The Problem With Sweden Is Sweden

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

On Aug. 12, 2004, celebratory headlines festooned the pages of Swedish newspapers, hailing a huge milestone: On that day a baby would be born as the nine millionth Swede. After years of fretting over declining birthrates, a modest increase in babies born and, crucially, robust migration had pushed that sprawling but lightly populated nation over a longed-for threshold.

Twenty years later, almost exactly to the day, the Swedish government trumpeted a very different achievement: More people were leaving Sweden than were migrating to it. By the end of the year, a country that had long celebrated its status as a refuge for people fleeing war and repression was touting the fact that fewer people had been granted asylum in Sweden than in any year since comparable records have been kept. To the government, led by the center-right Moderate Party and backed by the hard-line anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, this retrenchment was nothing but a good thing.

The celebration completed a stunning reversal. Sweden was for decades one of the most open and welcoming nations in the world, to the point where its foreign-born population stands at about 20 percent. Now it is among the most restrictive. By hardening asylum requirements and creating an unfriendly atmosphere for new arrivals, it has dramatically stemmed the flow of migrants. Arrivals have fallen year over year. Not satisfied, the government has cooked up new schemes to induce migrants already in the country to leave, offering a $34,000 payment per adult. In much less than a generation, Sweden has gone from safe haven to heavily fortified citadel.

In this, Sweden offers some an example to emulate. As wealthy countries across the globe turn against migration and ascendant right-wing parties push harsh restrictions, Sweden stands out as a country that has gone hard and fast to keep migrants out — first under a center-left government and then a more right-leaning one. It is a case study of backlash, where the fantasy of draconian border restrictions has been enacted. The story, on its face, may seem a simple one: After being overwhelmed by an influx of asylum seekers from Syria and other war-tossed Middle Eastern countries in 2015, the country sought to assert control over its borders and its population.

Yet when I traveled to the country earlier this year, I found something much more complicated. There is certainly antipathy toward migrants: In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.