Hunting down undocumented immigrants like animals is immoral and a waste of police resources
The end result is racial profiling, which is undignified for any country that respects the rule of law. The project entitled Reva, which stands for Rättssäkert och effektivt verkställighetsarbete (‘Legal and effective execution of policy’), uses rewritten methods to find and deport people who are in Sweden without permission. Reva exemplifies how a state authority can come up with new methods to reach its goals without technically violating the letter of the law.
The police have raided the street market on Möllevångstorget square in Malmö alongside officials from the Tax Authority (Skatteverket), for example, or stopped people cycling through the city for traffic violations – but in actual fact, the aim has been to check people’s identification documents. There are cases of the police breaking up weddings with pepper spray to get at undocumented immigrants. They have arrested teenagers out on leave from psychiatric care, which they were receiving in the first place because they were so terrified of being deported that it affected their mental health.
Reva is a success in as far as it has done what it set out to do. Deportations are up by 25 percent. The pilot project was followed by a national rollout – and all this is taking place with the EU’s support. Reva gets funding from the European Return Fund, which the union set up within the €676-million ($890 million) budget programme “Solidarity and Management of Migration Flows”.
Since January, Reva has been tried out in Stockholm, which has become all the more obvious these last few weeks for those of us who live here. Instead of targeting cyclists, the police are targeting commuters in the city’s public transit system. Citizens have reacted by plotting their whereabouts – either on the Facebook page Reva Spotter but also on Twitter. The main tactic is to target people who are jumping the turnstiles without paying for a ticket, which gives the police the opportunity to check people’s ID documents and residency permits.
Of course, it would be much easier for the police to simply stop anyone who looked like they weren’t European – but that is not allowed. ”We have to have a reason to check ID documents and residency permits,” a Stockholm police officer told our newspaper Arbetaren in December. Well, yes, of course they do, because what would we end up with if they didn’t need a reason? We’d end up with a police state.
The fact is – the police are engaging in a type of racial profiling, even though they use other qualifiers like jumping the turnstiles in Stockholm or cycling in Malmö with a broken headlight to stop people. What we have on our hands is a superb example of creative police work – how to figure out new methods to reach a specific goal without technically going against the letter of the law.
Swedish police officers do not, like their British colleagues do, have the right to stop and search anyone they like without having any suspicion of crime. So Swedish police have to make up reasons. That this is taking place in the context of a project that claims to respect the law is absurd. Furthermore, to pump resources into a crime as petty as jumping the turnstiles is an abuse of police powers, which in the long run risks damaging the respect that people feel for democracy. It does not respect the law.
Police work is all about prioritizing. A person with power has decided that hunting down undocumented immigrants should be top priority right now. As a Swedish citizen I have to ask – in what way does the presence of undocumented immigrants in the country pose a problem for me? For the undocumented immigrant, however, there are big problems in living and working in Sweden without a permit. Apart from the constant fear of arrest and deportation, they have to navigate many things that the rest of us take for granted – healthcare and education, for example.
Simple things like buying a train ticket – ironically, this also applies to a one-way ticket on the Stockholm metro – cannot be done today without possessing a personal identification number (personnummer). Undocumented immigrants work under the table for pitiful salaries and without any employment security. If they complain, the employer can easily have them kicked out of the country.
If we need to prioritize, why aren’t we targeting the employers who let undocumented immigrants slave away in restaurant kitchens or work for nothing as cleaners? Why aren’t we targeting the people in Sweden who make money off undocumented immigrants shovelling snow off the rooftops wearing nothing on their feet but trainers?
Why aren’t we targeting the people in Sweden who rope in undocumented immigrants to demolish houses riddled with asbestos without offering them proper protective gear? Many work for subcontractors. It is the big Swedish companies who don’t keep an eye on their subcontractors who carry much of the responsibility for this abuse.
The undocumented migrants are not the problem. The companies that exploit them are. Undocumented workers are also workers, but with worse working conditions, lower salaries and less security than anyone else in our country. That we let this happen and that we through our parliamentary system have told the police to hunt them down like animals is not just a waste of resources but deeply shameful.
Daniel Wiklander is editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Arbetaren, published by the Syndicalist Union (SAC) since 1922.
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Swedes Begin to Question Liberal Migration Tenets
By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: February 26, 2011
MALMO, Sweden — Nick Nilsson, 46, decided to vote for Sweden’s far-right party last fall because of a growing sense that his country had gone too far in letting so many immigrants settle here.
A truck driver, Mr. Nilsson lives a half mile from the Rosengard section of this city, where dreary apartment buildings are jammed with refugees from virtually all the world’s recent conflicts: Iranians, Bosnians, Palestinians, Somalis, Iraqis.
“No one has a job over there,” Mr. Nilsson said recently. “They are shooting at each other. There are drugs. They burn cars. Enough is enough.”
For a time, Sweden seemed immune to the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment blossoming elsewhere on the European continent. Its generous welfare and asylum policies have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to settle here, many in recent years from Muslim countries. Nearly a quarter of Sweden’s population is now foreign born or has a foreign-born parent.
But increasingly, Swedes are questioning these policies. Last fall, the far-right party — campaigning largely on an anti-immigration theme — won 6 percent of the vote and, for the first time, enough support to be seated in the Swedish Parliament.
Six months later, many Swedes are still in shock. The country — proud of its reputation for tolerance — can no longer say it stands apart from the growing anti-immigrant sentiment that has changed European parliaments elsewhere, leading to the banning of burqas in France and minarets in Switzerland.
In Malmo, a rapidly gentrifying port city in Sweden’s south, support for the far-right Sweden Democrats was particularly strong, about 10 percent of the vote. It is a place where tensions over immigration are on full display.
The city’s mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, a Social Democrat, ran his hands over a city map in his office, pointing out working-class neighborhoods like Mr. Nilsson’s that voted heavily for the Sweden Democrats, as might be expected, he said. But he could point to wealthier neighborhoods, too, that produced support for the far right as never before.
“We must dig deeper to understand that,” he said quietly.
Some experts say you do not have to dig that far. Sweden’s liberal policies have become costly. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Sweden, which had more manufacturing jobs than citizens to fill them, invited immigrants in. Most came from other European countries. They worked and paid taxes. Those were good years for Malmo, which had shipyards and a textile industry.
When those jobs disappeared, Sweden stopped the flow of immigrant labor, but not the flow of refugees, many of whom clustered in Malmo and other former industrial centers. Jobs were still scarce, but housing was available, apartments built long ago for laborers.
In some of those apartment blocks, the unemployment rate among immigrants stands at 80 percent. Still, their children need schooling, and they have elderly parents who need health care. Some are damaged by the violence they have lived through. They suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and drug and alcohol addictions.
Prof. Jan Ekberg, an economist at Linnaeus University, questions the policies that allowed so many refugees to settle far from jobs. “They are depending on the public sector now as never before,” he said. “That was a policy mistake.”
Rosengard hardly has the look of a troubled ghetto. Lawns and playgrounds abound. But the area does not look like traditional Sweden, either. Satellite dishes hang from every balcony. The bakery sells Middle Eastern confections. Al Jazeera plays on the televisions. And young men huddle on street corners casually bragging about doing battle with the police.
A few years ago, the fire and ambulance brigades would not even enter Rosengard without a police escort. Youths there threw rocks and set cars on fire. Police officials say things are much better now. Fires were down 40 percent last year compared with 2009. But last month, two police vehicles parked at the station were set on fire with small homemade explosives.
All this does not sit well with Mr. Nilsson and his wife, Ann-Christine, 51, who say that immigrants are not only failing to pay their way, but that they also are refusing to learn the ways of their host country.
“They do not respect Swedish people,” Mrs. Nilsson said. “As long as they learn the language and behave like Swedes, they are welcome. But they do not. Immigration as it is now needs to stop.”
But resentment runs both ways. Residents of Rosengard feel that they are isolated and looked down on. They scoff at the notion that Swedes are somehow special — less racist and xenophobic than other Europeans. They believe the country has been generous with financial support, but little else.
Young immigrants like Behrang Miri, 26, whose family came from Iran, say Islamophobia is a growing issue. “If a Swedish guy hits a woman, it’s alcoholism,” he said. “If someone hits a lady in my neighborhood, it’s due to culture.”
He added: “And all this talk about outlawing burqas for teachers. No teachers wear burqas. Why are they talking about that?”
Mr. Miri, a rapper who has started a nonprofit agency to encourage multiculturalism, says he loves Sweden and is grateful he was taken in. But, he says, the Swedes have not gone far enough in accepting immigrants. “O.K., they’ve opened up the first door.” he said. “But I want doors four, five and six. I want to be able to become president.”
Even older immigrants who have made lives here say they have little contact with Swedes. A refugee from Bosnia, Ask Gasi, says he can understand that Swedes are reluctant to embrace the diverse and needy refugee population. He wonders himself whether the government made a mistake in letting so many come in.
Mr. Gasi was able to earn a doctorate degree here, and he has a job as a teaching assistant. But he still does not feel welcome. He points to the swastikas and the Serbian crosses etched in the hall outside the mosque he attends.
“It’s hard to watch the news,” he said. “It’s Muslim this, Muslim that. Everything is about how bad we are. The Swedish won’t say anything to your face. But they say things.”
Some experts believe the support for the far right has already reached its limits in Sweden. They say the increase in votes last fall was more the product of deft campaigning by the far right, which has avoided inflammatory language, than a deepening of racist or xenophobic sentiments.
Ulf Bjereld, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg, says that a vast majority of Swedes rank immigration very low on their list of concerns. He says they are, in fact, less racist and xenophobic than they used to be, according to surveys conducted regularly since the 1990s.
But researchers have found that immigrants do face discrimination in jobs and housing. Malmo’s mayor, Mr. Reepalu, believes jobs and schooling are critical, though he notes with disappointment that as soon as a school has more than about 20 percent immigrants, Swedish parents take their children out.
The New York Times
Police stop illegal immigrants in the subway
Published: onsdag 12 december 2012 kl 18:37, Radio Sweden
People who pass through the subway turnstiles in Stockholm without paying could get checked for their migration papers as well, despite criticism.
Jerk Wiberg, who works with the border police in Stockholm, tells Swedish Radio P3 news that because riding the subway without paying is a crime, it gives the police the opportunity to check suspects for other crimes too.
“As border police, one can’t just go out to whoever in town, because they maybe look foreign. One doesn’t have the right to do that. The law requires something more, so that one has a good reason to make a check. We wait until we see someone going through the turnstiles without paying. If it turns out to be a foreign national, we’ll do an internal migration check,” says Wiberg.
But Jerzy Sarnecki, a professor in criminology with Stockholm University, says this goes against the spirit of the law. He says if the aim of the law is to have police make this kind of check, then police should have the authority to do it directly, rather than checking subway tickets first.
“If it’s not intended for the police carry out checks in this way, then either there’s something wrong with the law, or with the police’s way of acting. It seems like the law is being gone around,” he says.
Police deportation sting fails in nine of ten cases
Published: 25 Feb 13
Nine of ten people stopped by Stockholm police on suspicion of being illegal immigrants were in Sweden legally, new statistics show.
In January, police in the Swedish capital stopped 716 people to perform an “internal border control”, but only 42 people proved to be in the county without residency rights, the Metro newspaper reported.
Statistics for the months of December and February are characterized by a similar margin of error of around 90 percent.
“That’s a high margin of error,” Sören Clerton, head of the border control division of Sweden’ National Bureau of Investigation (Rikskriminalpolisen, NBI) told the newspaper.
“That’s a figure that should be as low as possible.”
Clerton admitted it was impossible for police to guarantee that no one be stopped because of their appearance or language. He promised that police would review their procedures to see if there was anything wrong with their methods.
Simon Andersson, a PhD candidate in legal procedure, criticized the police’s high margin of error.
“You need a very strong reason to believe someone doesn’t have the right to be here,” he told Metro
“The Swedish people don’t want people stopped for looking foreign, and it’s very strange to use another pretence, like fare-skipping, to stop people.”
TT/The Local/dl
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