Sweden’s “Creative Destruction”

• Some native Swedes feel that Sweden’s immigration policy is a sociological version of creative destruction: “Out with the old, in with the new.” Various ethnic and religious identities have been formed, but Swedish national identity is being lost. If this trend continues, in a few years Malmö will become a city where ethnic Swedes are in the minority.
• Sweden has become a shattered society. Optimists say that some day a new common historical and cultural context, based on Swedish multiculturalism, will grow. But immigrant riots in Husby, and the jihadist elements growing in major Swedish cities, tell a different story.
• Officials in Sweden’s government say they want immigrants to integrate into the society, but in areas where the majority are immigrants, there is not much society for them to integrate into. There are buildings and traces of a society, but the people who built that society are not around. In many areas where the majority of residents are immigrants and their children, the only identity the community manages to forge is that the area has many social problems.
• The same racism, although in a different form, that immigrants may face in some parts of society, Swedes are facing in other parts of society — where the majority are immigrants. However, only one of these racisms gets attention. This attitude, where racism against ethnic Swedes is made invisible, is something that one faces daily in Sweden. Sweden calls itself a “humanitarian superpower,” but this humanitarian thoughtfulness is apparently not broad enough to include ethnic Swedes, especially those who once lived in areas where today there are large concentrations of immigrants.

The Swedish government is now preparing a law that will force all Swedish municipalities, against their will, to provide public housing for newly arrived refugees.