Trump puts focus on Swedish embrace of immigrants
HELSINKI — When a riot broke out in a predominantly immigrant Stockholm suburb this week, the biggest surprise for many Swedes was that a police officer found it necessary to fire his gun.
For U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters, the episode appeared to confirm Trump’s vague observation two days earlier that the Scandinavian country was at risk of becoming a breeding ground for extremist attacks.
It’s true that Sweden, which prides itself on welcoming newcomers, is seeing a new kind of urban unrest. The combination of the country’s open-door policy and heterogeneous culture has led to frictions, especially in areas where many longtime immigrants feel disempowered.
Yet its problems with crime, poverty and violence are no greater — and potentially much less — than in the United States and other countries with homegrown gangs as well as waves of new arrivals — and Trump’s focus on Swedish issues has left many people there puzzled.
This week’s trouble started when police arrested a drugcrime suspect in Rinkeby late Monday. Rioters threw rocks at police, set cars on fire and looted shops, but no one was injured.
The flash came two days after Trump suggested during a Saturday rally in Florida that Sweden could be the next European country to suffer the kind of extremist attacks that have devastated France, Belgium and Germany.
“My statement as to what’s happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden,” Trump tweeted after he mentioned at the rally that something terrible had befallen the country the night before.
The president’s initial remarks bewildered Swedes — and gave rise to ridicule and a barrage of comment on social media — because no high-profile crimes or tragedies had taken place on Friday night.
The president might have been referring to a segment aired Friday night on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight. It reported that Sweden had accepted more than 160,000 asylum-seekers last year, but that only 500 of the migrants had found jobs.
Sweden received a record 163,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, not in 2016 as reported in the Fox News story. That was the highest per capita rate in Europe, and the country’s has since reduced the number of refugees and migrants it will accept, acknowledging it cannot manage such a large inflow.
But although the right-wing Sweden Democrats have tapped into a growing anti-immigrant sentiment, many Swedes are disinclined to link any increases in crime to the recent rapid growth in the number of refugees and migrants that streamed into the country and others in Europe.