Sweden is hardly the center of the world, let alone the Western world. However, Sweden has served as the canary in the coalmine for immigration. In the 1970s, the manufactured mainstream opinion was that Sweden should become “less boring”, so they opened the doors to immigrants from all over the world. Today, life in Sweden surely gets your heart rate and general anxiety up, but I do not think that anybody would argue in good faith that this is a net positive for society.

In short, Sweden has been flooded with immigrants from incompatible cultures for decades. Rapes, violent crime, bombings, everything is up, while the Swedish krona, the local currency, has not been doing so well. At least the local immigrant population is thriving, which officially constitutes about 20% of the population but given how easily you can acquire Swedish citizenship, I would not be surprised if at least 1/3 of the people residing in Sweden belong to a different ethnicity. Certainly, if you walk around any of the major Swedish cities at noon, or at night, you could be forgiven for believing that you have left Western Europe. Of course, if you leave your house at 7:00 a.m. to get to work, you hardly see anyone who is non-white, but I really have no idea why this is the case.

Swedes are quite possibly the most hypocritical people in the West. Less than a decade ago, they held big rallies in support of unfettered mass immigration while anybody who could barricaded himself in white areas. As a consequence, Sweden is one of the most segregated societies in all of Europe. Amusingly, the very people who live in 99.99% white neighborhoods lament that Sweden does not do enough to integrate Ahmed the goat herder into society. Yet, there is a limit to virtue signalling. It ends once a large enough number of daughters of virtue-signalling cucks have been raped, too many of their sons beaten up, and one bombing to many has happened. During my time in Sweden, someone was shot dead within 100 meters my apartment and I have also had the doubtful pleasure of hearing and feeling the blast of an explosion that happened within a few hundred meters away from my apartment.

However, once even the elites can no longer hide from the all chaos they have wreaked upon society, public opinion is allowed to shift. As a consequence, we have seen the meteoric rise of the Sweden Democrats, essentially a plain centrist party but because the rest of Swedish politics is so batshit insane leftist, they are perceived as “right-wing extremists”. Currently, the Sweden Democrats are not part of the government. However, there is an agreement with the minority government coalition that the Sweden Democrats will support them, in exchange for certain concessions on migration.

The effect the Sweden Democrats have had on Swedish politics cannot be underestimated. Quite recently, for instance, the Swedish Deputy Prime Minister caused an uproar by stating that Islam is incompatible with Swedish society, so muslims need to adopt or leave. A mainstream politician making such a statement even one year ago would have been completely unthinkable. Also, there have been rather significant policy changes. While their effect is quite minimal, it is perceptible. The most noticeable impact of the Sweden Democrats on immigration policy is that the number of asylum seekers coming to Sweden in 2023 was the lowest in almost 30 years and, for the first time in 50 years, basically for the first time since they started this insane mass-immigration experiment, Sweden is experiencing net emigration. Of course, leftist shit rags like The Guardian are very upset about this and they have no difficulty finding taxpayer-funded academics who consider this development “a pure catastrophe for Swedish society”. Oh, it is a real catastrophe that the chance of getting robbed, knifed, or shot is going down! How will Swedish society manage to survive this?

Interestingly, Sweden is also financially incentivizing immigrants to leave. They offer they equivalent of $34,000. No, this is not per family but per head! This means that, for instance, an immigrant family of six, hardly an uncommon sight, can pocket over $200k, tax-free, which is surely enough to retire in whatever country they came from. Yet, despite this very generous offer, which still saves the government money, probably within the first year already, there are only few takers. Let this sink in: people who refuse to integrate in society also refuse to leave. They rather live in their enclaves as colonizers.

I think the actions Sweden has taken are a good start, yet they do not nearly go far enough. After all, if you have a negative immigration of a few thousand people per year, it takes several millennia to get them all out, assuming, which is a bit of a stretch, that their fertility rate is not above the replacement rate. There is a new official policy, but this can only be the beginning if Swedes really want to fix their society. There are millions of poorly integrated immigrants in society. You are not going to fix this problem with the proverbial drop in the bucket.

What we see in Sweden are important first steps, but without increasing efforts I think it is not plausible to assume that there will be meaningful change. Marginal negative immigration is a positive, but not in absolute terms. Think of someone who is morbidly obese. If that person went from 150 lbs to 600 lbs in two decades and somehow managed to get down to 598 lbs last year, nobody in their right mind would conclude that this person has fixed any of his problems. The situation is just as crappy as before, it just does not get much worse. Yet, even that is debatable because the baseline is really bad and someone morbidly obese, even if the weight is held constant, faces the risk of serious health complications.

The comparison with weight was chosen deliberately. There surely is a maximum weight for humans. If you are grotesquely obese, you cannot even function properly in society anymore. Similarly, unlike the proclamations of leftist lunatics, there is a limit to the number of immigrants a country can take in. Ignoring aspects like integration or crime, we still have the issue that housing is in limited supply. The Swedish housing market is absolutely horrible, with queue times for rental contracts often being decades long. It is quite hard to imagine that Sweden could have meaningfully increased the number of immigrants even if it wanted to. Of course, the problems with the high number of poorly integrated immigrants are still present.

The situation in Sweden is worth keeping an eye on. If they do not manage to meaningfully reduce the number of immigrants in the next two or three years, you can completely write off that country. We would have to see a net immigration of several ten thousand next year, at the very least, to know that the government really is serious. Ideally, though, we would have to look at many hundreds of thousands of people per year, for many years, considering that we are looking at millions of immigrants, of which only a small fraction is well-integrated into society, and these are surely not the people that are cause for concern. It certainly is possible to get a few million immigrants out of the country. All it takes is political will, and if Sweden could do that, then any other Western country could as well.