After riots broke out in Rinkeby, a short drive from the center of Stockholm, Swedish residents begin to think the country's refugee policy have gone too far. They believe the government is not doing enough to resolve the issues caused by the scale of new arrivals of refugees and migrants in Sweden.
U.S. President Donald Trump made a recent remark about the refugee policy in the country, suggesting something was going wrong. He called out the country's unwise decision in welcoming so many refugees and migrants, that was first met with mockery, then a hidden reality.
The New York Times reported that Sweden has received more refugees per capita than any other European nation. During the European migrant crisis in 2015, some 160,000 people arrived in Sweden requesting asylum.
Magnus Ranstorp, a counter-terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense University said, "The equivalent in the U.S. (compared to the Sweden scenario) would be to take in six to seven million refugees." He called the refugee policy a shocking surge for a country that consists of a population fewer than ten million people.
While some remain convinced that Sweden's refugee policy is something to be proud of, one local resident thought Trump's comments were "spot on". Josefin Larsson, a 25-year-old Swedish-Bolivian salesperson from Gothenburg, said that while everyone else assume Sweden to be a safe place, gang violence and security threats continue in the streets.
Having observed the large number of new arrivals, integration has become a real concern in the refugee policy, especially in the large cities like Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg. "That is the problem, they are not acting, they are letting it go. It will become harder and harder later on to control," Larsson said, confirmed by CNN.
However, police argued that neither refugees nor the Sweden's refugee policy are entirely responsible for crime in low-income neighborhoods like Rinkeby, calling it a complex issue. Varg Gyllander, a press officer with the Stockholm police said, "I'm not denying that there are integration issues. What is wrong to do is to conflate immigration, crime and terrorism, because those linkages are not that strong."
