Sweden’s Welfare State in the Balance

Sweden’s Welfare State is in trouble due to large-scale government-assisted immigration of the culturally incompatible kind threatening the entire Swedish political model.

Seventy percent of its asylum seekers are from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq and mostly male, with an additional 70 000 migrants applying for asylum between 2016- 2018, that is besides the 105 000 already granted asylum status.

These figures don’t include the 162 000 migrants the country processed in 2015.

In Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, the foreign born or those born to foreign- born parents has increased from 31.9% of the population in 2002, to 45.9% in 2018.

Within a generation, Sweden’s third-largest city will have a population in which the majority of people are from foreign-backgrounds, which raises the question, how will assimilation work?

The answer, it won’t, with experts and politicians agreeing that integrating culturally disparate immigrants into Swedish society has been a failure.

Then there are the economic factors to consider; In March 2018, 58% of registered unemployed persons were born outside Sweden, even though the group’s share of the population is only 23%.

In 2018, the unemployment rate for foreign-born Swedes was 15.4%, while unemployment for Swedes born in Sweden was 3.8%.

Immigrants settle in areas where there is low cost housing and large migrant populations for network purposes, a process that reinforces segregation and creates migrant enclaves rife with rising crime with the associated social and security repercussions.

The impact on Swedish Society

Yes there are cultural consequences to all this as Swedish society undergoes rapid change that impact the country’s identity.

It’s been proposed by the Social Democrats and the Church of Sweden that the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-fitr become a national holiday and even though this religious observation is not yet official, several municipalities choose to celebrate it.

Sweden’s not a country that appreciates dissent with a law passed in 2016 making criticism of the government’s immigration policy in any public setting, especially on social media, a crime.

In 2018, the linguist Mikael Parkvall noted Arabic is now the second most popular language in Sweden. At the same time, many children born in Sweden learn Swedish so poorly that they cannot speak it properly, because there is not enough Swedish spoken in some preschools and grade schools, or enough teachers to serve the population in some cases.

Although it’s not just the social changes, the Swedish welfare state, the hallmark known around the world, is also changing and is likely to be phased out in the near future if things continue along this trajectory.

Sweden’s welfare state, not a socialist state as many so erroneously believe, works on the assumption a majority of adults employed full-time pay must pay exorbitant income tax to the state to subsidize the country’s social safety net.

What the state receives needs to be greater than what it pays out in the form of various welfare benefits and transfer payments.

When a large number of people who receive welfare benefits cannot find employment or are not willing to work, there is a crisis. This is exactly what has happened in Sweden with its liberal immigration policy.

As an example those who moved out of the jurisdiction of Filipstad municipality are Swedish-born and of working age. At the same time, its City Manager, Claes Hultgren, is concerned that the newly arrived migrants do not have the necessary skills to compete in the labor market. The consequence for municipalities such as this one is they forced to cut welfare services they have pledged to supply.

The Social Democratic municipal commissioner in Strömsund, a Swedish municipality with 11,699 inhabitants, warned:

“All costs are borne by the municipalities. We have never had such low unemployment in the municipality among native-born, yet, we are on our knees, and the explanation is that we also never had such high unemployment among foreign-born. And they end up in welfare, which in practice is now, for many, life-long support.”

Despite widespread recognition Sweden’s open immigration policy has failed there are nonetheless influential quarters of society committed to continue travelling the road to national suicide, at least for now.