Where do you live? I'd like you to come here and see if that reflects the reality of living in a Swedish town of just north of 15,000, with an immigrant population at just over 10% and climbing. I promise you that I am not exaggerating when I say that when you leave your house towards the early evening and beyond, the majority of the people you see on your way to the store are immigrants. Anecdotally, Swedish friends have stopped going out as much as they used to. Cab fares during nights out have increased substantially, when before people would just walk home.

I'm not unsympathetic to what's going on with immigrants. I've literally worked in the Swedish school system teaching teenage immigrants the language (until I started university), an experience that if anything turned me off Swedes more often than it did them. Something that I did observe in my time there though as far as creating a hostile environment for immigrants goes is that the vast majority of the time there were arguments or potentially worse, it was between conflicting groups of immigrants, and not between them and the Swedes. There were instances of marginalization by Swedes for sure, but hostility was very far from a common occurrence, in that direction.

There is an increasing feeling in the air here that shit is hitting the fan, and that may eventually take the form of Swedes turning on the immigrants in a real way, but that is not the reality I'm living in right now. The one where most of my female relatives and even an athletic, hockey-playing brother don't go out past x o'clock if they can help it is. The one where I've twice been approached by a group of Somalian kids seeming to fish for a way to convince themselves I've disrespected them is.

I realize that there must be immigrants sitting at home at night also feeling wary of going out at 10 PM, and I don't pretend that there aren't racist Swedes fucking with their shit here and there, but it must be acknowledged that at least here they would not be in the minority when they're out, and the danger they could run into isn't exclusively in the form of Swedish people.