President Donald Trump put the international spotlight on Sweden this week in his rally speech in Florida when he pointed to the country’s problems with assimilating Syrian and other refugees.
After some confusion over what Trump was referring to, media split along partisan lines over the situation in Sweden. One side observed skyrocketing crime, particularly rape, coinciding with the refugee influx in recent years. The other side found no refugee-induced crime increase to speak of.
In 2015, Sweden accepted over 160,000 refugees—five times its usual number—mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. That had many Swedes worried if the country would be able to absorb the influx consisting of mostly young men coming from a vastly different culture and environment.
The Swedish government acknowledged that integrating refugees has been a “challenge” and, in 2016, cut the intake to fewer than 30,000.
Yet some say the government has not been forthcoming about the extent of the challenge, while also pushing political correctness to the point of suppressing vital information.
Swedish police officer Peter Springare works as an investigator in Orebro, a town of some 100,000 about 100 miles west of Stockholm.
Two weeks ago, he shared on Facebook that virtually all crimes he investigated over the past two years were committed by an immigrant perpetrator, mostly from Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan.
