Sweden, for a whole host of reasons, decided to virtue signal over the issue of ‘refugees’ and opened its borders to such an extent that the problems with this policy are now starting to show. The influx of migrants, often from violent cultures with attitudes, views and beliefs that are diametrically different from the culture in Sweden, is impacting crime rates and presenting a nation that previously had much less crime with a major issue that needs to be tackled.

The response in the past to the rise in crime by the left leaning establishment in Sweden has often been to deny or try to explain away issues or create euphemisms such as ‘new Swedes’ to describe the migrants. However denial of Sweden’s migrant crime problem has become untenable as the violence from migrant gangsters has got worse and worse. Sweden is now trying to restrict immigration as they have more than enough problems with the migrants they’ve taken in already.

Some of those in Sweden’s academic class and political liberals who have previously been in wholehearted support of Sweden having a de-facto open borders policy, are changing their minds about their country’s open door migration policy. They’ve looked at the data, seen the increase in crime that has made Sweden the bomb chucking gangster capital of Europe and have quite rightly asked: What has gone wrong here?

One such liberal and one who has been literally mugged by reality, is Erik Gustafsson. This liberal who once supported open borders in part because he was guilt tripped into doing so. He said that he felt guilty for having advantages from being born in a good country like Sweden, advantages that those from less good countries didn’t have. He added that he agitated both online and offline for increased migration to Sweden. He also said that he was one of those who were calling those who disagreed with open borders ‘racists’ .

But now he’s repenting. He got a job that gave him access to the true figures of migrant crime and encountered the victims of it. Faced by incontrovertible evidence that the increase number of migrants was resulting in an increased amount of violent crime, he had to examine his previously pro-open borders position.

Mr Gustafsson said:

In 2020 after landing a job I moved to a different city & I came face-to-face with what I often advocated for. It wasn’t at all what I imagined.

My job gave me access to information & documents I was never exposed to before.

Despite forcing myself not to, I started noticing patterns in police files & who were dominating the crime scenes. I saw the victims, heard the stories.

Then I became a victim of my own beliefs—mugged at a knife point, punched, kicked & left in the cold. Everything around me was far from what I visioned. I found myself in faith crisis. I went into a withdraw from politics, stopped engaging in social medias & advocate groups.

I began to realize how destructive my naïve beliefs were, and how they were destroying this country.

Good for him for realising the uncomfortable truth rather than retreating into the embrace of comforting lies. I doubt that any reasonable moral person could do anything different when confronted with information that poses a dire challenge to their previous ideology.

I’m not surprised that Mr Gustafsson felt somewhat adrift when he realised that all that he had previously called for was just a load of old bollocks. As someone who has been propelled, by evidence, from the Left to the Centre Right I can somewhat understand his sense of dislocation and possibly shame for supporting destructive political ideologies.

He admits that he was naive and that in large part he supported open borders as he didn’t suffer as many other Swedes do, the impact of unchecked migration of people from cultures that are hostile to the Swedish way of life. The final prod that he needed to see that his prior views on open borders was wrong was when he was mugged in a country where previously this type of robbery was much less common.

He has some damning criticism of the liberal current in his society and some of that criticism could be applied to our own wealthy liberals in the Anglosphere who too often do not have to live with the consequences of political policies that they endorse. As with Sweden it is not the wealthy liberals who have to live in the fractured and violent societies that they’ve created, in part because of incompatible types and excessive levels of immigration, it’s the ordinary members of the long suffering working class who have to deal with that.

Mr Gustafsson added:

My point in all this, is that, liberals are often delusional & disconnected from reality. They’re driven by irrational guilts & childish emotions with no substances.

Spot on there. Too often those who call themselves liberal whom I’ve interacted with are completely ‘feels over reals’ to such an extent that they cannot recognise reality and desperately want their fantasy world to be real. Ruled by emotional incontinence the liberal left create policies that make them feel emotionally good or which increase their standing among their liberal peer groups. The problem is that many of these liberal, emotion driven policies have real world negative impacts such as a previously peaceful nation becoming a foreign gangsters paradise.