Torn apart by an open door for migrants: Sweden is seen as Europe's most liberal nation, but violent crime is soaring and the Far Right is on the march

Daily Mail

This may sound rather ungrateful. Maher and his two friends, Mahamed, 22, and Mahmood, 38, came to Sweden after taking this summer's well-trodden route to Europe from the Middle East, via Turkey. On reaching Germany, they discovered that the waiting time to claim asylum was running into months. So, last month, they boarded a ferry to ultra-liberal Sweden, which has a reputation for welcoming any foreigner who knocks, and handing out generous taxpayer-funded benefits.Of course, like the 100,000 other incomers to this country of just 9.5 million people this year, Maher's group was let in, and given a place to stay. But there's a problem: by Christmas, another 90,000 are expected to try to enter Sweden, leaving conflict in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as poverty-plagued parts of Africa. ........

The Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji, who himself has an Iranian-Kurdish background, recently described what's happening in Sweden as 'quite disastrous'. He said: 'This is an irreversible social experiment that no wealthy state has ever attempted. There are almost no ideas or visions over how this can be solved 'You can't combine open borders with a welfare state. If you offer generous benefits, and anyone can come and use these benefits, a very large number of people will try to do that. It's just mathematically impossible for a small country like Sweden to fund that.'