Swedish Unfairy Tales
It is commonly believed that trolls, gnomes and other inhabitants of the "lower" underground world, which allegedly existed in time immemorial parallel to the "upper" world of people, are the fruit of imagination of medieval novelists or authors of modern fantasy bestsellers such as "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings". As for police commissioners or officials from the Department of Immigration, all this fantasy must be completely alien to these serious people in the line of duty. Perhaps, at worst, an instructive detective novel might be useful, but certainly not fantasy.
However, of late, reports and accounts coming from the pens of criminal investigation specialists have turned from ordinary routine into fascinating reading. Statistical summaries have begun to resemble novels about invisible people. They stir the imagination and even smack of devilry—in those sections that concern immigrants and refugees. Recently, these concepts have often been linked with the epithets "illegal" and "criminal". Knowing how strictly regulated life in modern Sweden is, it is even hard to believe that thousands of illegal foreigners live here side by side with law-abiding citizens in their own special world. This "lower" world of "invisible people" is practically closed to prying eyes.
Nevertheless, it is just as real as the "upper" world, where the holders of social security numbers and plastic cards live. According to the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten, citing the Swedish Police Authority, as of January 2004 there are about 20,000 foreigners living illegally in Sweden, and their number is growing rapidly. Having lost its former "transparency", as indeed have most of the EU countries that are attractive to third-world migrants, Sweden today resembles more of a "muddy water". In the past year alone, the number of emigrants who vanished from sight before they could be expelled from the country in time increased by six thousand.
Familiar Faces
Sweden's illegal emigration has also been affected by all-pervasive globalization. Among the foreigners who have chosen the lot of "invisible people" instead of deportation to their homeland are former residents of the Maghreb, the Hindu Kush, and islands of tropical seas on both sides of Greenwich. But it is not aliens from exotic corners of the globe that determine the face of today's immigration. It is much more recognizable. The most numerous groups of refugees applying to the Swedish authorities for asylum last year came from the CIS countries, Bosnia, Albania, Serbia and Romania. They are also the ones who most often become "invisibles" if refused.
In recent years, unusual youth groups have begun to appear on the streets of Sweden's largest cities. As a rule, these are sturdy, well-built young men with stern looks from under their brows. Unlike rockers jangling with chains (hippies, punks, etc.), these guys are indifferent to flashy theatrical props. Instead, they prefer a practical and far-from-fancy style of dress: leather jackets, sweatpants and sneakers, short haircuts, almost shaven heads. They have little contact with locals, and if they do, it is in broken English or via gestures. In the Swedes' understanding, that's what refugees from the former Yugoslavia and the USSR look like. Non-Swedes easily recognize them as "bratva".
Today, the criminal foreign community is most widely represented, first and foremost, by people from the CIS, the Balkan states and Eastern European countries. If the Russians—as all Russian-speaking people from the former USSR are still called here—specialize mainly in robberies, thefts, car theft and resale of stolen vehicles, the Bosnians and Albanians run the drug trade. The Swedes were greatly surprised when, after a check at the migration authority, it suddenly turned out that more than 40% of refugees—men aged 20 to
40 years—had been registered with the police either in Sweden or in their home countries. In other words, they had committed offenses.
Attempts have been made to dispute the counting methods used in these statistics, but even if a certain exaggeration is conceded, the result is enough to make both the professional police officer and the ordinary citizen jittery.
Throwaway Passport
Under the pressure of the criminal threat from Eastern Europe, the Swedish government has decided to create a special police unit for "prevention and fight against crime among refugees from the CIS". As the TT news agency reports, the need for such a step is dictated by the fact that "when applying for asylum, some refugees use the waiting time for a response to create or develop a network of contacts in the criminal world of Sweden. At the same time, they often commit crimes, the most common types of which are thefts and robberies".
Well, of course! What enterprising criminal would not want to take advantage of the opportunities provided by Swedish immigration law? The most humane in the world, it requires of any asylum seeker a mere trifle: to appear at the nearest office and declare oneself a victim of political, religious or racial persecution. You don't even need to present any documents. On the contrary, it is much better to brazenly turn up without any ID! How else to explain that only 9% of foreigners who applied for political asylum in Sweden last year had passports on them? The lack of necessary documents makes the work of the inspectors harder, but it gives the refugees themselves the opportunity to live in Sweden at full public expense for some additional time beyond the six months guaranteed by law when an asylum application is processed.
Unlike, for example, Great Britain, where in a similar situation committing crimes is much more difficult (even the camp territory cannot be left without permission from the authorities), in humane Sweden an asylum seeker who has 'suffered' in a previous life enjoys the right to move freely throughout the country. No wonder: when the authorities finally decide on deportation, often there is simply no one to expel. The would-be political emigrant has long since disappeared without a trace. He has already vanished from the 'upper' world and descended into the 'lower' illegal world.
The ways of the underground
According to the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet, out of 6,000 non-returnees in 2003, only 780 people voluntarily left the country after being denied the right to political asylum. The lack of documents, housing, and official sources of income is not an insurmountable obstacle for illegal immigrants. To the considerable surprise of Swedes, who simply cannot imagine their lives without the indispensable personal identification number (in Scandinavia it is used everywhere, and a person without it is practically deprived of rights), thousands of people live among them uncounted. And for years! For example, during a police raid against drug dealers in Malmö at the end of February, police found not only hashish but also an entire family of illegal immigrants from Bosnia. Without any documents whatsoever, they had lived in Sweden... for four years. The police began to find such 'invisible people' more and more often. This mainly happens during various operations against drug dealers, arms dealers, or traffickers in human beings - in underground brothels, film studios of the child porn industry, and other dubious places.
Children and teenagers, who are increasingly disappearing from refugee camps, lead criminologists to assume that Sweden has become one of the bustling crossroads and transit corridors in the underground human trade. Thanks to the tolerance of Swedish migration rules, it is easier to bring in human cargo here, and then supply them to other countries for especially sophisticated lovers of 'forbidden fruit'.
Legal immigrants and those who have gone underground are equally interested in the black labor market - one can earn money there. Later, many of them will be firmly bound by a community of far-from-legal business interests. Judge for yourself how harsh the mores prevailing in this environment are: in the Stockholm suburb of Märsta, where one of the refugee camps is located, the body of a young man who had come from Armenia and asked for political asylum in Sweden was found. He was hanged on a tree upside down. The murder occurred during a party attended by 'political emigrants' from a nearby refugee camp. Characteristically, despite the corpse in the garden, the participants of the event were having a great time. The police, who arrived in the morning, found the merry company sleeping the sleep of the just after a heavy drinking bout. Who killed him, why, and for what reason remained unclear.
Or maybe use force?
After this tragic incident, the cup of patience of Märsta's residents overflowed. Concerned residents began calling the police, asking to rid them of their dangerous neighbors. Or at least to tighten the rules for leaving the refugee camp. Alas, those who by duty are called to protect peace and order could only throw up their hands: changing the existing rules is outside the competence of law enforcement agencies.
The police feel in full measure that the world of illegal immigration threatens the whole Swedish society with a criminal epidemic. While the migration authority slowly administers its justice, the police by duty have to clean out the Augean stables. As the head of the foreigners' department of the Malmö police, Annika Wärngård, admitted in an interview with the newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet, "foreigners who have avoided deportation are becoming a serious problem. The fact that we are finding them more and more often by chance testifies to the threatening scale that illegal immigration is taking. Unfortunately, we see only the tip of this iceberg, while most illegal immigrants manage to escape without hindrance, and we are powerless to prevent this."