By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
As if on cue, riots broke out in a heavily immigrant
suburb of Stockholm as soon as the media mocked President Donald Trump for a
vague warning about immigration-related problems in Sweden.
At a campaign rally over the weekend, Trump issued forth
with a mystifyingly ominous statement. “You look,” he declared, “at what’s
happening last night in Sweden.” What?
Had the president invented a nonexistent terror attack? As it turned out,
the reference was to a segment on Sweden he had watched on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight the previous night, rather than to any
specific event in the Nordic country.
The ensuing discussion quickly took on the character of
much of the debate in the early Trump years — a blunderbuss president matched
against a snotty and hyperventilating press, with a legitimate issue lurking
underneath.
By welcoming a historic number of asylum-seekers
proportionate to its population, Sweden has indeed embarked on a vast social
experiment that wasn’t well thought out and isn’t going very well. The unrest
in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby after police made an arrest the other night
underscored the problems inherent in Sweden’s immigration surge.
Sweden’s admirable humanitarianism is outstripping its
capacity to absorb newcomers. Nothing if not an earnest and well-meaning
society, Sweden has always accepted more than its share of refugees.
Immigration was already at elevated levels before the latest influx into Europe
from the Middle East, which prompted Sweden to try to see and raise the
reckless open-borders policy of German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Sweden welcomed more than 160,000 asylum-seekers in 2015,
including nearly 40,000 in October of that year alone. For a country of fewer
than 10 million, this was almost equal to 2 percent of the population — in one
year. The flow doubled the number of asylum-seekers at the height of the Balkans
crisis in 1992.
The foreign-born proportion of the Swedish population was
18 percent in 2016, double that of 1990. As of 2015, the most common county of
origin for the foreign-born was Finland, which makes sense as it is a
neighboring Scandinavian country. Next are Iraq and Syria.
Predictably, it isn’t easy to integrate people who don’t
know the language, aren’t highly skilled, and come from a foreign culture.
Sweden’s economic policies don’t help. As a report of the Migration Policy
Institute put it politely, Sweden is “an interesting case” because “the state
is committed to fostering large-scale immigration despite huge integration
challenges in the labor market.”
There is a stark gap in the labor-force-participation
rate between the native born (82 percent) and the foreign born (57 percent). As
the Migration Policy Institute points out, Sweden is an advanced economy with
relatively few low-skills jobs to begin with. On top of this, high minimum
wages and stringent labor protections make it harder for marginal workers to
find employment, while social assistance discourages the unemployed from
getting work.
None of this is a formula for assimilation or social
tranquility. In a piece for The Spectator,
Swedish journalist Tove Lifvendahl writes, “A parallel society is emerging
where the state’s monopoly on law and order is being challenged.”
And the fiscal cost is high. According to Swedish
economist Tino Sanandaji, the country spends 1.5 percent of its GDP on the
asylum-seekers, more than on its defense budget. Sweden is spending twice the
entire budget of the United Nations High Commissioner responsible for refugees
worldwide. Pressed for housing, Sweden has spent as much on sheltering 3,000
people in tents as it would cost to care for 100,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan.
It is little wonder that Sweden, where so recently it was
forbidden to question the open-handed orthodoxy on immigration, has now clamped
down on its borders. Sweden is a unique case, but clearly one of the lessons of
its recent experience is, Don’t try this at home.
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