The path to Swedish asylum: A smuggler speaks

From The Local

Rami Abdelrahman travels to Jordan and tracks down the first link in the chain of an underground operation involved in the smuggling of Iraqi refugees to Sweden.

“Immigration services, immigration services,” Jabber calls to Iraqis walking towards the Swedish Embassy in Amman. His office stationery consists of a deck of cheap yellow business cards with a mobile number printed in black. His “company” is called International Immigration Services, or so says the card.

Jabber has stationed himself on the low wall of The Salahuddin Mosque in front of the embassy. He makes petty cash by selling postage stamps, filling out applications and translating Arabic texts into English.

But occasionally Jabber has some big money rolling in, when he arranges for those who fail to get a Swedish visa to fly to the Scandinavian country through a sophisticated smuggling network.

“Business has been regressing in the last year or so,” he tells The Local during an interview at a café in Jabal Al Weibdeh, one of Amman’s seven main hills and “home” to thousands of Iraqi refugees.

Jordan has more than 400,000 Iraqi refugees, according to the latest official study carried out by the Jordanian government in conjunction with Fafo, a Norwegian agency experienced in the compilation of immigration statistics. According to their report, 40 percent of these refugees would like to move to a third country.

Jabber, a middle-aged Jordanian of Palestinian origin, has been in business since the 1980s. He says the highlight of his career was between 2004 and 2006, when he helped more than 80 Iraqis into Europe, each yielding more than $3,000 in revenue.

“We had more routes open for us then and more people interested in fleeing to Europe. We never worked with arranging fake passports, but helped Iraqi passport holders to get to Greece or Italy with their real identification documents,” says Jabber, his words emerging through cigarette smoke and the scent of Turkish coffee.

Read the rest (link at the top).

If the "refugees" gets their way in to the Schengen area, there is almost no way to stop them. They toss away their passports, and by doing that (if they're not so stupid to actually admit were they come from)- immgration rules says that we can't deport them. Now! I can understand why the Iraquis and the Somalis want to come here in the first place. It's a fairly free society. In fact it's so free that they freely can continue to belive in their totalitarian ideologies- and will do so. Not to mention that they after some years here are free to go back to their countrys of origin (many do), when they have managed to get life- time support from the Swedish state.

How happy I'm to live in a free state! A state so free that 90% of the women now according to polls are afraid that they will be gang- raped. Sigh!