Henrik Selin, head of the Department for Intercultural Dialogue at the Swedish Institute, told us the surge of asylum seekers in 2015 has created challenges for Sweden, but he said reports from right-leaning media about a surge of immigrant crime have been “highly exaggerated.”

“So many things are being claimed,” Selin said. “If you look at the facts, there is nothing to support the claim that the crime rate took off after the 160,000 came in 2015.”

Crime has generally been trending down for the last decade, but there was a small uptick last year, he said. While it’s true that immigrants have been over-represented among those committing crimes — particularly in some suburban communities heavily populated by immigrants, he said — the issue of crime and immigration is complex. Upon closer examination, Selin said, researchers have found that the crime is more closely associated with factors like joblessness, poverty and exclusion from society. “It is not clear that immigrants are susceptible to committing such crimes,” he said.

Nor is it at all true, Selin said, that there are so-called no-go zones where police are afraid to patrol, or where locals have instituted sharia law, as Horowitz claimed. Selin’s refutation was echoed by Felipe Estrada Dörner, a criminology professor at Stockholm University, interviewed by the Washington Post.

But that is not to say there are not some “challenges in the short term … that we need to deal with,” Selin said.

Jerzy Sarnecki, a criminology professor at Stockholm University, said that claims about surging violence due to immigration are “lies.”

“But really good lies always have a little bit of truth in them,” Sarnecki told us in an email. “So also in this case.”

Sarnecki noted that Sweden has a “very broad legal definition of rape” and that “Swedish women are aware of their rights and have a high propensity to report sexual assaults, and we calculate crimes in a different manner than comparable countries.”