Is a large flow of migrants a good or a bad thing ?/ A new wave of foreign arrivals in Sweden began 15 years ago...

Publié le 31 mars 2006 par From The Economist print edition

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Jun 12th 2003
From The Economist print edition

Is a large flow of migrants a good or a bad thing?

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ROSENGARD is a suburb of Malmo in Sweden, lined with carefully maintained high-rise buildings. Built to house working-class families a generation ago, it now contains the highest-density population of immigrants anywhere in the Nordic region. For every white face, you are likely to see at least nine brown ones peering down from windows and balconies. Many flats have sprouted satellite dishes so that the newly arrived can watch TV programmes from back home.

According to Mona Sahlin, the minister of integration, “Rosengard is the hardest, most segregated part of the country. In some parts 95% of people don't have a job.” Lars Birve of MKB, a company that manages most of the housing in the area, explains that “in Rosengard you can have a class of 30 children where none speaks Swedish.” Even in Malmo as a whole, over one-third of all residents were born outside Sweden.

A new wave of foreign arrivals in Sweden began 15 years ago. Experts prefer not to call it immigration because most come as asylum-seekers or as part of family reunions, unlike the many job-seeking Finns and others who appeared in the 1960s. But whatever the label, roughly 1m of Sweden's 9m people were born outside the country; and if you add in those with at least one parent born abroad, nearly a quarter of the population are outsiders.

Mrs Sahlin draws a parallel with the number of foreigners, including many Swedes, who washed up on America's shores early in the 20th century: “In 1910 20% of the Swedish population lived in the United States. Now more than 20% of the Swedish population come from another part of the world.” She points out that Sweden's current influx nearly matches the peak of migration to America in 1913, when about 14% of the population there were foreign-born, compared with about 12% in Sweden today. That proportion is higher than in America now, as well as in any other European country.

Why is Sweden attracting so many more foreigners than the other Nordic countries? It is the biggest, most urban and most cosmopolitan of the five, plays an active role on the international stage and has a policy, broadly speaking, of welcoming refugees. In recent years its liberal rules on family reunion have further increased the number of foreign arrivals.

The other Nordic countries have been less hospitable. In Norway the foreign-born proportion of the population is about 7% and in Denmark 6%. Iceland has very few foreigners, other than 2,000-3,000 Poles who regularly work in its fishing industry. And in Finland migration is almost unknown, unless you count an old Swedish minority.

Goodbye to meatballs

But in the three Scandinavian countries, the arrival of large numbers of outsiders with a different culture, religion, history and skin-colour has brought about conspicuous changes. In 1951, that British report on “The Scandinavian States and Finland: a Political and Economic Survey” was still able to state: “There are almost no traces of alien stock in Scandinavia...this racial homogeneity...is reflected in similarities of political outlook and institutions, and of language.” Today Sweden's cities, especially Stockholm and Malmo, bustle with different cultures. In one small square in downtown Malmo your correspondent, sitting in the China Garden restaurant, had a view of the Tehran Supermarket, a shop called Asian Trading and four other ethnic restaurants, the India Tandoori, the Middle East, the Falafel House and the Krua Thai. Not so long ago the hopeful diner would have been lucky to find a pizza house.

There is more change to come. Theodor Paues at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise expects one-third of Swedes to be immigrants within a few years, at least by parentage. More migration is likely from the parts of eastern Europe that are about to join the EU. And in Sweden's parliament all the parties except the Social Democrats want a commission to be set up to attract more skilled labour from outside the EU.

Despite tough anti-immigration rules in Denmark and Norway, many foreigners are likely to enter through family reunion, which is hard to block. Mauricio Rojas, a member of parliament for Sweden's Liberal Party and director of Timbro, a think-tank, says immigration is shaking the identity of the Nordics. The most important task now is to manage the integration of so many outsiders.

Back in Malmo's Rosengard in early April, Bejzat Becirov offers a guided tour of his mosque and Islamic school. Mr Becirov arrived from Macedonia in 1962 and is perhaps a model of a newcomer who has bridged gaps between cultures and religions in his adoptive country. “This was the first mosque to be built in Scandinavia, it was built in 1984,” he explains. He took no foreign money from international Islamic organisations for its construction, but accepted donations from churches and synagogues in southern Sweden as well as from the local Muslim population.

It is a Friday, and as classes finish, dozens of small children pour out into the spring sunshine. A few girls wear headscarves. Now the first of 3,000 adults arrive for prayer sessions. “At this mosque 130 languages are spoken, but I tell everyone they must learn Swedish. We have 55,000 members, and 5% of those are ‘original' Swedes,” says Mr Becirov. In the days after September 11th 2001, Christians, Jews and Muslims held meetings in the classrooms of the Islamic centre.

On April 27th Mr Becirov's mosque and school was largely gutted by fire, with arson suspected. Sweden is not especially prone to violence against immigrants, though neo-Nazi thugs occasionally attack foreigners. But nor is it especially successful at integrating outsiders. The next day someone threw a molotov cocktail at the town's synagogue.

The challenge of integration is threefold: to ease clashes of culture between migrants and the native population; to avert a xenophobic backlash in politics; and, most important, to bring foreigners into the workforce.

The first of these will take time. Many white residents, especially those who live away from the larger towns, are simply unused to seeing brown faces. Opinion polls suggest that hostility towards foreigners declines if the locals actually meet them. Mr Rojas, one of 30,000 Chilean-Swedes who arrived three decades ago, says the public has been reluctant to accept svartskalle (black skulls) people as true Swedes, which they see as an ethnic identity, although most people agree that outsiders can become Swedish citizens, which is more of a political identity.

Hallo to onion bhajis

Breaking down those barriers can take many forms. In Oslo, Shabana Rehman describes her use of stand-up comedy to provoke discussion between cultures. Sitting in her sister's restaurant, which serves Norwegian-Pakistani fusion food (curried reindeer, spiced monkfish), she explains: “I start my act wearing a burqa and dancing an old Norwegian peasant dance; then I challenge the audience to say what it is to be a true Norwegian.” Many politicians, including those from the anti-immigration Progress Party, make a point of attending her shows. She once posed naked for a newspaper, her body painted in the colours of the Norwegian flag, to the horror of some of the Pakistani community.

Ms Rehman is due to tour rural Norway and several other European countries with her comedy act. She also writes a column for a national newspaper and regularly appears on television. Is it helping? “I think things are changing, there is more intermingling, and more debate among the Pakistanis too. Yes, there's change, but it took a naked Muslim girl to get that change.”

More exposure may help ease culture clashes between individuals, but tackling the political backlash against immigrants is harder. Despite its high rates of migration, Sweden has so far avoided the re-emergence of a populist anti-immigrant party at national level (one spluttered into life a decade ago, but quickly expired). Still, many expect that one will emerge soon, or at least that mainstream parties will propose tougher action to keep migrants out. Mrs Sahlin points to a redneck party, the Swedish Democrats, that did well in the south in recent local elections: “We are not immune. We have between 10-15% of voters who are very strongly against immigration; we expect a big fight in 2006 [the date of the next general election].”

In Norway, a populist and anti-migrant party, the Progress Party, is currently enjoying strong support, though perhaps more because of its charismatic leader, Carl Hagen, than because of its policies. In Denmark, the extremist Danish People's Party has redrawn political lines, increasing its number of MPs to 22 in the 2001 election and now propping up the minority government. Its success is also partly due to a populist leader, Pia Kjaersgaard, a sceptic on the EU and on immigration. Mr Fogh Rasmussen and his Liberals need the support of Ms Kjaersgaard's party in parliament, so the government has had to adopt many of her policies on immigration. Danes are less concerned about political correctness and more inclined to speak their minds than their Swedish neighbours. Many of them openly call themselves racist.

Anti-immigrant? Us?

Mr Fogh Rasmussen denies that Denmark has anti-immigration laws, but he concedes that “in principle we have an immigration stop”, because the government believes that the country has reached the limits of its capacity. In fact, because of family reunion, it is impossible to prevent more migrants coming in, but that has recently been made harder with a range of petty and illiberal rules.

Since 2002 Danes under the age of 25 have not been able to get non-EU citizens into the country automatically by marrying them; entry of foreign spouses is conditional on paying a deposit of DKr51,600 ($8,180), to be used against any claims on the welfare state, and on evidence from the couple that they have a monthly income of at least DKr16,000. They must also prove they have a “close attachment” to Denmark, for example by showing they have lots of Danish relatives. Observers say these rules are specially designed to cut the numbers of Turks, Kurds and Somalis, some of whom come to Denmark through arranged marriages.

Bashy Quraishy, author of a recent book called “Danish Identity Seen Through Brown Eyes”, says the new laws mean foreigners will have to wait as long as 11 years to become Danish citizens, take a language test, prove they have committed no crime in another country and even swear an oath that they will learn about Danish culture and norms.

The most effective way to deal with xenophobic responses and cultural clashes is to make sure migrants quickly become part of the working population. Mr Paues from the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise quotes a 2002 poll which suggested that 67% of Swedes were happy for more immigrants to enter the country if they had jobs waiting for them. But getting foreigners into jobs is difficult. A Swedish study last November showed that the country had 100,000 full-time or part-time job vacancies. Unemployment last year was only 4%, but among the non-European foreign-born population as many as 13.2% were without formal work.

Mrs Sahlin points out that this is a great improvement on 1998, when the rate was over 22%, and insists that migrants are moving into jobs ever more quickly. But trade-union rules make it difficult to hire and fire workers, lower-paid jobs for the less skilled are hard to come by, and a combination of high taxes on low incomes and generous welfare payments reduces the incentive to seek work at all.

The minister is adamant that immigrant workers will not be exploited by being forced into low-skilled jobs, but migrants and the people who work with them on the ground have different worries. Mr Birve in Rosengard complains that people eager to work are too often barred from formal jobs, so take up informal ones instead. He points out that when there were not enough jobs to go round for white Swedish building workers, the government offered tax relief on home refurbishment, causing a boom in the industry. Why not introduce similar incentives to get brown Swedes into formal work too?

There are already plenty of incentives to work in the underground economy. Mr Eklund, the bank economist in Stockholm, suggests that untaxed, unregulated work and smuggling now account for 5-10% of the total economy, though these activities involve natives as well as foreigners. He reckons that migrants would be more easily assimilated if more of them could break into the formal labour market.

This is bound to happen sooner or later. As the Nordic countries' population ages, there will be many more openings for foreigners in medicine, the caring professions and other jobs, especially in the public sector. The question is whether in this way migrants will help to preserve the Nordic countries' treasured welfare model, or whether they will change their host societies so fundamentally that the model itself will come under threat.