Swedish political science professor Tommy Möller has warned that the unprecedented mass migration into Sweden in the last decade could unravel the country’s “democratic welfare society.”
Professor Möller, who teaches at Stockholm University, has claimed that political stability in Sweden has been greatly affected by mass migration, stating that it could be relegated to a museum in an op-ed published by Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri.
“No matter what happens, no one can deny that our society has undergone significant changes as a result of the extensive immigration, and these demographic changes will permeate Swedish politics for the foreseeable future,” Moller said and highlighted the rise of the anti-mass migration Sweden Democrats (SD) who have topped recent opinion polls.
“Problems in health care and school, the municipalities’ increased costs for supply support, housing shortages and, not least, the accelerating gang crime – all of these are problems and some of them have been linked by SD with immigration,” he said.
Mass migration has been linked to several of those issues such as in the southern city of Malmo where the vast majority of shooting suspects in a Swedish media report released earlier this year were from migrant backgrounds.
Municipalities who took in large shares of asylum seekers and migrants since the height of the 2015 migrant crisis have also seen financial difficulties, such as the municipality of Bengtsfors which claimed it risked bankruptcy earlier this year.
The professor went on to add that polarization and cultural conflicts were on the rise, warning, “Unless the integration of the newly arrived succeeds better, in the long run, the social putty that makes a democratic welfare society of our kind possible risks being torn apart.”
“Unfortunately, the interpersonal trust that is a prerequisite for a large-scale society to function has decreased in Sweden in recent years,” Moller said and added, “Gaps between people, whether economic or cultural, create a distance in terms of experience and values.”
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