If your prime worry is that immigrants will add to crime, then you would need to also take into account the rate of crime of natural-born citizens. If an immigrant is less likely to commit or be convicted of a crime, then you are simply applying a double-standard. This, specifically:
I like this talking point a lot. Even if it were to be true (this isn’t true even for Turkey), why would a country willingly import more crime by the means of low quality migrants?
… seemingly suggests that by accepting immigrants, you are simply “importing more crime”. That effectively, that the only relevant element of adding to the population is its commensurate increase in absolute crime statistics. Viewed through this lens, if the native-born populous commits crime at a higher rate, then by allowing natives to have children (rather than importing potentially lower-criminality immigrants) you are effectively only adding to the amount of crime, and thus making the society worse (viewed only through the lens of crime, as you have done in the above quote).
If, instead, you want to take a more nuanced perspective of the positives and negatives of adding to the population, then you can meaningfully justify allowing the native-born population to have more children. That’s the reasonable thing to do, of course, because as you said: the alternative is eugenics. Of course, then you must also apply nuance to the positives and negatives of accepting immigrants—because of course, there are positive and negatives, just like with native-born additions to the population. To suggest otherwise would be either ignorant or racist.
So, the line of reason must then contend with a rather complicated, much larger question: what are the net benefits and net negatives of immigration? And unfortunately, the answer to that question is extremely complicated, due to the sheer number of factors involved in trying to quantify a person’s (let alone multiple persons’) life into a set of statistics that can be accurately judged.
w.r.t. the publication you provided here, I was able to find a more up-to-date publication, so I will be addressing the data in the more up-to-date publication, rather than yours. Additionally, the publication is obviously in Swedish, so I will be using Firefox’s Translate feature to read it (author’s note: this was quite tedious).
Notably, a specific finding of the publication you provided (and the more up-to-date version I provided) is that the country-of-origin has a distinct affect on the overall net-benefit (or lack thereof) of any average immigrant. While this may suggest that immigrants of specific origins are less (pick one or multiple): useful, productive, hard-working, intelligent, educated—it may alternatively suggest that Sweden is particularly poor at integrating immigrants from MENAPT (or other non-Western) countries.
This is supported by the following study, which is the very same kind of research (cost-benefit analysis of immigrants vs. natural-born citizens), but covering many countries in the European Union, rather than just Sweden. Of note, is the following quote from the summary:
In Belgium, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, and Portugal, for example, the research shows that migrants contribute more to the national budget than they take out.
This is notable, because it further supports my hypothesis that Sweden may simply be particularly poor at integrating and making use of new, often (much) cheaper (in multiple dimensions) immigrant labor.
I provide this hypothesis not with the intent of beginning an academic discourse on the merits, but to exemplify that naïvely interpreting data without considering its context is a very common failure of humanity, and it leads to far worse outcomes (assuming that making decisions without all of the available information will on average lead to worse outcomes). In this case, we may interpret the immigrant net-cost data from Sweden in the following two ways:
- MENAPT immigrants are a net drain on Swedish society because (insert personal/racial/ethnic/cultural/etc flaw(s) here).
- MENAPT immigrants are a net drain on Swedish society because Swedish society is particularly poor at integrating MENAPT immigrants.
In which case, further research needs to be done (and is being done) into what specific challenges immigrants face when attempting to integrate into Swedish society. Or, you could simply kick them all out. But the reality is that you are likely missing out on the very real economic benefits that immigrant can provide (if the integrating society is structured to facilitate those benefits).
Thus, if your argument is an economic one, further research needs to be conducted on whether it is the immigrants or Swedish immigration policy that is to blame for the poor economic outcomes. If, instead, your argument is a social one, I suspect you would struggle to make it without sounding like a racist.
Crime:
This is unfortunately from Denmark, which is close to, but not actually Sweden. Regardless, I will take as fact (for my current argument) that at least MENAPT immigrants commit crime at (roughly) double the rate of natural-born citizens in Sweden (though the provided publication is, again, data from Denmark).
As can be seen in the publication I previously linked, that is not the case for the United States (again, the publication is Texas-specific, but you can find the same data for the entire country if you want). This suggests (once again) that there may be variance in countries’ effectiveness in integrating immigrant populations. This could reasonably lead one to the exact same hypothesis I posited for the economic conundrum of immigrants in Sweden: Sweden is particularly poor at integrating immigrant populations.
Additionally, the following study suggests that, nearly writ-large, immigrants do not commit more crime than natural-born citizens, even if some specific statistical frameworks suggest that they may. This confusion of data is hypothesized on in the following excerpt from the study’s conclusion:
We can suggest several possible resolutions for this seemingly conflicting
evidence. First, perhaps the observed high arrest and incarceration rates of immi-
grants stem from discrimination (preference-based or statistical) against immigrants
on the part of police or judicial authorities, rather than actual higher crime rates,
although we are not aware of any systematic review on this issue internationally.
Second, perhaps immigrants have substituted for natives in some illegal criminal
markets, which would be consistent with immigrants exhibiting higher offending
rates than natives while, at the same time, immigration not leading to higher crime
rates at the local level. Finally, the last (and perhaps simplest) explanation remains
that the share of immigrants in the population—and among offenders—may still
be in most cases too low to cause overall detectable changes in local crime rates.
The share of immigrants in the global population is only 3.5 percent, and even in
high-immigration countries in Europe and North America, it remains in most cases
between 10 and 15 percent. These hypotheses are tentative, and further research is
needed to reconcile the patterns emerging from individual-level and aggregate data
on immigration and crime patterns.
To conclude (and at the very least) much more research needs to be done on what immigration strategies are actually effective, and why the specific discrepancies in immigrant data exist (seemingly, Nordic vs. most other Western countries).
I recognize that can be a very frustrating thing to hear (feels like: no answers for now, it’s too complicated, just keep dealing with it until we figure it out!), and that the simple arguments / lines of reasoning are thus far more attractive to avoid getting bogged down in the endless complexity of human society. But, if we take for self-evident that we all want the best outcomes for everyone, then it is incumbent upon each of us to do our best in understanding the issues we care about, and shepherding the resolution of those issues to the best outcome of everyone involved.
So, if you really care about the effects of immigration on your respective town/city/county/country/region/continent, it is thereby incumbent upon you to educate yourself on the complex nuances of that topic—so that you can then help to lead your town/city/county/country/region/continent to the best possible outcome for everyone. If you instead do not care enough about immigration to do that, then you should probably just avoid arguing about what should and should not be done w.r.t to it—because you are not educated enough on the topic for your opinion to actually be usefully informed.