When ‘Underage’ Refugees Look Anything But

Under strain from an influx of asylum-seekers claiming to be children, Sweden is now considering instituting mandatory age tests

BY ELISABETH BRAWJANUARY 13, 2016

MALMÖ, Sweden — For years, Sweden has been the favorite destination for unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Europe. Its reputation as both a comfortable place to wait out the application process and a generous granter of asylum approval has spread far and wide. Last year it received almost twice as many underage asylum-seekers as the No. 2 destination, Germany; at the end of the year in particular, the number of children arriving alone in Sweden skyrocketed. But lately, some of these recent arrivals have appeared — at least according to their fellow asylum-seekers and Swedish officials — well, mature for their ages.

“In my [home for unaccompanied minors], there are so many people who look like 32 but say they’re 16,” reports Jamal Hawilo, a 17-year-old Palestinian whose slender frame and not-quite-settled bass voice suggest that he is indeed an adolescent. “There’s one guy I’m absolutely 100 percent convinced he’s 35.”

Jamal, who arrived in Sweden in August with his 16-year-old brother, isn’t the only one who noticed some rather seasoned-looking men among the 1,000-2,000 unaccompanied minors who were arriving in Sweden each week over the summer and fall. Now, in the midst of a fierce debate over asylum policy that saw Sweden backtrack on its generous open-door position late last year, Swedes are also weighing how to treat migrants who claim to be children but lack identification.

“The problem is not the volume, but the fact that people” are claiming to be children, said Mats Johansson, chair of the Stockholm Free World Forum, a right-leaning think tank and a former member of parliament from Sweden’s center-right Moderate Party. “Adult Afghans are not children in need of protection.”

The government and the country’s Migration Agency have long been reluctant to medically test unaccompanied minors’ ages as a standard procedure. “The government has been hoping that silence about age cheating will solve the issue,” said Johansson. But now as part of the recent reversal of its open-door asylum policy, the government is considering making age-determination tests standard practice for unaccompanied minors. The test, which involves dental and wrist-bone X-rays, can usually determine a young person’s age within a one-year margin. A Justice Ministry spokesman told Foreign Policy that a proposal is expected within the next six months.

There are many reasons a 30-year-old asylum-seeker would claim to be an adolescent. In Sweden, if a newly arrived asylum-seeker claims to be a minor, the Migration Agency has to treat him as such during the application process until it has ample reason to contend he’s an adult — and that means extra protections, enshrined in international law. Signatories to the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child have agreed to give children — that is, anyone under age 18 — “special safeguards and care.” In practice in Sweden, this means that while an adult, for example, can be denied asylum on the grounds that some parts of his country are safe and can then be returned to an unfamiliar place, a child will not be sent to a different part of his home country. Children applying for asylum in Sweden also don’t face the prospect of being returned to the EU country where they first arrived and are, if approved, allowed to bring their families to join them.

During the week of Nov. 9, exactly 2,942 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in Sweden, which means that children arriving alone made up nearly one-third of the 10,553 asylum applications filed that week. That’s an increase of 635 children compared with the week before. In total, 8,808 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in November, a small drop from the record month of October, when 9,339 children did so. In 2014 — the latest year for which data are available from the European Union’s statistical body, Eurostat — Sweden was the undisputed No. 1 among destinations for unaccompanied minors, with 7,049 applications. Second-ranked Germany received 4,400 applications, followed by Italy at 2,505.

It’s unclear how many of these applicants are adult men claiming to be 17 or younger, as the Swedish Migration Agency only investigates applicants’ ages later in the asylum process. But Migration Agency figures show that 46 percent the unaccompanied minors who applied for asylum in Sweden last year were males giving their age as 16 or 17. Another 40 percent were males ages 13 to 15. “We Swedes are undemanding and naive in not wanting to check unaccompanied minors’ ages,” said David Eberhard, a leading Swedish psychiatrist and expert on children’s psychological development. “That attitude is connected to the undemanding way in which we rear our children.”

The influx of what appear to be grown men posing as adolescents, however, has created a vigorous debate that rages on Internet forums and social media. Local newspapers often report on the unaccompanied minors, and when the photos seem to depict men rather than boys, ordinary citizens proceed to research their ages by, for example, locating their Facebook profiles. “The guy is not 17 years old, but 34”, claimed a user recently on Flashback, a popular website among age-cheating detectives, about an unaccompanied minor featured in a newspaper report.

The question of age-cheating among asylum-seekers is a fraught one, explained Stefan Olsson, a political columnist and local politician for the Moderate Party. No one wants to accuse children in danger of lying.The question of age-cheating among asylum-seekers is a fraught one, explained Stefan Olsson, a political columnist and local politician for the Moderate Party. No one wants to accuse children in danger of lying. But “because the establishment doesn’t discuss the issue openly, and critics of the very liberal policy towards unaccompanied minors are often accused of being racists, the discussion is mostly conducted on the Internet” — where it often turns one-sided.

The New Year’s Eve sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, have added a new aspect to the debate. Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading daily, recently reported that last year at “We are Sthlm,” a large youth festival, 90 young men were removed by the police after attacking female participants. The newspaper quotes one of the police officers as saying that the police treated it as a sensitive matter because a number of the men were understood to be unaccompanied minors.

Sweden’s commitment to underage asylum-seekers is evident in the housing provided for unaccompanied minors while their asylum claims are decided, a process that on average can take some 200 days. Their home-like residences typically feature modern furniture, televisions, game rooms, and well-equipped kitchens; adults and families are housed in more modest accommodations. “They give you money for the bus, for the [mobile] phone, for a laptop,” says Jamal’s brother, Wael, of the residence where he lives with Jamal and some 10 other boys.

The children are looked after around the clock by social workers, and each child is also represented by a guardian whose task is to protect his interests. While humane, the policy of enhanced care for children means these cozy homes can be hugely expensive. To cover the cost of caring for asylum-seekers, the Swedish government is using funds from its aid and development budget: Every new asylum-seeker means 499 kronor per day ($60) is taken from development-aid recipients.

Local authorities are reimbursed 1,900 kronor ($220) per child per day by the government, but because they don’t have enough capacity, they also buy services from private companies. In some cases the prices charged by such companies have tripled, leaving local authorities out of pocket by large amounts. As a result of the cost and the enormous increase in arriving children, city authorities are struggling to provide room and staff, and more than 30 cities have already reported themselves to the government as unable to care for the children. In October, the government announced that it will introduce pared-down living arrangements for 16- and 17-year-olds, which will include less adult supervision.

Jamal and Wael traveled to Sweden from the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra just outside Beirut, where they grew up, last August. At home in Sabra, there are no opportunities for Palestinians, Wael explained. Plus, their estranged father had not paid back loans to several people, who are now threatening to harm Jamal and Wael. To get a better life for his grandsons, Jamal and Wael’s grandfather, with whom they lived, arranged for them to travel to Denmark with a Lebanese soccer team. As planned, the two teenagers absconded to Sweden.

After arriving at Central Station in the southern Swedish city of Malmö, the boys made their way to the Migration Agency registration office, where the agency assigned them to one of the 34 refugee residences here. In the youth residences, Afghan males dominate: another on-the-ground expression of a geopolitical reality. Because Sweden grants permanent residency to all Syrians, Syrian men don’t need to pretend to be boys, and only 3,777 of the unaccompanied minors arriving in Sweden last year came from the ravaged country. But with no such blanket asylum in place for Afghans, they — and a likewise disproportionate number of Somalis and Eritreans — often appear to claim asylum as unaccompanied minors. Recent figures provided by the Migration Agency show that more than half of the 41,564 Afghans who arrived in Sweden in 2015 claimed as unaccompanied minors.

With family members looking out for them, the Hawilo brothers are not abandoned. But they arrived in Sweden on their own, and as far as the law is concerned, that makes them unaccompanied minors. Now they’re attending a city-run school program for newly arrived refugees while their asylum claims are processed. If they get asylum, they want to bring their grandparents here.

Over 2,000 of the children who have recently arrived in Malmö have been assigned to youth residences while awaiting their asylum decisions; others are housed in neighboring towns. To keep up with the increasing numbers of unaccompanied minors, Malmö’s City Council has hired 1,000 new staff, mostly social workers. “Last spring we had 120 places for unaccompanied minors; we now have 2,500, but this is it,” explained Lene Cordes, Malmö’s director of youth welfare. “There’s no more space we can use.” There’s no more staff either. Cordes has even created a 15-person unit charged with making sure the child-refugee homes are always fully staffed.

At his residence, Jamal reports, many of the teenagers he suspects of actually being 30-somethings shave their arms in order to look younger. But, he says, “I tell them, ‘The Migration Agency is smarter than that. They check your teeth.’” If social workers sense a resident in a child-refugee home is much older, they can request that he be removed — a policy also designed to keep younger residents safe. However, according to social authorities, it happens extremely rarely

Previously, unaccompanied minors’ state-appointed guardians could request age-determination tests by means of dental and wrist-bone X-rays if the Migration Agency decided the children were older than they claimed; these could become standard if the Justice Ministry’s proposal goes forward. But Anders Hjern, a professor of pediatrics at the Centre for Health Equity Studies in Stockholm, told Foreign Policy that while the method works well in determining ages between 14 and 17 years, it’s less than accurate in people between 17 and 30 — a tricky problem when so much hinges on the true age of older applicants.

Another driving force behind this spate of unaccompanied minors — real or fake — is that Swedish law allows parents, guardians, and siblings of unaccompanied minors who have been granted asylum as refugees to join them in Sweden. By contrast, adults granted asylum are not automatically permitted to bring their parents. Parents and siblings apply for residence permits at a local consulate, and armed with the acceptance letter they can make their way to Sweden. To send along a minor, or someone who pretends to be one, as an advance party is seen by some as a more cost-effective — or indeed the only possible — way of bringing over a whole family.

Qassim Ali, a 17-year-old from the Syrian city of Daraa, arrived in Malmö last May, having made the journey north from Turkey via Hungary. At first, his family of six had wanted to flee to Sweden together, but with smugglers now charging more than $10,000 a head, his parents concluded that escaping together would be impossible. Instead, Qassim’s father paid a smuggler the requested $15,000 for Qassim, who made his way to Turkey while his parents and three younger siblings traveled to the United Arab Emirates. “We decided that I would go to Sweden first and they’d join me,” Qassim explains.

When he receives asylum and permanent residence, his family will have permission to join him, meaning they will be able to travel by plane — a legal way of traveling to Sweden and one that’s safer and cheaper than journeying through Greece or the Balkans. It’s a tactic smugglers have taken to advertising: “They tell families in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan that it’s easy to get to Sweden by sending an older boy first and then the family can come after,” reported Terje Torvik, the Migration Agency’s point man for unaccompanied minors. “Smugglers make money on these journeys, so it’s in their interest to advertise Sweden as a paradise for unaccompanied minors.” But sending an older teen ahead has its risks too, as the family-unification policy doesn’t apply once an asylum-seeker turns 18.

The government’s plans to increase age tests may be a measure of last resort as Sweden grapples with the youthful-refugee surge. But it’s nonetheless a radical change in Swedish politics. Noted Eberhard: “Just a couple of months ago, you would have been called a racist for suggesting age tests.”

Mosque Destroyed By Fire — Police Investigate Potential Arson

by OLIVER LANE17 Jan 201690
The central mosque of the medieval city of Borås, Sweden, has cancelled all activity until further notice after their building burnt down overnight, despite efforts by the emergency services to save it.

Police were first on the scene with fire extinguishers when the fire was reported at three o’clock this morning, but they were ineffective. Although early reports suggested the fire had been quickly put out, it was still burning hours later — and fire crews even had to demolish one of the mosque walls in order to spray water onto the fire inside.

Police are treating the incident at the converted industrial unit as a potential arson, and are investigating how the fire was started, reports Göteborgs-Posten. An emergency services spokesman said: “We were met by flames. It was a full fire broken out”. A mosque spokesman took to Facebook to inform followers: “The venue can not be used. All daily activities are canceled until further notice”.

The mosque has been fundraising to construct a new, purpose-built mosque in the city centre since 2012.

Today’s mosque fire in Borås, a regional capital in southern Sweden’s rural hinterland follows a spate of similar attacks on mosques and migrant centres across Europe.

There was a spate of deliberately set fires at Swedish mosques in 2014, and Breitbart London has reported at length on the emerging trend for attacking mosques across Europe as tensions stoked by the migration crisis and Islamist terrorist attacks has intensified. Two teenagers were arrested last year after an arson attack on a mosque in south London, described as western Europe’s largest caused extensive damage.

In addition to mosque fires, there have been hundreds of asylum shelter fires set in Europe, with almost 200 recorded in Germany in 2015 alone. While some of the fires have been caused by anti-migration activists and disgruntled locals destroying properties in the process of being converted to migrant accommodation before the inhabitants arrive, a great deal have been caused by migrants themselves.

Today’s fire in Borås is not the only time recently the small city of just 66,000 people has been in the news. Just last week the city made headlines after an apartment block was set alight, but the fire brigade found themselves unable to douse the flames. The weather in Sweden has recently turned so cold the water carried by the fire engine had frozen solid by the time it reached the blaze.

A double shooting in the same neighbourhood last year excited interest on social media because of a rumoured link to the town’s growing immigrant community. Two men were discovered injured by officers after residents heard gunfire and witnessed another two men escaping on a moped, reported Aftonbladet. Attempts by Breitbart London to ascertain the details of the case went unanswered by Swedish police.

Norway Security Agency To Liberal Sweden: Muslim Influx Will Bring Problems

by LIAM DEACON13 Jan 2016168
The head of the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) has traveled to Sweden and warned counterparts in the largely liberal, pro mass migration nation that Muslim immigrants are resistant to integration and can cause “problems” for the host nation.

“A strong increase in immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, can cause other long-term challenges. When a large number of asylum seekers come to a local community, it can have unfortunate consequences,” PST head Marie Benedicte Bjørnland, said at a security conference in the Swedish ski resort town of Sälen on Monday.

“One cannot take for granted that new population groups will automatically adapt the norms and rules of the Norwegian society,” she said.

In an interview with broadcaster TV2, Ms. Bjørnland added that large numbers of foreigners can lead to violent clashes and the growth of far-right extremist groups.

“If in the long term, you see a growth of parallel societies, radicalisation and extremist environments, then we will have challenges as a security agency,” the PST head said.

Tensions between Norway and Sweden have been high of late; the former being determined not to absorb any immigrants attracted by the latter’s open door policy, and the statement’s from on Monday will be interpreted as one of the clearest statements yet of Norway’s distain for it’s neighbour’s policies.

Norway has taken a comparatively hard stance on migration since the beginning of the European migration crisis this summer.

In December, they introduced 40 changes to the law designed to reduce the number of migrants entering Norway, including tightening the rules on family reunification and implementing a minimum period of five years before permanent residence is granted.

Sweden, meanwhile, adopted an open door policy, where by it has absorbed more migrants this year per capita than any other European nation.

The country has been completely overwhelmed and has been forced to house migrant in tents. In November, Sweden suspended the Schengen zone closed off it’s boarders in a dramatic change of direction.

In December, Denmark’s rail operator warned that new border checks on train passengers aimed at curbing the number of asylum seekers entering Sweden from Denmark will cost nearly 1 million Danish crowns (£99,370 pounds) a day.

15 Year Old Boy Was Stabbed To Death By Arab Migrant Because He Was Protecting Young Girl From Sex Assault

by OLIVER LANE15 Jan 20165,847
The parents of 15 year old Lithuanian boy Arminas Pileckas have blasted Sweden and the Swedish media for cowardice in the face of the migrant threat, and for covering up the murder of their son.

Arminas Pileckas, a native of northern European state Lithuania was living in Sweden with his parents when he was brutally murdered on Monday by an “Arab” — reportedly Syrian — migrant classmate.

It is reported that Arminas intervened to protect a female school-mate from being sexually assaulted in December, only to have the Syrian he defended her from stab him in the back and through the heart on the first day of the next term.

While the killing of a European on his first day back at school by a migrant pupil has received minimal press coverage in Sweden, it has been practically ignored across the rest of Europe, a state of affairs his father has called a ‘cover-up’.

In an angry interview with his native Lithuanian press, Arminas’ father said he hadn’t even been approached for interviews by the Swedish press after the death of his son, while the same Swedish media rushed to interview the father of the killer. He said in Lithuania the migrant problem was frankly and openly discussed, while in Sweden “everything is being kept hidden”.

This week the mainstream left-wing paper Aftonbladet published a sympathetic interview with the father of the 14 year old migrant killer who accused the dead boy of not defending the teenage girl, but instead beign guilty of bullying his migrant classmate. In a remarkable admission of the alien culture the accused came from, the father of the “Arab student” told the paper the school had done nothing in the wake of the altercation in December:

“The school did nothing to help him and establish his honour. Instead, my son had to meet this 15 year old every day. It made him very upset”.

Aftonbladet did not question whether hurt honour was a sufficient reason for killing a classmate, nor did it report on the teenage girl Arminas is said to have lost his life over or the Syrian origin of the suspected killer.

Arminas’ father has said the reports in the Swedish press about his son being a bully are bare-faced lies. He told the Lyrtas: “He was hard-working, cheerful and had a lot of Swedish friends. All loved him… The Swedish press writes that Arminas assaulted the student, but that is not the case…. our son saw that boy take the girl. He stopped him and they got into a fight”.

Mr. Pileckas said the young boy swore to get his revenge on Arminas for keeping him away from his female class mates, that the school knew about it,and that it was not an isolated incident in Broby, Skåne where they lived. He said of the ‘refugees’ living in the town: “A Lithuanian girl was attacked a few months ago. They tried to rape her. The police did nothing then… last year the refugees attacked another Lithuanian, who was taking her puppy for a walk”.

Rejecting any notion of his son being a bully, he said the school would certainly have told him were taht the case: “the school never hides anything. If he was just late to class, we parents would instantly receive messages”.

The father’s depiction of his son as a good student was confirmed by a 15 year old classmate. Her remarks were reported by FriaTider: “He really spread joy to those around him. Very nice and kind. He was an important presence in the classroom. If the whole class was feeling down, he was a person who could always get the class to laugh”.

A police spokesman said they were presently trying to piece together exactly what had happened at the school.

Court Rules Migrants Can Drive Without Licence If They ‘Lost Documents’ En Route


Sweden JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
by OLIVER LANE22 Jan 20161,650
Newly arrived migrants in Sweden can now enjoy two and a half years or more driving without any sort of licence, putting themselves and others at risk, thanks to the judgement of a Swedish court.

The case revolves around the arrest of a 22 year old Bosnian man in September last year, who was caught driving to the pub without a licence by officers. When the man claimed he had lost his licence nine months earlier as he migrated to Sweden but was unable to prove he’d ever had one at all, the case went to court, reports Sweden Radio.

The prosecution called for the man to produce evidence from Bosnia he had ever passed a driving test, but he claimed he is a refugee with “problems” back in his homeland and didn’t want to alert the Bosnian government to where he had escaped to. Acquitting the man, the court said the impetus was on the prosecution to prove he didn’t have a driving licence, rather than on the suspect to prove he did.

Because of Sweden’s driving laws, any migrant who can claim they have lost their driving licence and can’t write home to get a new one sent will now have 12 months grace and legal driving without a licence. With the ‘refugee’ application process now taking upwards of one and a half years in practice individuals will be free to drive without passing a test for two and a half years.

Committing a similar offence, a native Swede could expect fines of thousands of Kronor, or jail time for repeat offenders.

The safety implications of the ruling are clear to police officers, with traffic cop Stefan Palm making an appeal to newly legal-unlicensed drivers to please “calm down before driving”. He was dissatisfied with the ruling, and said it should be up to migrants to prove they were able to drive.

Already the number of similar cases are building up, with just one criminal investigator reporting to have 30 similar cases awaiting prosecution, but with the legal precedent set they are unlikely to be successful for the Swedish police.

This is not the only case in which native Swedes are reduced to the status of second class citizens, paying with their tax money for benefits they have no hope to enjoy. Breitbart reported last year on the decision of Sweden’s nationalised rail network to no longer require migrants to purchase and present train tickets. The policy proved so popular with Sweden’s new population the rail company was even obliged to put on extra trains to cope with demand.

Grupa odraslih muslimana zaustavili curu u pol bijela dana i htjeli je na silu ljubiti, pa je izgurati na stranu da je siluju. Kad se branila udarali je i gurnuli pa se ozlijedila. Uspjela im je pobjeći. To čime se ti muslimanski majmuni bave je jednostavno neopisivo. Osim džihad, sveti rat.

I tako širom države, primjera bezbroj.

Swedes Fail to Mix Invaders with Old People

JANUARY 15, 2016 BY TNO STAFF— IN EUROPE

In yet another astounding display of Swedish liberal madness, the mayor of the town of Vimmerby has been forced to announce that his policy of placing “unaccompanied minor” refugee-invaders in spare rooms in already occupied old-age homes is to be reversed after “serious incidents” which threatened the elderly people.

The announcement, made on January 12, 2016 by Mayor Tomas Peterson, reverses his grand announcement made on October 22, 2015, in which the town council said that it was opening up the spare places in the Vimarhaga and Borg Haga old-age homes to the flood of so-called “minor refugee children.”

The October 2015 announcement, which can still be seen on the Vimmerby council website, said that there were three occupied old-age homes in the town—but as they were building a fourth, they considered it their duty to help accommodate “minors under 18” in the spare rooms one of the homes.

The expectation was, the Vimmerby council said, that once the fourth home had been built, then the “children” would move to this new home.

However, two months later, Mayor Peterson seems to have discovered the error of his ways.

According to the Vimmerbytidning newspaper, the Vimarhaga and Borg Haga nursing homes “will soon be emptied of unaccompanied refugee children.”

In an understatement of the goings-on, Mayor Peterson said there “have been a lot of incidents recently,” and so they “now want to empty these places as soon as possible.”

Their first problem was that they discovered that the “unaccompanied minors” were not “children” at all, but “men in their late teens,” he said.

In other words, the nonwhites lied about their ages because they know that “minors” get preferential accommodation treatment from the deluded liberals—who are so enamored with the invaders that they refuse to question their self-provided ages even when their real age is obvious, all for fear of being called “racist.”

Mayor Peterson and his townsfolk seemed to actually be expecting a bunch of children to arrive in the town—when in fact they got a mob of invaders in their late teens/early twenties.

“It has been generally messy, and there have been a lot of incidents,” Mayor Peterson continued.

Pressed as to what these “incidents” were, he admitted that “among other things,” they included “equipment being thrown out of the windows” and “various forms of abuse” to the elderly people.

The Vimmerbytidning added that “older people spoken to by our newspaper feel that the unaccompanied refugee children are generally disruptive and have no respect for the elderly. There is talk of sleepless nights, loud music played late into the evenings, and a general feeling of insecurity in the accommodation.”

Mayor Peterson admitted that the “children” have not “successfully mixed with old people” and that the “unaccompanied refugees” will be moved elsewhere “while we wait for them to get a permanent position elsewhere in Sweden.”