Rioting in Stockholm’s suburbs has highlighted Sweden’s failure to integrate swathes of its immigrant population, but in this small, consensus-driven country, there was little agreement on how to solve the problem.
Four nights of unrest in Stockholm’s low-income suburbs have trained the spotlight on the assimilation of immigrants, who make up about 15 percent of the population and who are much more likely to be unemployed despite numerous government programmes.
Due to its generous refugee laws, Sweden has in the past decade welcomed hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and the Balkans, among others.
Many congregate in areas already inhabited by other immigrants, where school results are poorer and joblessness is higher, leaving many immigrant youths with a sense of disillusionment and hopelessness about the future.
In the suburb of Husby, where the riots began on Sunday in response to the fatal police shooting of a 69-year-old machete-wielding man, 80 percent of residents are immigrants.
Some of the rioters were under the age of 16, according to police.
Some experts blame the current troubles on a growing chasm between rich and poor in the Nordic country, where a centre-right government has scaled back social benefits since taking power in 2006.
“The fact that the size of certain allowances hasn’t changed in years has had a strong impact on certain suburbs,” said Eva Andersson, an associate professor of human geography at Stockholm University.
“People are really surprised by the effects of this dramatic change,” she added.
The Swedish government has earned praise for the handling of its economy, even as Europe was engulfed by the financial and debt crises.
But the Scandinavian state is no longer the cradle-to-grave welfare state it once was: most cities have an acute housing shortage, homelessness is on the rise and youth unemployment is among the highest in Europe.
Rioting last broke out among immigrants in Stockholm in 2010, when up to 100 youths threw bricks, set fires and attacked the local police station in the suburb of Rinkeby for two nights.
That violence broke out after a group of young adults were barred from entering a junior high school dance. In reaction, they flung rocks through the school windows.
In 2008, hundreds of youths rioted against police in the southern town of Malmoe, upset over the closure of an Islamic cultural centre.
According to the OECD, Sweden still ranks among the nine most equal member states of the organisation which includes the world’s leading economies.
But inequality surged by one third between 1985 and 2008 — the largest among all OECD countries, the organisation said in a report earlier this year.
Farbod Rezania, an expert on labour market issues at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, lamented the loss of low-skill jobs in Sweden’s high cost economy, making it harder for many immigrants to get a foothold.
In countries like Britain, the retail and hospitality industries hired more staff because salaries and hiring costs were lower, he argued.
Aje Carlbom, a social anthropologist at Malmoe University, said the government needed to admit that immigrants arriving without an education were unlikely to ever get a job.
“Maybe a lot of money should be invested in second and third generation immigrants, to make sure they learn Swedish. The parents’ generation I think, unfortunately, is probably a lost cause in terms of integration,” he said.
Swedish authorities have also been neglecting the troubled neighbourhoods, noted experts.
Rather than isolated incidents, the riots should be seen as the “peak” of an ongoing problem with youth gangs and crime, Rezania said.
There are “regular complaints from the residents over youth gangs… but the authorities don’t act. This hasn’t happened over night,” he said.
This was illustrated by home insurance rates, which can be twice as high in Stockholm’s deprived areas as they are in the wealthy city centre, he noted.
For Andersson, the segregated housing market is a key problem.
“Areas like Husby have become really run down, not attractive to Swedes. These are places most people would hesitate to simply go to,” she said.
“There is a neighbourhood effect. What you see people around you doing really affects you. If you see young adults studying, you will follow the norm,” she added.
Yet while the rioting has made international headlines, the story was quickly losing its lustre at home.
Many Stockholmers said politicians were reading too much into the events.
“A lot of people have this stereotypical image of Sweden as a socially well-functioning country. There are very few dramatic events here,” said Carlbom.
“But we are gradually becoming more like other countries,” he added.
As riots flare, Sweden divided over integration policies
