Sweden breaks with its liberal past on migration

Welcome back. This month, the Swedish Ministry of Justice published a fascinating statement that has received little attention outside the country’s borders. For the first time in more than 50 years, more people are emigrating from Sweden than are arriving as migrants, the ministry said.

What is driving this change? What does it tell us about Europe’s wider approach to legal and illegal migration, asylum seekers, labour shortages, demographic pressures and national identities? I can be reached at [email protected].

Sweden’s paradigm shift

Gone are the days when Sweden had a global reputation for its benevolent embrace of migrants and asylum seekers. During the Cold War and for about 30 years after the end of Eastern European communism in 1989, Sweden took in countless people fleeing political persecution or wars, from the Balkans to the Middle East.

According to the Geopolitical Intelligence Service in Liechtenstein, an independent network of experts, around 20 percent of Sweden’s 10.6 million people were born abroad in 2022. That’s more than double the number in 2000.

Now a centre-right coalition governs the country with parliamentary support from the far-right Sweden Democrats party. Asylum and immigration policy has changed course accordingly.

The government puts it as follows:

Swedish migration policy is undergoing a paradigm shift. The government is intensifying its efforts to reduce the number of irregular migrants to Sweden, in full compliance with Sweden’s international obligations.

Fraud and abuse in labour migration must be stopped and the ‘shadow society’ must be combated. Sweden will continue to apply dignified reception standards and those who have no grounds for protection or other legal right to remain in Sweden must be deported.

(The term “shadow society” refers to foreigners living in Sweden without a residence permit and working in the informal labor market.)

‘Hired Swedish child soldiers’

Part of the explanation for the country’s tougher policies lies in the rise in gang violence in Swedish cities, a phenomenon that the Financial Times’ Richard Milne wrote a wonderful report about in November.

The criminal gangs involved in Sweden’s urban warfare are largely run by second-generation immigrants, Richard reported. This has often led to anxious debate about the “failed integration,” as Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described it last year, of many newcomers and their families.

Sweden was once one of the safest places to live in Europe (and, despite everything, is still safe overall), but now has one of the highest gun death rates per capita on the continent, as the chart below shows.

The violence has affected Sweden’s relations with its neighbors. This month, the Danish government announced it would tighten border controls with Sweden in response to what it called the arrival of “hired Swedish child soldiers” planning to commit crimes in Copenhagen.

According to the government in Stockholm, Sweden will have its lowest number of asylum seekers since 1997 this year due to a tougher approach to unwanted migrants.

As for the reversal of net migration, Swedish statistics indicate that the main reason for this is that thousands of residents born in countries such as Iraq, Somalia and Syria have decided to leave Sweden.

Henry Ford’s Melting Pot Ceremony

The Swedish debate about “failed integration” has parallels in most Western European countries. Broadly speaking, there are two models of integration in Europe, as Jessica Tollette explained in a 2017 article for the US-based Humanity in Action group.

She defined these as assimilation and multiculturalism:

Assimilation is the process by which immigrants abandon the customs and cultural practices of their native country in favor of adopting the ideals and values ​​of the host country.

While some European countries, such as France, opted for more assimilation practices, several European countries, including the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, pushed for a multicultural model of integration.

In terms of assimilation, no European policymaker has gone as far as the American industrialist Henry Ford in the first half of the 20th century. He founded an English school, not only to teach the language to his immigrant workers, but also to educate them as American citizens.

The workers’ graduation ceremony was a sight to behold, as Tara Zahra, a historian at the University of Chicago, wrote last year in her book Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the Wars:

The ‘graduates’ arrived in national costumes and sang songs from their home countries as they climbed a ladder into a giant papier-mâché ‘melting pot’.

They emerged on the other side as “Americans,” dressed in derby hats and polka-dot ties and singing the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Denmark’s terrifying integration test

When immigrants to European countries wish to obtain citizenship, they are often required to pass tests on their knowledge of the history and culture of the state where they intend to settle permanently. In some cases, the required knowledge is so formidable that even some natives would be baffled if they were required to take the tests.

A good example is Denmark, where the 2016 test included this question:

“What do the rune stones say Harald Bluetooth did when he traveled to Jelling in 965?”

(See the link above for the answer!)

Migrants fill shortages in the labor market

The picture is mixed throughout Europe.

In some Western European countries, the paradox is that formal barriers to immigration – let alone to obtaining citizenship – are increasing at a time when the need to replenish shrinking labor forces has rarely been greater.

In this analysis for the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Jessica Bither and Hannes Einsporn write:

Demographic changes and skills and labour shortages in many OECD countries are requiring unprecedented levels of immigration, while a new global competition for talent, particularly in sectors such as health care and information technology, has made recruitment more difficult.

The authors estimate that Germany needs net immigration of 400,000 people per year to make up for these shortages. In Italy, the working-age population is expected to shrink by about 630,000 over the next three years, they write.

Birth rates, migrants and population decline

In June, another excellent study was published, written by Maryna Tverdostup for the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. She says:

After decades of rising population trends, the EU now faces a bleak demographic outlook. With stagnant fertility rates and a rising ratio of older to younger residents, positive net migration has been the main driver of population growth over the past 30 years and will become increasingly important in the coming decades.

She writes that most immigrants to Europe in the past thirty years came from the Middle East and Africa.

Between 2014 and 2022, the share of ‘third-country nationals’ (defined as people not originating from EU countries, EU candidate countries from 2015 or European Free Trade Association countries) in the total population more than doubled in Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland and Malta, and increased by more than 50 percent in Finland, Germany, Poland and Slovakia.

As for Central and Eastern European countries, most of that increase is related to the arrival of Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion in February 2022. (Ukraine only became a candidate for EU membership in June 2022.)

In other respects, the region is experiencing a sharp population decline. Tverdostup estimates that between 2012 and 2022, the population in Croatia fell by 9.8 percent, in Lithuania by 8.3 percent, in Bulgaria by 6.7 percent, and in Latvia by 6.6 percent.

The number of irregular border crossings is decreasing

At both EU and national level, the need to reduce demographic pressure by enabling immigration is recognised, but governments do not always present this to their voters as a benefit to society.

The idea is to combine orderly legal immigration with a tougher crackdown on illegal arrivals. The latest data suggests that the EU policy is having some effect.

A report published this week by Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, shows that the number of irregular EU border crossings fell by 36 percent to 113,400 people in the first seven months of this year, compared to the same period in 2023.

The decline is particularly noticeable in the Central Mediterranean, indicating that the EU policy of offering financial incentives to North African countries in exchange for tackling irregular migration is paying off.

On the other hand, irregular border crossings on the West African route to the EU increased, and the number of migrants crossing the Channel to the UK also increased (by 22 percent to 33,183 people, according to Frontex).

All in all, the EU and national governments are still struggling to find the right balance in their migration and asylum policies. It is an area that will certainly occupy EU policymakers once the new European Commission takes office later this year.

More on this topic

Irregular migration and the next European Commission – an analysis by Sergio Carrera and Davide Colombi for the Brussels-based think tank Centre for European Policy Studies

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