Don’t Become Sweden

By Rich Lowry

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

There must be worse ideas than admitting refugees from Gaza into the U.S., but none immediately come to mind. 

 

According to CBS News, one proposal the Biden administration is considering is “using the decades-old United States Refugee Admissions Program to welcome Palestinians with U.S. ties who have managed to escape Gaza and enter neighboring Egypt.” Another possibility is “getting additional Palestinians out of Gaza and processing them as refugees if they have American relatives.”

 

Who knows how serious the internal deliberations are, and, presumably, any such programs would be small-scale. That said, few would have thought President Biden would allow millions of people to walk into the country over the southern border, but here we are. 

 

The response to any consideration of letting Gazan refugees into the country in any numbers should be, “Don’t become Sweden.” That admonition from conservatives once was exclusively about the risks of adopting an overweening welfare state; now, it also has to be about the perils of adopting a heedlessly open-handed, self-congratulatory immigration policy.

 

If the Biden administration thinks it can send a message to the rest of the world — and perhaps to Dearborn — about our admirable liberality by accepting large numbers of people from the Middle East who don’t share our values, Sweden has been there and done that. 

 

The Scandinavian country has managed to transform itself from an overwhelmingly peaceful society to one with a gangland violence problem — without really trying, or certainly without intending to. 

 

To conjure an image of contemporary Sweden, think less IKEA and more bombs blowing up outside fashionable Stockholm restaurants. 

 

Sweden welcomed more than 150,000 refugees from the broader Middle East in 2015, an act its leaders framed as a moral triumph. Given the country’s population of roughly 10 million, this was a huge number. 

 

In about two decades, Sweden decided to go from a largely homogenous society to 20 percent of the population being foreign-born, in part, as an exercise in virtue-signaling. (The percentages among young people are much higher.)

 

In 2015, the prime minister Stefan Löfven couldn’t have been more puffed up and morally self-important about the decision to take migrants en masse. “My Europe takes in refugees,” he intoned. “My Europe doesn’t build walls.” 

 

His Europe was incredibly short-sighted and naïve. 

 

The country assumed that poorly educated people from an entirely different culture would fit right into the Scandinavian nation, because, you know, Sweden is Sweden. What could go wrong?

 

As James Traub in Foreign Policy magazine notes, this decision was very costly. Sweden spent more than 5 percent of its overall budget on refugees in 2016. 

 

And, more importantly, it has created social problems where there were none before, at least not on this scale. 

 

Sweden, in effect, seeded its country with the equivalent of the Paris suburbs. Stefan Hedlund writes of “the emergence of neighborhoods where almost all residents are immigrants, where unemployment rates are very high and where the children of immigrants go to schools where no other children, often not even teachers, are proficient in Swedish.”

 

With this, inevitably, has come disorder. Fatal shootings have doubled over the last 30 years, and on a per capita basis, Stockholm has 30 times the gun violence of London, according to the Wall Street Journal.

 

Only Albania has a higher rate of gun deaths among sizable European countries. 

 

If the shooting incidents aren’t bad enough, the hand grenades and bombs are particularly hard to ignore. 

 

The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said, “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.”

 

The Wall Street Journal report cites “turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities.”

 

Young migrants are indeed heavily involved. About 45 percent of suspects in gun-related murder and manslaughter charges are aged 15–20, according to the Guardian. That’s an increase from 23.6 percent in 2012. (Meanwhile, overall youthful offending has declined a bit.)

 

The background of the prominent gang leader Rawa Majid is telling. Referred to as the “Scandinavian Pablo Escobar” by one expert, he was brought to Sweden as an infant by parents from Iraqi Kurdistan and assimilated into a life of crime thanks to his cousins.

 

The chief of Sweden’s central bank has warned that the violence could harm the country’s long-term economic prospects, and across the political spectrum, everyone who hated the idea of walls a decade ago now supports a much more restrictive approach to immigration, as well as tough-on-crime policies. 

 

If Biden wants an even further shift to the right on immigration in the U.S., admitting Gazan refugees would do it. 

 

There’s simply no reason to go out of our way to take refugees from the most dysfunctional culture in the Middle East, shot through with political and religious radicalism and support for a terror group. 

 

It’d especially make no sense to pluck them out of Egypt, the country right next door to Gaza, with a similar culture and values. Many Gazans, after all, ultimately come from Egypt.

 

Of course, we’d be told that all of the prospective refugees are the most pro-American, philosemitic people in all of Gaza. As a practical matter, though, they’d only be checked for terrorist connections, while there’s no effective mechanism for screening for their social and political attitudes.

 

Given how refugees ramify, accepting any significant number would be a choice to create a Gazan diaspora in the United States. Refugees are rapidly eligible for green cards and citizenship, and can in short order bring in family members, in the classic dynamic of chain migration. 

 

We shouldn’t go there and, if we have any doubt about that, should look to Scandinavia. Sweden has indeed created an example for the world. Just not the one it expected to.