Did you just call the American poor "some of the poorest people on earth?" Or were you talking about immigrants? One town in Sweden (Södertälje) has received more Iraqi refugees alone than all of the US has, the country that actually started the war. Sweden's immigrants are actually some of the poorest people on earth, mainly refugees of war and people who would be prosecuted/killed if they returned to their home country. Contrast that with the US that receives heaps of well educated people every year. Today, the ratio of foreign born people in Sweden is roughly equal to that of the US, but again, mainly refugees.

I was referring to the large amount of asian, mexican and central american people who live in SF. SF is known as an amnesty city (along with NYC, LA and Chicago).

What is the racial/ethnic diversity of Sweden? Showing stats on high immigration where the top of list is finnland, germany, denmark, etc. It's great sweden takes refugee's, but that is easy if they are a tiny fraction of the population. What percentage of the population is a different race or ethnicity? Here is san fransisco http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

Your categories (being the US census categories) are, of course, US-centric so cannot be directly compared to other countries. That is, in the Swedish context, why should Swedes and Iraqis both be categorized as "white" while Chileans are in their own category of "Hispanic or Latino"?

For some hard numbers, "15% of the [Swedish] population was born abroad, 5% of the population was born in Sweden to two parents born abroad, and another 7% was born in Sweden to one parent born abroad. Resulting in 27% of the Swedish population being of at least partly foreign descent." (Wikipedia for Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_population_of_immigrants_and_their_descendants . That also shows the complete breakdown, with Iraq, Bosnia, former Yugoslavia, and Iran in positions #2-5, after Finland.)

Compare that to the US: "According to the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey, the US immigrant population was 38,517,234, or 12.5 percent of the total US population." (http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=8... )

12.5% for the US is less than 15% for Sweden.

It's hard to compare the Swedish immigration numbers to the ones in the link you gave, which talks about ethnicity in San Francisco, because the Swedish government tracks nationality, not ethnicity.

It's also difficult to compare San Francisco, which has a higher than average diversity in the US, with all of Sweden. For example, in Botkyrka Municipality near Stockholm nearly half the population has at least one parent born in another country, and that rises to 65% in one of its neighborhoods; a neighborhood where 26% of the neighborhood is a foreign national.

By comparison, that number is 30% (instead of 26%) for the SF Bay Area. However, even then it's not a good comparison because I picked a single neighborhood of 82k people in Sweden, against the Bay Area, which has a population of 7.15 million. The entirety of Sweden is only 9.5 million people.

So yes, you can easily say that San Francisco is a very culturally diverse city. No one disagrees with you.

However, purplelobster's point was that Sweden currently, and over the last two decades, takes in a lot of refugees on a per-capita basis, and even more than the US does - a fact which is not in dispute.

This is something people frequently ignore, and point to the areas of the US being culturally diverse as an excuse for poor school results or high crime. This annoys me slightly as it carries an implication that there are some ethnic backgrounds which are inherently bad\stupid\poor\whatever.

My implication is different (altho I agree some people use it as a racist argument). My implication is that social cohesion policies are not easy when you have a ethically diverse population with different cultures and values. It's perfectly natural for people to form into groups and not trust 'others' (which isn't racist). This natural tendency makes it hard for social policies to be successful. When 95% of your population is white, with similar cultural values, its easy to have a policy where you spread the wealth to fellow group members you identify with. It's a lot harder to have policies when your population is split into 3 different camps.

As a EU member Sweden is open to most of our European neighbors... We also take in way more immigrants than most.

"SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth." no more so than the rest of the United States is insofar as immigration goes. I don't believe there are many (any?) people living in SF that qualify as the poorest people on earth though.

SF is an amnesty city, with a lot of immigrants from central america. Many other US cities have an active deportation policy, SF does not. SF does not push out the homeless either.

My point was if Stockholm had the same weather and immigration policies as San Fransisco, it would be facing some of the same challenges with poverty and homelessness.