They Just Keep Wandering In

The Scandinavian languages are close cousins to Old English, which means that an alert English-speaker will notice words and phrases in Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian that are recognizable, to a certain extent. (This is true for texts, at least, but I find the spoken languages VERY difficult to understand.)

Take, for example, the Swedish word invandring, which means “immigration”. The obvious parallel word in English would be “in-wandering”. Variants on the word “wander” may be found in all the Germanic languages, and are derived from a root in Common Germanic, from which we also get the words “wend”, “went”, and “winding” (in the sense of a twisting path).

This etymology seems appropriate to the Swedish attitude towards mass immigration, which is that all those swarthy criminal foreigners have just wandered into the country somehow. Now that they’re here to stay, good Swedes just have to get used to them, and accommodate their behavior to their rapacious new neighbors.

Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from the Swedish blog Det Goda Samhället.

Report on immigration and crime

Det Goda Samhället [Good Society Foundation] has updated the reports of the Crime Prevention Council (Brå) from 1996-2005 on immigrant crime. The new report is entitled “Immigration and crime — A 30-year perspective.”

Patrick Engellau, the report’s author, believes that several interesting conclusions can be drawn from the material in the study. Three of the most important are the following:

  • For the first time, more crimes are being committed — in absolute numbers — by persons with a foreign background than by people of Swedish origin.
  • The most crime-burdened sub-group of the population comprises those born domestically from two foreign-born parents. This group’s weight is higher than the foreign-born, and increases over time.
  • An earlier, not particularly noticed group comprises those not registered, for example, members of foreign theft gangs, so-called undocumented migrants, EU-migrants, and tourists. This group has, in recent decades, greatly increased its share of the total number of crimes committed, from 3% to 13%.

    Read the new report, “Immigration and crime — A 30-year perspective” here.

    See a PowerPoint presentation that explains the new report here.

    See the Crime Prevention Council (Brå) statistics that are explained in the new report here.

  • See the original article for the embedded links.