Sweden breaks with its liberal past on migration

Welcome back. This month, Sweden’s justice ministry released a fascinating statement that attracted almost no attention beyond the country’s borders. For the first time in more than 50 years, more people are emigrating from Sweden than arriving there as migrants, the ministry said.

What accounts for this change? What does it tell us about the wider European approach to legal and illegal migration, asylum-seekers, labour market shortages, demographic pressures and national identities? I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Sweden’s paradigm shift

The times have gone when Sweden had a worldwide reputation for its benevolent embrace of migrants and asylum-seekers. During the cold war, and for roughly 30 years after the end of eastern European communism in 1989, Sweden took in numerous people fleeing political persecution or wars everywhere from the Balkans to the Middle East.

By 2022, about 20 per cent of Sweden’s 10.6mn inhabitants were foreign-born, more than double the figure for 2000, according to the Liechtenstein-based Geopolitical Intelligence Services, an independent network of experts.

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

The government puts it this way:

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

Labour immigration fraud and abuses must be stopped and the ‘shadow society’ combated. Sweden will continue to have dignified reception standards, and those who have no grounds for protection or other legal right to stay in Sweden must be expelled.

(The term “shadow society” refers to foreigners who live in Sweden without a residence permit and work in the informal labour market.)

‘Hired Swedish child soldiers’

Part of the explanation for the nation’s tougher policies lies in the rise of gang violence in Swedish cities, a phenomenon on which the FT’s Richard Milne wrote a fine report in November.

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

Once one of Europe’s safest places to live (and, despite everything, still safe in general), Sweden now has one of the continent’s highest gun death rates per head, as the chart below shows.

The violence affects Sweden’s relations with its neighbours. This month, Denmark’s government announced it would strengthen border controls with Sweden in response to what it called the arrival of “hired Swedish child soldiers” intent on committing crimes in Copenhagen.

According to the government in Stockholm, the tougher line on unwanted migrants means that Sweden will this year have its lowest number of asylum-seekers since 1997.

As for the reversal of net migration, Swedish statistics indicate the main reason 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 discussion of “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 “let go” of customs and cultural practices from one’s native country in favour of adopting the ideals and values of the host country …

While some European countries such as France opted for more assimilatory practices, several European countries including the UK, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden pushed for a multicultural model to integration.

Regarding assimilation, no European policymakers have gone quite so far as the US industrialist Henry Ford in the first half of the 20th century. He set up an English School not only to teach the language to his immigrant workers, but to mould them into American citizens.

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

The “graduates” arrived in national costumes and sang songs from their homelands as they climbed a ladder into a giant paper-mâché ‘melting pot’.

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

Denmark’s fearsome citizenship test

Should immigrants to European countries wish to acquire citizenship, they often have to pass tests of their knowledge of the history and culture of the state where they hope to settle for good. In some cases, the knowledge required is so formidable that even some native residents — if they had to do the tests — would find themselves stumped.

A case in point is Denmark, where the test in 2016 included this question:

“What do the rune stones report that Harald Bluetooth did while he was travelling to Jelling in 965?”

(See the link above for the answer!)

Migrants fill labour market shortages

The picture is mixed across Europe.

In some western European countries, the paradox is that formal barriers to immigration — let alone the acquisition of citizenship — are rising at precisely the moment when the need to replenish declining labour forces has rarely been stronger.

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 require unprecedented levels of immigration, while a new global competition for talent, especially in sectors like healthcare and information technology, has made recruitment harder.

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

Birth rates, migrants and population decline

Another excellent study appeared in June, written by Maryna Tverdostup for the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. She says:

After decades of an upward population trend, the EU is now facing grim demographic prospects. With stagnating fertility rates and a rising ratio of older to younger residents, positive net migration has been the major driver of population growth over the last 30 years and will gain importance in the decades to come.

Over the past three decades, most immigrants to Europe have come from the Middle East and Africa, she writes.

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

As regards central and eastern European countries, most of that increase is related to the arrival of Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion of February 2022. (Ukraine didn’t become a candidate for EU membership until June 2022.)

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

Irregular border entries fall

At both EU and national level, the need to offset demographic pressures by opening doors to immigration is understood, though not always presented by governments to their electorates as a benefit to society.

The idea is to combine orderly legal immigration with a clampdown on illegal entries — and the latest data suggest that EU policies are having some effect.

A report issued this week by Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, estimated that irregular frontier crossings into the EU in the first seven months of this year fell by 36 per cent to 113,400 people compared with the same period of 2023.

The drop is especially noticeable in the central Mediterranean, indicating that the EU’s policy of offering financial inducements to north African countries in return for cracking down on illegal migration may be reaping rewards.

On the other hand, irregular crossings increased on the western African route into the EU, and exits across the Channel into the UK also increased (by 22 per cent to 33,183 people, according to Frontex).

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

More on this topic

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

Tony’s picks of the week

• Up to half of all UK jobseekers are using artificial intelligence tools to search and apply for positions, but recruiters say the quality of AI-powered applications is often lower than the quantity, the FT’s Cristina Criddle and Delphine Strauss report

• Russia’s emerging influence in Africa’s Sahel region is likely to fade over time, and the US fixation on Moscow’s activities there is a distraction, Dan Whitman writes for the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute