Bill Maher lays bare Sweden’s refugee problem

Comedian Bill Maher is often a fascinating person to watch. His show, Real Time with Bill Maher, airs Friday nights on HBO and features monologues and a panel of guests who discuss the week’s news stories. What is interesting about the program is that Maher is a sort of “anti-woke” liberal — the weed-smoking, pro-choice, left-libertarian kind — that despises political correctness. This makes for entertaining viewing because Maher alternates between spitting out hideous ideas, hilarious jokes that cut both sides of the political aisle and occasionally stumbling upon — and being willing to vocalize! — an important but perhaps inconvenient truth. 

When watching Real Time, I often find myself vacillating between wanting to throw the remote at the screen and nodding in agreement. 

Last week’s episode was a perfect example. Maher admitted that he thinks abortion is “kind of murder” but is still pro-choice because he believes the world is overpopulated. Essentially, unborn children need to die to retain planetary homeostasis. It’s a pretty evil position to justify murder on environmental grounds. But how many other pro-choice people feel the way Maher does and are just unwilling to express it? It might actually be useful for people to air their vilest inclinations so they can be combatted appropriately; isn’t that one of the key reasons to support a culture of free speech? 

Another nice thing about free speech is that when someone feels comfortable enough to share views that their peers might find reprehensible, they may eventually stumble upon the truth. This was the case with another opinion Maher expressed during Friday’s show: that unfettered immigration to Sweden essentially destroyed the country. Even more generally: not all cultures are created equal.

“Sweden opened its borders to over a million and a half immigrants since 2010 and now 20 percent of their citizens are foreign-born and its education system is tanking and it has Europe’s highest rate of gang-land killings,” Maher said.

“Liberals say, ‘blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist.’ Yeah, but is it true?” he continued as his audience sat in uncomfortable silence. “Of course it’s true. It’s not a coincidence the quality of life went down when the Somali gangs… started a turf war.”

Sweden is indeed a case study of what happens when political leaders don’t consider the cultural effects of immigration. There are of course economic and political impacts of mass migration, but people are often afraid to talk about culture for fear of being branded racist. If you value your country’s laws and norms, you are reasonable to be concerned about what happens when you import millions of people who operate on a different set of standards. As the former president said, “They’re not sending their best… some, I assume are good people.” Sometimes genuinely good, honest, hard-working people seek to migrate so they can afford themselves a better opportunity in life. Sometimes they are seeking refuge from personal or political violence. But when you treat immigration as a right as opposed to a privilege, you inevitably end up taking in some pretty bad people, too.

In addition to settling tens of thousands of asylum seekers each year — many of whom the Swedish government now admits don’t have legitimate claims — Sweden took in 163,000 refugees, most from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2015 refugee crisis, more than any other nation in the European Union. According to economist Tino Sanandaji, this has had devastating effects on the overall health of the country: “Foreign-born represent 53 percent of individuals with long prison sentences, 58 percent of the unemployed, and receive 65 percent of social welfare expenditures; 77 percent of Sweden’s child poverty is present in households with a foreign background, while 90 percent of suspects in public shootings have immigrant backgrounds.” Unmentioned by Sanandaji or Maher is the ongoing rape crisis. Rapes in Sweden fell slightly in 2015 but increased every other year between 2013 and 2021. Between 2013 and 2018, nearly 60 percent of rapes were found to have been committed by men born abroad.

In the United States, where we currently face a border security crisis of unprecedented proportions, we see similar effects. Venezuelan and El Salvadoran gangs are setting up criminal enterprises in American cities, young women have been randomly raped and killed by illegal aliens — and in the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, some of the refugees we took were immediately accused of committing domestic abuse or sexual violence against their fellow refugees.

Luckily we face nowhere near the problem Sweden has — yet. But I would urge people to take a look at the violence against women and child sexual abuse rates in Mexico and ask themselves if they want carte blanche importation to the US.

Critics of more restrictionist immigration policy argue that immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born US citizens. This might be true for legal immigrants, but I have not had much time to dig deep into the data they’re using. I would expect it’s probably true because the US legal immigration process is very long and arduous, so impulsive criminals are likely not to apply nor qualify through the various legal immigration channels. (I did note during a quick review earlier this week that the crime rate for Central and South American immigrants was drastically higher than those of Chinese and European immigrants, which illustrates the point that it’s not just immigrants that are the problem, but immigrants from some places that have different cultural norms.) The question is trickier when it comes to illegal immigrants, because we don’t have a lot of data on them, and what we do have is in an active dispute.

This, though, is clear: a country that’s not careful about who it lets in could end up like Sweden. Maher is no conservative hero, but on this point he is correct.