in question has a bunch of context. The background was a parliamentary proposition that suggest that immigrants that are on subsidy programs should be required to do some social work as part of the integration process. The opposition disagreed, arguing that this would enable the government to exploit immigrants as free labor, and that is when this politician commented that if they want subsidy but refuse to work then they should return back to their home country (often translated as deported, which is not completely wrong translation but lacks context).
The discussion around deportation from Sweden is also very different from the political discussion in US. Sweden has been deporting people for about 100 years if a person lacks permission to stay in the country, and there is no party that is advocating to stop this. What is debated is the definition used in the exception for unsafe home country, and a bit about what specific circumstances a permission to stay in the country can be withdrawn. Except for the above mentioned parliamentary proposition, I do not know of any political statements that Örebro party or their leader has said on those issues.
It also has a comment from the other founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800
Ethnonationalism: Defined by shared ancestry, lineage, and cultural heritage. Membership is exclusive and inherited by birth, focusing on preserving a specific ethnic identity.
Civic Nationalism: Defined by shared political principles, values, and laws. Membership is inclusive and open to anyone who adheres to the state's legal framework, regardless of background.
Does the party call for remigration or a lower status for immigrants who have committed no crimes, found jobs and are not a disproportionate drain on the welfare state? To be ethnonationist, I believe they must call for that on the basis of us vs them. Perhaps someone can provide evidence of this. I haven't seen any. Seems like they are very upset about crime and welfare drain. Also they have a bunch other non immigration related positions that some might label as extreme.
I don't see any mention of crimes, having jobs or "being a disproportionate drain" (however you define that).
My understanding is that the discussion can be found around this timestamp link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4goynP4mHYI&t=1h18m43s
According to the machine translation, Allard explicitly frames his argument around cultural assimilation, economic contribution, and behavior rather than biological ethnicity or skin color alone.
In public statements, he has routinely asserted that an individual's racial background or skin color is irrelevant to his politics.
Look, I'm not some Allard supporter. Don't know the guy, not even Swedish. Easily found some stuff on their platform which I quickly disagree with. I really doubt he's literally out there just calling for mass deportation of folks based on ethnicity. That is actual ethnonationism. Swedish people are from a nice free society and are accustomed to low crime and low problems. They've got this 2nd generation migrant issue that lots of Europe is dealing with.
The definition of ethnonationist is being used so flipantly throughout this thread.
Do your really think this guy is just standing up saying 'remigrate all dark skinned folks who got here recently'?
Even if that were his true political goals, it would be pretty self defeating to just charge onto the stage going full Nazi. He wouldn't have this much movement.
> I really doubt he's literally out there just calling for mass deportation of folks based on ethnicity. That is actual ethnonationism. Swedish people are from a nice free society
If you meant that they wouldn't support racist policies, a party with neo-nazi roots is currently the second largest one; calling for mass deportation based on ethnicity might not be that unpopular.
Actually, the Swedish Democrats themselves in 2003 adopted “the idea of "open Swedishness”, meaning that Swedish identity is not biologically exclusive and that assimilation is – theoretically – possible”.
And their ideas about immigration don't seem very different to those of Örebro, at a quick glance.
The SD are described in the intersting scholarly article at https://direct.mit.edu/euso/article/21/4/583/127125/Frames-o... as ethno-nationalists.
It is also interesting how they may get their seat.
Örebropartiet is a local party to Örebro, but because they are getting a lot of votes in the local district election they may end up in a seat in the Riksdag, which is highly unusual.
Or because they're getting a lot of money through Mullvad subscriptions
Twitch and Discord meanwhile feel remarkably unaffected compared to their counterparts.
VPNs in the aftermath of FireSheep[1] before we got proper HTTPS, but it's not likely to be the ban or censorship circumvention tool we think they are.
A free and open society does not mean that law and order cannot exist. Nor does it mean that immigration laws cannot be created or enforced.
I do not consider that as a requirement free society. While representational democracies give governance to a small amount of people compared to the overall populace theoretical you could have a society where everyone was on equal footing and all contributed to decisions being made.
However, support for migration is not a left or right issue. Accepting refugees might be (and I fully support that), but non-refugee immigration (the vast majority of it) is not an unalloyed good.
Immigration has a number of negative effects, on housing, employment and wages, inequalities, social cohesion, political direction.
Being a radical leftist and against immigration is not contradictory.
According to your definition of what "non-European" means
Their previous one: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vitalyan1234
Seems very sensible.
Whether or not they are actually capable or even plan do any of that it's a different matter. Typically, they only end up being a coverup for political extremism. In then other cases they fumble and somehow mess up the situation even more.
In general though, I’m more likely to trust people who have strong opinions, especially if they’re dissenting opinions.
We often immolate people for not being perfect enough while letting people like Trump capture huge parts of their respective market.
Your ire isn’t useful.
I believe that this is handwringing from people who want to take Mullvad down.
2) My parents weren't alive
3) my grandparents weren't alive.
4) he was running a country, not a company thats entire purpose was to protect peoples privacy
5) had people taken privacy seriously, there would be a lot less dead people in Europe, famously the dutch kept meticulous records of their populations which is part of why the Nazi's were so effective.
I am one of the imposter people you reference.
That said, I don't actually see much to corroborate what you're saying either, they don't seem to be implying use of AI and mass surveillance.
I think you've decided something you don't like is bad and now are trying to tie other things you don't like to it?
If you give money to Mullvad you're giving a percentage of it through to Örebro. That's why people are boycotting Mullvad.
No I don't think it's a honeypot, unless it's a total lie to begin with. If it's true, it's an unforced error by Mullvad. There are other VPNs you can use that allow port forwarding.
> I think you've decided something you don't like is bad and now are trying to tie other things you don't like to it?
This is against guidelines.
Can you show me where you got the idea of mass surveillance and AI (since you're claiming you didn't make it up)
My dude, he wants to expel all non-Swedes from Sweden.
It's an extreme position.
Yet it's also now two degrees moved from the founder of Mullvad; who has not expressed these opinions nor issued direct support for them specifically, nor do they imply all non-Swedes as you imply.
I'm not sure how you go from "Mullvad founder gave money to a party" to "that party leader said something extreme about criminals and welfare-abuse" to "the mullvad founder wants all non-Swedes deported".
What is a "natural connection to Sweden"?
"Values" get thrown around a lot, but equality of women and acceptance of homosexuality is a big deal to Swedes, so if you shun those things then I wouldn't expect acceptance.
That quote is his answer to a question about people born here who commit crimes and live long-term on welfare; whether they can also be made to leave. It's not a freestanding statement about everyone born in Sweden to immigrant parents.
And the passage continues past where your excerpt stops:
"They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they haven't been interested in becoming part of Sweden. That's a qualitative difference." "Have not become" only works if becoming is possible. So the criterion he's stating is failed assimilation, not ancestry; and the write-ups of the same interview describe his programme the same way: remigration for criminals and the long-term welfare-dependent.
To be fair: that's still a subjective judgement about people's inner attitudes, which I've said elsewhere in this thread is arbitrary and I'd oppose. He also says he's prepared to "walk over corpses" on this, so I'm not selling him as a moderate. Extreme, yes. Ancestry-based, no. Those are different accusations, and only one of them survives contact with sources.
Podcast (Swedish): https://aljosja.substack.com/p/satter-orebropartiet-sverige-...
I feel like people are looking for a reason to be outraged and not the shape of the actual situation. It makes me skittish.
But, born here? Or not born here?
Anyhow, "criminals" is a way too vague concept for expelling someone from a country, especially when your party could come to power and criminalize anything you want.
And, Show me the man and I'll show you the crime: most people commit something illegal relatively frequently, sometimes without even realizing that it could be (e.g. copyright violations, libel, slight violations of obscure little-known laws...).
They'll typically never face consequences for that; but if you target them, or if it becomes more interesting for law enforcement to find any violation of the law on the part of someone, more often than not something will be found.
I empathise with the point you're making, and I suspect we agree on a lot more than you expect, but there is a serious issue with crime as it is currently defined.
If the party comes to power and the law they'll actually enact says "If you violated any law you can be expelled", it would make anyone easily expellable.
Selective enforcement of those you find disagreeable is a way of bullying people with impunity.
That said, I'm curious on how you would solve the issue that Sweden is faced with. It is a very outsized, pronounced, issue and the legal system in Sweden is not equipped to deal with it.
The Swedish legal system prioritises rehabilitation, but the scale of the problem and the reoffending rate being what it is for serious crimes of foreign born persons does need to be answered somehow.
Ignoring it will make the problem worse, people will keep reaching further right.
Do search for the causes and strive to solve them, I doubt that the only possible solution (if it were a solution) is mass deportations.
Insufficient integration efforts could well be at the root of a lot of the immigrant crime problems; I agree with striving to integrate immigrants, to the point that I agree to a lot of what I see at https://web.archive.org/web/20200120174720/http://www.orebro... (2020, not on their site anymore).
I think you should demand committed acceptance of some core values to new immigrants, and I can agree with expulsion after serious enough violations of those.
And I'm not a fan of having as much immigration as possible.
Of course his ire is useful. You just don’t want it to be.
... While, Elon Musk still owns everything and in my opinion he's worse.
It's also very easy to sympathise with Mullvads co-founder here, so you help make the conditions for the next 2016 "surprise, an actual Fascist gains power!" election, which is what's happening in Sweden right now as SD (founded by dyed in the wool actual Nazi's) has become the second largest party in Sweden.
But yeah, go off king! You got this, show them who's boss! We'll all be better for it! (/s)
No fucking thanks. Not an inch. Here’s a politically savvy idea: maybe somebody should make an immigration-skeptical party that’s not frothing at the mouth about ethnic cleansing.
Also, it’s just one VPN out of hundreds. The free internet will somehow survive, I’m sure.
It's enough to consider that there's something malicious going on.
But I guess we should use one of the VPN providers that aren't pushing for systems transparency[0] and are dubiously everywhere across all of youtube advertising despite that being provably the place where the scummiest of companies go.[1].
[0]: https://mullvad.net/media/system-transparency-rev5.pdf
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3t1d1zzu54
Not wanting unfettered and uncontrolled migration (when it has proven to massively increase crime - which was the context) is not racism, that's stupid.
If 15% of the population of Japan had moved from the UK in the last 10 years and committed a disproportionate amount of crime, it would cause racism, but talking about it as a problem that needs to be solved is not itself racism.
Sorry, but we’re all in this together. Anyone who disagrees won’t get a cent from me.
Also:
> unfettered and uncontrolled migration
Bullshit, immigration is already massively down: https://archive.ph/20260720101017/https://www.economist.com/...
Same lie far-right parties around the world use to enact their sick agendas.
> sympathetic to anti immigration sentiments
Ok, in Australia they can probably be called Murdoch
Progressive people, being more keen on altruism, tend to think that the good reasons immigrants have to migrate should overshadow the problems that immigration can cause.
And sometimes there's maybe also a view that a strongly multi-ethnic society is something to aspire for, because of the increased understanding of different people and hopefully a reduction of racism that it can lead to.
Progressives tend to think that everyone should be as tolerant as them, and that can lead to only looking into the problems, and finding solutions, up to a degree.
I saw that in the shift from arguing for integration to arguing for tolerance and a multi-cultural society, for example, where inadeguate integration efforts faiiled.
---
On the other hand, right wing/conservative parties often enact policies that compound the immigration problems, rather than improving them.
In part that's due to a preference for securitarian policies, rather than looking for the root causes.
And in part that's because immigration problems most often lead to increased votes for them, so it's in their interest to not actually solve them.
All this, in the end, can create a space for parties standing for drastic solutions such as mass deportations; however immoral, dangerous for everyone and hard to realize they may be.
---
The way forward, in my opinion, should be for progressive parties to stop dismissing the problems that immigration can lead to, and to do their utmost to improve them all, rather than pretending for everyone to be as tolerant as them.
The actual middle/long term solution would probably be ensuring that the new potential immigrants are willing to integrate to a sufficient degree, and most of all to look into what pushes them to migrate in the first place, and work for improving the causes of that.
The latter can seem utopic, but it's better than the alternatives, in my opinion.
Ok, that wasn't so brief xD
What's left is an audience devoted to power, money, and being the boot that stamps on a human face.
Immigration isn't just sunshine and roses, and the negatives are coming to light. Especially when we're allowing Sharia-espousing people, exposing people who, by definition, can't integrate with our own values: FGM, abusing women, and child brides are not acceptable to me.I used to think that people in tech would have the brain to react in a sensible way, anyhow.
And I don't see how you could think that someone "by definition, can't integrate with our own values" without resorting to racism.
Being this sensitive to company leadership political activity is going to exhaust a person and time would be better spent being careful to buy products with minimal value added from authoritarian nations with a history of gross human rights issues.
Lots of counties don't want immigration, especially after they let a large group in and deal with integration challenges. The CCP forcefully places ethnic Han into minority homes to function as de facto informants. The Russians broke up Finnish/Ukrainian families en masse, moving them to the other end of Russia to minimize the likelihood of dissent in occupied areas.
There are a lot worse ideas at play in the world than some of the more extreme suggestions that this very infant-sized Swedish party flirt with. On a scale of 1-10 heinousness, barely registers on the global stage.
My thinking goes more like this:
This product I bought from this nation... Does that Nation tend to value human rights, freedom of expression and liberal values? Sweden... Check.
I can buy Swedish products all day. They make nice jets and mobile artillery that push back on the really bad ideas. One CEO's affiliation with an anti immigration populist party which honestly doesn't seem that serious... They've got some Marxist ideas in there. I really doubt these guys go much of anywhere in their current form. It's a capitalist society. Some of their ideas will stick but the party is immature. I wouldn't worry so much.
If so, I'd be keen to see clear evidence of that.
> In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."
The user you were replying to wasn't claiming that you're an ethno-nationalist state if you don't have birthright citizenship, or an ethno-naionalist if you're against it.
Such an overreaction and mischaracterization.
Being unable to evaluate an anti immigration party without labeling them ethnonationist shows a pretty glaring blind spot.
And, to be fair, I also haven't integrated perfectly well (I scarcely speak Swedish)- but I pay a lot of taxes and I don't do any crimes.
I would suspect that the Orebro party doesn't really have a problem with me, though they would start to have an issue if I started bringing my home countries problems with me, or if I started trying to bend society to my will- or if I never paid any taxes and had to live my entire life on welfare... or if I committed crimes.
I can't say for sure, since the only thing I know about the party itself is learning about it from this incident, but based on my conversations with conservative SD supporting Swedes, this is probably the case.
If so, then unfortunately, I (and many other immigrants, especially those from the Balkans in the 90s) likely support this idea.
I speak broken German rather than English. Even many who speak English flawlessly. But you will be tolerated if you are overall a net contributor, that is right.
I'm tolerated for not speaking Swedish, but I would not be tolerated if I was a criminal, went directly against Swedish values loudly or was a net drain on society in some other way.
The distinction is that a person can be ethnicity agnostic while being very strict about deporting immigrants who commit crimes. In the case of Sweden, it appears to me that the evidence indicates the primary concern is folks born to non-native parents. See the exert below from their Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention:
"The proportion of the various groups registered as suspects for any type of crime are as follows: • 3.2 percent of persons born in Sweden to two native-born parents (4.8 percent of men, 1.5 percent of women). • 5.9 percent of persons born in Sweden to one non-native parent (8.6 percent of men, 3.1 percent of women). • 10.2 percent of persons born in Sweden to two non-native parents (15.3 percent of men, 4.8 percent of women). • 8.0 percent of persons born abroad (12.2 of men, 3.9 percent of women)."
https://bra.se/download/18.45e4b8e192705389a34c2b/1729515966...
If I am a true-blue ethnonationalist, I want all non-Swedish ethnicities deported/remigrated or relegated to lower social status. This would be the Nazi position... White skin blue eyes = superior.
If I am a tough on crime migrant skeptic, I call for deportation of non-native's who commit crimes without concern for their specific ethnicity/origin. I can't be in the Nazi party, because I don't think German descent people are superior. I think anyone who migrates to our country and then commits crimes is undesirable. I would just as easily call for the deportation of any ethnic background.
I looked into this a bit, because I was curious if there was actual evidence driving these political movements. As it turns out, there is and it has been studied. The primary pain point(crime) comes in when the 2nd generation doesn't economically assimilate. If a non-native family economically assimilates they then apparently actually have lower likelihood of criminal activity than a native family.
You go against the established leftist narrative? You get called all the possible names: ethnonationalist, fascist, nazist, racist, whatever.
It got stale and it's giving a lot of people fatigue, even more so considering that we all lived in a shared reality and we can all see that the narrative around immigration does not survive the basic reality checks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977076
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977076
If YOU are claiming that the meteoric rise in violence in Sweden is not related to the insane levels of refugees from the middle east that came during the same period, the burden of proof is on YOU.
NO country has gone through the same level of demographic change, unwanted by the Swedes, mind you. The Swedish population was never in favor of this politics and explains the meteoric rise of Sverigedemokraterna, a party founded by literal Nazis(Gustaf Ekström, a Waffen-SS volunteer).
Why this happened, can be discussed in eternity. Probably to understand you should read The New Totalitarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Totalitarians
You can start by checking mug photos.
I have migrated from Sweden and frequently return for work and for family visits. It's still a great country, if you avoid "certain areas". Weird, that these "certain areas" are predominately populated with strangers from a different part of the world who enjoy welfare benefits but either don't want, or can't integrate.
It is the person who claims otherwise who must provide the contrarian evidence.
I laid out a lot of primary source citations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48976762
For myself, my favourite restaurant was bombed and a month later four people were shot outside my door (literally on my doorstep, three died): https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/sa-borjade-den-blodi...
Here's some more sources:
BBC, November 2023, "Spread of gang violence wrecks Sweden's peaceful image". Over 60 gun deaths in 2022 (the record), 140+ explosions in 2023, violence spreading out of the low-income vulnerable areas into quiet suburbs, gang leaders directing from Turkey and Serbia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67342368
AP (via Euronews), September 2023 — three killed overnight in shootings and a bombing during the Foxtrot gang feud; the rival factions led by a Swedish-Turkish dual national operating from Turkey. https://www.euronews.com/2023/09/28/3-killed-in-shootings-an...
Al Jazeera, September 2023 — Kristersson calling in the military; police estimate of roughly 30,000 people involved with or tied to gang crime; violence spreading from major urban areas to smaller towns. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/29/swedish-pm-seeks-he...
NBC News, September 2023 — same events, plus the framing that the coalition won the 2022 election partly on the promise to stem gang violence.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sweden-leader-summons-arm...
Reuters, January 2020 — the bombing statistics: 257 bomb attacks reported in 2019, up 60% year on year, concentrated around the ~60 deprived areas police had identified. https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-suffers-surge-bomb-attacks-131...
Euronews, September 2023 — Kristersson: "No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this." https://www.euronews.com/2023/09/29/sweden-pm-asks-military-...
This kind of statement isn't allowed here.
People love responding to interpretations or theories, but properly reasoned and cited comments tend to go unanswered.
Stating facts is not against HN guidelines, even if it’s against your preferred position.
You claimed two things that I took issue with: The rise of intense violence and organized crime is higher than in any other country. All those crimes are linked to people openly accepted through its refugee programmes.
A student thesis about "The Ripple Effect of Gang Violence" does not back up these claims.
I am well aware that Sweden has had an increase in intense violence and organized crime in recent years, but that is not what you claimed. You were more specific.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977076
To reiterate your claims:
> Sweden has, more than any other country, faced an astounding and shocking rise of intense violence and organized crime, with shootings in the middle of cities and cafés, all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs.
1. Which link proves that Sweden has had a more shocking rise of intense violence and organized crime than all other countries in the world?
2. Which link proves that they are all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs?
Regarding 1. it would also be interesting to know which time period you are referring to, because that's pretty much a prerequisite for a claim like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977076
Large increase in gang violence yes. But this is a pretty strong and specific claim, I live in Sweden and have not seen this in the news. Some of the gangs part of the gangswars are MC related clubs like Bandidos which seem to be mostly ethnically Swedes, and they've been an issue for decades.
Arguably part of the problem is our emulation of US war on drugs, it failed there and its obviously failing here and allows gangs to have large income. Together with bad integration and prospects for children of immigrants/refugees allows gangs to influence and exploit them to do crime and attacks for them.
I'm genuinely surprised by this. I live in a nearby country and it is in the news every few months.
Then you link a study without really going much about how the study supports your claims, as if that is evidence of what you suggest.
You are gesturing to one thing - "there's a study on gang violence in Sweden" - and presenting it as evidence of another thing - "immigrants are to blame for gang violence".
So I decided to engage with it and read the damn thing; I suppose you did not (or if you did you are hypocritically linking it hoping no one else does:
> One of the most consistent findings in research on societal responses to a collective threat is the tendency for the majority population to seek culpability, often by attributing blame to an outgroup perceived to be associated with the perpetrators (Frey, 2022; Ramirez and Kim, 2024). This process, known as scapegoating, is a psychological coping mechanism in which individuals displace frustration or anxiety onto an entire group (Frey, 2022).
And this, buddy, is precisely what you are doing.
Huh, so did I... but clearly one of us didn't read it thoroughly enough.
The first sentence of the abstract says the surge in shootings is "disproportionately involving young men with immigrant backgrounds".
Page 2: people with an immigrant background are 80% of shooting victims and 64% of perpetrators (citing Brå).
You seem to just skip to the theory section page 13 regarding scapegoating.
To be fair, the original claim was overcooked in two places. "All linked" should be "most", and "more than any other country" needs a qualifier:
1) Brå compared Sweden with 22 other European countries. Sweden is the only one with a continuous rise in gun homicide since 2005
https://bra.se/english/publications/archive/2021-05-26-gun-h...
2) the OECD's own conclusion was that 2014–15 Sweden saw the largest per-capita inflow of asylum seekers ever recorded in an OECD country
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/international-migration...
3) Brå's register study puts the relative risk of being a crime suspect at 2.5x for the foreign-born and 3.2x for the second generation, with excess risk remaining after controlling for age, sex, income and education
https://bra.se/english/publications/archive/2021-08-25-regis...
https://bra.se/download/18.45e4b8e192705389a34c2b/1729515966...
The most dangerous, then, are "Swedish" persons with a migrant background, born and raised in Sweden- I'm not sure how to answer that, but that's really uncomfortable.
4) None of this is a fringe reading. Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrat, then PM) said in 2022 that integration had failed and produced parallel societies feeding the gangs... Kristersen as PM (right wing) said the same thing a year later.. so it has some broad bipartisan agreement.
https://www.euronews.com/2022/04/29/us-sweden-immigration
https://www.government.se/speeches/2023/09/prime-minister-ul...
They are the official source for crime statistics in Sweden.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/svt-s-rundringning-visar-...
We can agree that the 'all' part was just the original commenters own biases, but that 'refugee' part is still unfounded based on your quotes.
Refugees are a small minority of immigrants (historically around 10%, don't know what it is in Sweden). The quotes you cite are about immigrants, and the few nationalities mentioned are Turkey and Serbia: neither is a country where refugees originate (except maybe LGBT people, but I'd be very surprised if Sweden is in the thrall of gay Turks...).
So the assertion about immigrant backgrounds seems to hold, but nothing says it's related to refugees, otherwise the large majority of these criminals would be Afghan, Syrian, Eritrean, etc., which doesn't seem to be the case.
The problem is that those statistics are doing something sensible. There are uncomfortable statistics related to immigrants, and your point #4, the thing about integration not being properly done creating parallel societies is a real problem that can and should be addressed properly.
But that's not what the person I replied to was doing - "all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs"
No, the study says that a foreign-born person is "2.5x" more likely to be a "crime suspect". That can mean a lot of things (e.g.: how many of them were actually convicted). Also, they are minority. Presuming all of them are convicted, it's still a minority that has about double the odds of being criminals. The logical consequence is that a lot of Swedish people are criminals if there's an explosion of gang violence.
Maybe the problem is the Swedish approach to guns? I live in a country that has a shitton of immigrants and is not seeing this surge of gun violence.
You see, we can discuss this properly without engaging in ethnonationalist bullshit.
This has been especially true in Sweden, and I’ve seen it, the way people talk about migration is: if you talk about it, you are a nazi.
This seems to have taken the sting out of supporting actual Nazi parties (SD)…
So while you and I can debate the facts, the larger trend in society is not due to us as individuals, its how much society permits this dialogue to happen at all before trying to shut it down with bad faith and unreasoned statements.
We can't expect everyone to be informed and educated. I perceive most people as being guided by basic emotions - Mostly their fears.
> if you talk about it, you are a nazi.
Part of the problem I perceive on the left was unwillingness, for a long time, to engage with it at all. For a long time in the past decade, and in many ways to this day, the whole immigration discussion was dominated by people that were just annoyed that there's too many brown people walking around nowadays.
And that's how you poison the well of discussion. If you accept immigrants, you should expect people to behave in a certain way. In many ways a visa is a privilege, not a right. But how can you even start this conversation when a mouth breather will come out of his hole branding about claims about all crimes being tied to immigrants?
Honestly, this sort of sucks.
There are other comments in this thread that are expressing the situation better than I am.
I do not live in Sweden, but the gang violence and problems reported there are in the news and I read about it frequently. The was the point of my original post, which is that there is a context to this discussion that many probably aren't getting because they have no direct links to the society there. I think some of the other comments in this thread do a better job of underscoring this point than I am.
Some of the other commenters here (from Sweden, it seems) are doing a better job than me at explaining the problem, so I defer to them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48976762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977054
I can't stand these kind of passive aggressive middle-of-the-road insults, you clearly think he's a scumbag, stand by your beliefs instead of speaking like you work in HR.
He wants to spew ethnonationalist bullshit and not be labeled an ethnonationalist?
Does an ethnonationalist even consider it to be an insult?
I was not even insulting him, I was being descriptive. I may or may not think he is a scumbag, but that's beyond the point being made.
You could have noticed that the nationalities mentioned in the study (as pointed out in other comments, Serbian and Turkish) are not nationalities where refugees typically come from. Those are very specific.
You could also have considered other things - why are other European countries that had large immigration in recent decades are not seeing the surge in crime such as Sweden. Might it have other causes, such as Swedish approach to guns? Other structural issues?
No, you preferred to just claim some outlandish bullshit (all crime is tied to refugees), then get all touchy and snowflaky about being labeled an ethnonationalist.
You want your argument to be taken seriously, then you should think seriously about the shit you are writing and the consequences of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977076