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Notes -
Swedish elections, anyone?
I am far from an expert on this but I found it very interesting and wanted to do a quick post about it. Last Sunday, September 11th, Swedish General Elections were held to elect the 349 members of the Riksdag. There are 8 parties that seem like they were get seats, and it appears that they are broadly split into two coalitions - of course, today we naturally refer to them as the 'left coalition' (Social democrats, Greens, Left, Center), and the 'right coalition' (Moderates, Sweden Democrats, Liberals, Christian Democrats).
If you've followed any European elections in the last few years you won't be surprised that immigration appears to be a huge issue, and the rise of the right-wing, anti-immigration party (the Sweden Democrats, not to be confused with the Social Democrats) will of course mirror the rise in support for Le Pen, Lega Nord, etc.
But this time - it appears they won. Well, sort of. The elections are so tight that as of Monday night in Sweden, they're still counting the votes. But all the recent indications point to the right coalition winning the slimmest of majorities - 175 to 174 seats. Furthermore, while it was expected that the Moderate party (center-right) that would be the biggest in the right coalition, it appears that the Sweden Democrats (I think universally regarded as the farthest right) that will be the largest in the coalition, and the second largest overall, after the Social Democrats.
There's so much to say, though much of it has been said in discussions about France and Italy and so on and so forth. Seriously, I could rant about this shit for hours - about how immigration can be awesome, but not uncontrolled immigration of those who despise your way of life, about how the strategy of hiding data and gaslighting the public ultimately doesn't pay off, about the naivety and hubris of thinking that anyone that you let live near you will automatically adopt your values, and on and on and on. But most of it won't be new.
One thing that does feel... maybe kind of new(?) this time, is that the media reaction also seems somewhat more subdued, both before and during the election. Of course, most traditional / legacy media will still be tell you, or at least hint to you, that the results are a Bad thing[1] and that Bad people just got a lot of votes, but on balance it still feels... a bit more subdued and less histrionic? I wonder if 1) I'm just imagining it, and 2) if not, how much of this is due to Sweden being a much smaller country than France or Italy, and how much of it is due to an underlying sense of unease as having to portray the Swedes of all people as neo-nazis.
[1] To be fair, the Sweden Democrats do have a sketchy history, and a disproportionate number of their MPs do seem to get in unsavory controversies. Not my first choice... except they also seem to be the loudest at addressing the unfettered immigration fiasco [2]
[2] OK fine one small clarification rant. I like immigration. I do! I unironically think multicultural restaurants make an area nicer, and I unironically like meeting people of different backgrounds. But there have to be major caveats here. For one, they have to actually respect me and my society, and our values and how we live our lives. For another, it really helps if they either have valuable skills, or are otherwise productive in some other way. And I sure as fuck do not want violent criminals living anywhere near me.
Sweden isn't trying to import biophysicists or electrical engineers. They're letting in disproportionately young men from countries with poor traditions of women's rights, democracy, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. Are all of them going to share the views of their motherlands? No. But how is it nonetheless not clear that this would be a fiasco?
I'm going to slightly infringe the rules by posting this twitter thread, which is very much wage-the-culture-war. I fully assume they're being misleading/inflammatory with their statistics and some of the textual-image commentary.
https://twitter.com/Composite_Guy2/status/1569253995411038211
I only want to highlight the videos, which can't be lies. (How many months until we can't say that honestly, due to AI?). We have an old lady and her friend getting threatened by an angry young man into giving up their seat to him. We have a teen getting robbed, beaten and pissed on. We have a clueless girl getting hit in the head and knocked over just for laughs. We have what appears to be a younger teen getting forced to kneel and then getting hit anyway.
This isn't people merely despising one another's way of life. There are rural people who despise city-dwellers and vis versa. It's fairly popular to despise the US in the Anglosphere, the tired old memes about obesity, ignorance and school shootings. But this is relatively good-natured, thoughts and words only. You and I might despise those climate protestors who close off roads in peak hour and stop people getting to work. But we don't actually track them down, go out of our way to beat them and humiliate them.
I think that what's really happening is ritual humiliation. I have a proper, long form link that gets more into similar events in Austria and Germany. The article argues convincingly that these egregious cases (obviously not every migrant does this) are not merely a clash of cultures or sudden exposure to alcohol but a profound, deep hatred for Western civilization. I think that this hatred is expressed in crimes of humiliation - sex crimes and low-value public aggression like bullying people for the fun of it.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
Perhaps despising and humiliating are just two parts of the same scale, like how infra-red and x-rays are the same thing but with more energy. In any event, they should be treated differently. X-rays cause cancer.
Yes, reminds me of how revolutionary terror in russia and france got going because the heads of state were very lenient in their approach to malcontent citizens. These men come from repressive nations to countries like sweden where you get a slap on the wrist for aggravated assault.
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It very well may be, and it's likely because anti-immigration politicians are old news in today's Europe.
Over in America, Donald Trump won an election in large part just for being the one guy willing to take a stance against immigration. This was then touted as a RADICAL change that was UNPRECEDENTED and surely a HUGE upheaval. On spaces like this one and the defunct SSC comments, people were sure that anti-immigration sentiment in Europe was a clear effect of this, and..
.. No?
We've had anti-immigrant parties for decades now, as opposed to it being a thing in 2016. Sometimes they do well, sometimes they do not, sometimes they even get elected into governments. This has gone on for such a long time and with such regularity that it's become a little boring: it's really hard for something to keep its edge for such a long timeframe. There are people who disagree with the anti-immigration guys for various reasons, certainly, but the hysterics and doomsday rhetoric just isn't there anymore. It didn't work, the novelty wore off, and anti-immigration parties have become such a permanent fixture that even the negative coverage is more level-headed than it is apocalyptic.
I don't disagree, but I remember for example the most recent Macron vs Le Pen election as being covered a lot more apocalyptically.
Maybe my memory is just wrong though
Outside France, I think most of the "apocalyptic" views were more about her being pro-Putin and anti-EU. The immigration is only salient to both extreme pro-immigration and anti-immigration crowd, who make it a central thing about their platform / identity.
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France is an actually important country (2nd tier at least) with a hyper presidential system. It is more or less the only country left in continental Europe that believes in some sort of national destiny, which gives its rulers the power to do great or terrible things if they choose to. In contrast, almost every other politician in Europe is not much more than middle managers intent on keeping their order and bereft of any actual ambition. Who cares if Swedish diluted Neo-nazis get 3% more votes every election after all? Honestly what can they do?
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The victories of the pro migrant parties are permanent and all the right wing parties can do is stem the tide. 25% of the country now has a migrant background so the homogeneous, peaceful society that your grandparents knew is gone. The Sweden Democrats might slow the demographic change while they're in power but they're not going to reverse it. Elections matter and the Swedes have permanently changed their country for the worse. Unfortunately it's a lot easier to wreck a country than it is to fix it.
In theory it is still possible to deport hundreds of thousands that aren't citizens yet and didn't really have valid asylum reasons.
Permanent resident permits can be rescinded.
Will this happen? Of course not, and even if it did it wouldn't really "solve" things since many of the issues are with the second generation.
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The victories of pro-migrant parties are permanent insofar as they will have changed the ethnic composition of the population, but there are still things that anti-migrant parties can do to limit the speed of further demographic change and foster assimilation. One policy would be to explicitly target percentage of foreign born population as a measure for immigration policy, with automatic immigration restrictions kicking when it's passed. These restrictions could be selective, so as to specifically limit immigration from the developing world while leaving open immigration from e.g. the United States or Japan. One could combine these with pro-natal policies that won't disproportionately favour recent poorer immigrant groups (e.g., tax relief for parents earning above a certain threshold).
Given disparities in TFR between native and immigrant populations, this probably won't have a huge impact on the proportion of population from non-Swedish ethnic backgrounds, but it might successfully reduce the proportion of foreign-born citizens. Moreover, it may allow the percentage of successfully "assimilated" non-native citizens (for most values of "assimilated") to increase over time, and if we're interested in cultural assimilation (as per civic nationalism) rather than just ethnicity (as per ethnic nationalism) that might fix the problem in the long-run. This is true even if you think assimilation is hard; even among groups for whom it's more difficult (e.g., Somalian immigrants) it does happen to a subset of the population.
So unless we're concerned with ethnic change per se, then I think it's too early to sound a council of despair, especially since none of the big European migrant-destination countries have actually implemented heavy-duty policies to reduce percentage of foreign-born citizens. We have to be careful not to say "We've tried nothing and we're all out of options."
It's not a particularly big disparity. By 2021 statistics, foreign-born TFR is 1,8-1,9 (and falling), native-born 1,6-1,7.
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There is truth to this, but I think it is overstated. America radically overhauled our immigration policy in the 1920s. The specifics were often silly, but one of the goals was to give time for immigrant communities to assimilate. And it worked!
That’s not to say that all the costs went away; neither did all the advantages. But even if you can’t regain all of what you lost, you can regain some of it.
This time is different, even for US specifically. Lets look at this graph from this pew article.
The current level of immigration in USA is almost reaching historical highs from 1900 as percentage of population (Sweden has even larger share of foreign born population than USA). The difference is that in 1900 the US fertility rate was around 4.0 while it is 1.7 now (coincidentally Sweden also has 1.7 fertility rate now) and even that fertility is already driven by immigrant population to significant extent. The level of immigration from 1980 till 2018 is absolutely unprecedented and it is probably about to continue growing. If this trend continues for another 2 or 3 generations the situation will be unlike any time in history.
Another thing is that I'd say capacity of the West to assimilate immigrants is at all time low due to two main reasons. First one is the technology - immigrants have unprecedent ability to communicate with people back at home. You can have daily videocalls and access to all the media you want as opposed to a few letters a year. Second reason is cultural: the multicultural push is exactly opposing to what was happening in USA after 1920ies where new mass media had explicit push to get rid of "hyphenated Americans" and have only Americans. The new ethos in the West is to do exactly the opposite: promote foreign cultures and demonize indigenous white population and their culture as uniquely racist and bad.
I'd flag that this isn't necessarily at odds with assimilation. Look at first-generation Filipino-Americans as an example - this is a group that has assimilated very well by most standards, but maintains strong connections to their home country. I think we need to be clearer about what assimilation means. To my mind, it's something like convergence of broad values, linguistic competence, and convergence to national medians for things like income, education, and rates of offending. Of course perfect convergence is unlikely due to deep-seated differences between populations, but approximate convergence (or getting better results than the median) is all that's required.
I don't think comparing immigrant assimilation between Europe and America is that sensible. The power of American culture is a zillion times stronger than almost any European one. There are immense economic and social opportunities for assimilating into the dominant culture in comparison. Western Europe lacks this almost completely. The natives themselves can barely justify their own cultural existence and mostly see themselves as "America with funny language and some quirks".
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It is a lot easier to wreck literally anything than it is to fix it.
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