Perilous Times Ahead for Sweden

Steen drew my attention to this YLE article about the decline in refugee applications in Finland and other parts of Europe. It appears that making the Rom part of the EU (via the admission of Romania) cut down on the number of asylum-seekers, since they can now move wherever they want, mostly Italy.

The number of persons applying for refugee status in Finland declined dramatically last year. Immigration officials say just 1,400 foreigners applied for refugee status, down a little over 40 percent from the previous year.

Refugee applicants have also been falling in other EU countries, except for Sweden. The Finnish Immigration Service said applications have declined because the largest applicant group in previous years, the Romany from Eastern Europe, have been excluded with EU enlargement.

Of all the nationalities, only Iraqi applicants have shown a significant increase, nearly 30 percent more than the preceding year. A solid 300 Iraqis applied for refugee status in Finland, still far short of the 18,000 applying for asylum in Sweden. [emphasis added]

Notice that Sweden is the exception — Sweden is still experiencing a massive and accelerating influx of refugees, particularly from Iraq.

Our Swedish correspondent LN sent us a series of graphs of Swedish labor statistics and a partial translation of an article from the Swedish blog Falkblick (“the Falcon’s Gaze”) about the new labor figures. LN says that the appearance of these statistics in Falkblick was probably the first time they were published in a Swedish blog.

The Falkblick post is entitled “the fiasco in pictures”:

Contemplate the following pictures, retrieved from page 63 in the report’s collection of tables; they represent the labor market participation for immigrant groups born in different countries. The deep green color at the bottom of each respective figure shows the part of the population that supports themselves with their own work, light green through part-time or temporary work, and the various colors above with different compensation programs, different employment efforts, and direct benefit dependency, in the active ages 20-64 years.

With LN’s help, I have replaced the significant titles and descriptions in the original graphs with their English translations. Since the graphic is so long, I put it below the jump. Scroll down to see some interesting results.
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Figure 2.10: Labor market status according to the social model, 1992-2002 by country of origin and birth, within the population aged 20 to 64 years.

Notice that native Swedes persons of Swedish background perform the most work and collect the least in benefits. Each successive group works less and freeloads more, with the “Middle Eastern and North African” group being the most parasitical.

Another interesting thing to be found in these graphs is the change over time of the behavior of southern Europeans in Sweden. They started out as freeloaders, and later became more like “other Western countries”, with most of them working for a living.

The southern Europeans presumably have assimilated to Swedish customs. Assimilation is always the key, and it is precisely assimilation that the Swedish government no longer requires from its newly arrived immigrants.