What's Happening in Sweden?
Sexual violence, crime, and immigration have been linked together for years in the media and politics in particularly negative ways. This is especially relevant in the case of Sweden, where the current overflow of refugees and crime linked to foreigners have led to significant backlash and hostility from society. However, at a time when racial and religious tensions are rampant in the world, it is important to look deeper into the socio-economic factors and other data surrounding statistics rather than accepting statements from the media at face value. Through this article, we aim to combat some common misconceptions and show that ethnicity and nationality are not the only factors which contribute to crime. Due to the limitations of data collected by Swedish agencies and made available to the public, we will be looking at statistics collected from the mid- to late-2000s.
In order to more fully understand the issue at hand, let us go through some basic contextual information. We have created a visualization depicting the flow of immigrants from around the world to Sweden; when you hover over a country, you can see the number of people that left to move to Sweden. From this, we can see that the highest concentration of immigrants comes from Iraq. The reason for this becomes more clear when we look at a breakdown of the motives for immigrant from a particular country to go to Sweden. Through this graph, we see that, of the immigrants from Iraq, nearly 50% arrived as refugees seeking asylum while the remainder were looking to be reunited with family. In other countries with large amounts of immigrants, such as Serbia, Thailand, and China, highest motives are also asylum, family reunification, and then education.
While immigrants come from a diverse range of countries, we found that, on average, they tend to reside in the same regions of Sweden. Stockholm County, Västra Götaland County, Skåne County, and Västmanland County are the most heavily populated with immigrants, and the most densely populated in general (with the exception of Västmanland County). The fact that they are the most populated areas in general is a key point to keep in mind, because such a high concentration of people living in urban areas tends to lead to increased levels of crime whether there are immigrants there or not.
The heart of blaming immigrants for crimes is most widely corroborated with statistics compiled from the National Crime Survey data in 2005. After 2005, however, the survey stopped recording country of origin. In this statistical publication, Brå (the Swedish National Council for Crime), noted that the percentage of non-Swedish born suspects varied according to region, which are generally classified according to the UN statistics bureau’s regional demarcations. This data shows that by far, African-born Swedish residents are the most overrepresented foreign-born people as suspects in crime investigations. On the other hand, Nordic countries except Sweden, other European countries including Turkey and Cyprus, and West Asia had greatest percentage of suspects. Despite the relatively large proportion of suspects from Europe, West Asian immigrants are not negligibly overrepresented more compared to European immigrants. This must also be taken with a grain of salt, as there may be biases in the survey data. Perhaps it is more likely that people from European countries respond to these surveys? It is impossible to know as this data was not recorded in the survey.
From the graph depicting crimes committed by foreign-born, immigrant children, and native Swedes, there is a clear discrepancy in crimes committed against persons. This includes robbery, sexual crimes, aggravated assault, crimes involving lethal violence among others. Foreign-born residents are suspected to a much larger degree than immigrant children or Sweden-born residents in this category, as opposed to all other categories, except driving offenses. This could substantiate the claim that immigrants cause more trouble due to the fact that they are immigrants, however, it is very important to note that there could be a variety of other factors that influence this group more than other groups. Due to the lack of data, it is impossible to point that immigration has a causal relationship with crime.
For all but six categories of crimes, foreign born Swedish residents have the highest rate of being the victim. In all of those six categories, immigrant children have the highest rate of being a victim.
Along with some inherent overrepresentation in crime statistics, there are also other socio-economic factors which can help to explain why immigrants may be more likely to turn to crime or be primary suspects. Before arriving in Sweden, many of them had completed their studies, gone on to higher education, or risen up in the job market. When we look at a breakdown of income levels, however, these aspects don’t seem to have carried over when gaining employment in Sweden:
From the bar chart above, it is evident that immigrants earn much less than native Swedes. With the statistical data Brå has released, neither immigration nor income can be outed as the cause for criminal behavior. Rather, there exists a complex socioeconomic network of interrelated problems that manifests in the larger proportion of immigrants as suspects in criminal investigations. In order to get a better sense of why the income levels are so unequal among the four groups, we took a look at the breakdown of the labor market:
While over 60% of Swedish natives are white collar workers, only 33.6% of non-European and non-Scandinavian foreigners have white collar jobs. At the same time, they have the highest amount of blue collar workers, and an unemployed sector that is more than twice as large as that of any other group. A large part of this may be because of the fact that many immigrants who arrive as refugees may not prioritize reentering the workplace, or may view their time in Sweden as more of a brief stop until they reach a final destination. However, studies from 2007 (cite) show that there is also a significant amount of employee bias when hiring those with easily recognizable European names and those with more foreign names. Data has also shown (cite) that the breakdown of percentages of these groups that have gone on to higher education are all in the range of mid-20s; as we have seen though, the breakdown of the labor market implies that many foreign-born Swedes are overqualified for the jobs they have managed to find. At the same time, it is important to note that the quality of education is unknown and could possibly be incomparable for different areas of the world.
When we consider the fact that many immigrants have lower incomes, face employee discrimination when applying for jobs, and have much poorer social network support in Sweden (cite), it is easier to see other factors that may come into play when looking at the correlation between immigrants and crime (cite). Rather than solely considering the fact that they came from somewhere else, learning more about their status and lives in Sweden is the first step to working towards an improvement in the lives of immigrants and working towards a less racially conflicted nation.