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Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State
long NYT piece on Islam in Sweden. excerpt:
Sweden has become a multiethnic, multicultural and racially divided country in two ways: first gradually, then suddenly. The gradual part started with World War II. Sweden was neutral, but it fell under Germany's sway. Indeed, the historian Byron Nordstrom has described this neutrality as "a sham" and Sweden as a "virtual ally" of the Germans. Sweden provided million of tons of iron ore to the Nazis and permitted the free movement of troops across its territory. This neutrality would have two important consequences in the half-century that followed. The first was spiritual. The ambitious Swedish welfare state, defended in the first decades of the century on grounds of ethnic, and even volkisch, solidarity, was maintained and expanded, but on different rationales — expiatory ones, you could say, like egalitarianism and humanitarianism.

The second consequence was logistical. At a time when all of Europe's infrastructure needed to be rebuilt or replaced, Sweden had one of the few undemolished industrial bases on the continent. In retrospect, its astonishing postwar growth rates — 4 percent a year until the oil crisis of the 1970's and 7 percent for most of the 1960's — were almost inevitable. All Sweden lacked was sufficient people to man its factories. A result was a series of temporary labor agreements with foreign countries along the lines of Germany's Gastarbeiter program ....

When the boom stopped all over the West in the 1970's, labor unions sought — and got — restrictions on work-force migration. But one door was left open: political asylum. Polish Jews fleeing state anti-Semitism and Greeks fleeing the dictatorship of the "colonels" began arriving in the late 1960's, and Swedish immigration since then forms — to use a metaphor of the economist Torsten Persson — "a ringlike pattern of political crises," from pro-Allende Chileans in the 1970's through Kurdish nationalists in the 1980's to Somalis and Bosnians in the 1990's. So began the "sudden" phase of the emergence of multiethnic Sweden. Since 1980, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, half of all residence permits granted — almost 400,000 — have gone to reunite families from various geopolitical disaster areas. A lot of these places were in the Islamic world. So Sweden now has a Muslim population of 200,000 to 400,000; the higher tally would place it among the most heavily Muslim countries in Western Europe....

Sweden suffered from bad decisions and bad timing. In 1985, it shifted responsibility for integrating immigrants from its employment bureaucracy to its welfare system. Then, between 1990 and 1994, squeezed between an expanding state sector and increasing global competition for its industries, Sweden underwent the worst economic collapse of any Western European economy in decades. G.N.P. contracted by 6 percent, and employment levels declined by 12 percent. This was the moment (1992) when asylum applications were reaching a peak of 84,000 a year — to a country of only 9 million. The vast majority were accepted. That is, before family reunification is even reckoned in, Sweden was adding almost 1 percent a year to its population by welcoming some of the most desperate and traumatized people on earth.
As the Swedes scrambled to house these people, they ended up segregating them far from jobs .... and a familiar pattern emerges. RTWT, even if it is the NYT. We need to understand this history.

Posted by: lotp 2006-02-05
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=141692