Swedish Model Is Tested By Influx
FILIPSTAD, Sweden — At first, local leaders were inclined to see the refugees as an opportunity. The iron ore mines had shut down. So had a factory that made machinery for the logging industry. The town had been abandoned, its population cut in half. A shot at replenishment appeared at hand.
It was the summer of 2015, and people were arriving from some of the most troubled places on earth — Syria, Somalia, Iraq. They would fill vacant homes, learn Swedish, and take jobs caring for older Swedes. They would pay taxes, helping finance the extensive social welfare programs that have made Sweden a rarity in the world, a country seemingly at peace in an age of tempestuous global capitalism.
But four years after the influx, growing numbers of native-born Swedes have come to see the refugees as a drain on public finances. Some decry an assault on “Swedish heritage,” or “Swedish culture,” or other words that mean white, Christian and familiar. Antipathy for immigrants now threatens to erode support for Sweden’s social welfare state.
“People don’t want to pay taxes to support people who don’t work,” said Urban Pettersson, 62, a member of the local council here in Filipstad, a town west of Stockholm. “Ninety percent of the refugees don’t contribute to society. These people are going to have a lifelong dependence on social welfare. This is a huge problem.”
In a global economy increasingly besieged by rage over inequality and the pitfalls of capitalism, Sweden has long stood out as a kinder, gentler country, a potential template for other nations eager to avoid destructive populism.
The so-called Nordic model that prevails in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland has been engineered to protect people from the commonplace economic afflictions assailing many developed countries. Under the Nordic model, governments furnish health care, education and pensions to everyone. The state delivers subsidized housing and child care. When people lose jobs, they gain unemployment benefits and access to job training programs.
As world leaders debate how to keep the in
novative forces of capitalism while more equitably spreading the bounty, the Nordic model is often played up as a promising approach.
But the endurance of the Nordic model has long depended on two crucial elements — the public’s willingness to pay some of the highest taxes on earth, and the understanding that everyone is supposed to work.
Sweden’s influx of immigrants — the largest of any European nation — directly tests this proposition. At the peak in 2015, 160,000 refugees sought asylum in Sweden, a country of 10 million people.
Over the last two decades, the share of foreign-born people has risen to 19 percent of the Swedish population from 11 percent. Many of them have little education and do not speak Swedish, making them difficult to employ.
Public opinion surveys show that Swedes remain willing to accept their tax burden. But as citizens absorb the reality that many refugees will rely on welfare for years, some are balking at the cost while demanding limits on government aid for jobless people. “People are quite open to showing solidarity for people who are like themselves,” said Carl Melin, policy director at Futurion, a research institution in Stockholm. “They don’t show solidarity for people who are different.”
The primary vessel of discontent is the Sweden Democrats, a rightwing political party with roots in the neo-Nazi movement. The party has gained force amid anger over an economy that has stagnated in recent years and frustration over cuts to social services that have been unfolding for a quarter-century.
The party has also been propelled by revulsion over multiculturalism in towns like Filipstad, where Muslim women in head scarves now
Christina Anderson contributed reporting. wheel toddlers down sidewalks.
“These immigrants don’t speak the same language,” said Mr. Pettersson, a Sweden Democrat. “They have different religions, different ways of life. If there are too many differences, it’s harder to get along. It’s interesting to meet someone from another country for maybe half an hour, but if you’re going to live together, it’s tough.”
He favors sending refugees back to their home countries through “voluntary repatriation.” “We don’t have infinite resources,” Mr. Pettersson said. “Either it’s higher taxes, or you have to cut something.”
When the national government began bringing refugees to Filipstad in 2012, local officials received assurances they would not be left to fend for themselves.
The state was eager to put refugees in small towns rather than in cities like Stockholm, where housing was scarce and expensive. National authorities agreed to cover rent, food, clothing and specialized medical care for the first two years. After that, municipalities would inherit responsibility, though costs were assumed to be minimal: By then, most refugees would supposedly be able to support themselves.
That was a fantasy, said Hannes Fellsman, who manages work and education programs at a unit the local government set up in 2015 to prepare refugees for careers.
Roughly one-fifth of Filipstad’s nearly 11,000 inhabitants are now foreign-born. Among the 750 working-age people, 500 have received less than a high school education. Two hundred are illiterate.
“The state keeps saying we need to prepare people to get jobs fast,” Mr. Fellsman said. “That’s impossible. You have to educate them.”
Preparing refugees for work in Sweden is difficult because the economy is centered on highly skilled, highly paid pursuits. It has been engineered to minimize low-paying service sector jobs.
The unemployment rate was only 3.8 percent among the Swedish-born populace last year, but 15 percent among foreign-born. Roughly half of all jobless people in Sweden were foreign-born.
Among supporters of the Sweden Democrats, these sorts of numbers are cited as evidence that refugees have flocked here to enjoy lives of state-financed sloth.
Such depictions astonish Babak Jamali. Six years ago, he left his home in Afghanistan, went to the Swedish city of Malmo and applied for asylum. For the last year, he has lived in the fields outside the southern town of Horby in a house heated by a wood stove and lacking plumbing.
Mr. Jamali, 19, cannot work while his asylum case is pending, so he goes into Horby six days a week to study Swedish. Swedes holler at him from passing cars, telling him to go home.
“What home?” he said. “I have no home.”
His first asylum claim was denied. He has filed an appeal. If he loses, he faces deportation, a possibility that frightens him. He is nearly fluent in Swedish and wants to be an electrician. “I want to live the way other people live,” he said.
Economists say the Nordic model is proven, justifying taxpayer investments toward settling refugees. Their children will grow up speaking Swedish. They will graduate from Swedish schools into jobs.
The average refugee in Sweden receives about $7,800 more in government services than they pay into the system, Joakim Ruist, an economist, concluded in a report released last year. Over all, the cost of social programs for refugees runs about 1 percent of Sweden’s annual national economic output. “Sweden can bear this cost,” Mr. Ruist said. “This seemingly unsolvable refugee crisis is fully solvable.”
The job training unit aims to help. Saadia Osman, a mother of three who fled war in Somalia for Sweden six years ago, was in a classroom recently learning Swedish tailored for restaurant kitchens. Her husband landed a job three years ago at a factory, earning about $2,100 a month. They now pay their own rent. “We are all eager to work,” she said. “It’s not good to sit around at home.”
Three years ago, the national government gave Filipstad about $5.8 million to cover the extra costs of supporting refugees. That money runs out this year. Authorities recently approved plans for an additional $34 million in aid for local governments, less than initially proposed.
From where Johnny Grahn sits, Sweden is already helping too much.
A bus driver by profession, Mr. Grahn occupies a seat on the Filipstad government council, representing the Sweden Democrats. As he describes it, refugees have overwhelmed the community.
Local housing complexes are full
URBAN PETTERSSON a member of the local council in Filipstad
A social welfare state that assumes all will contribute to it.
of foreigners, he said, and preschools have been “inundated” with refugee children. People are waiting weeks to see dentists. At the same time, the local government’s welfare payments have soared over the past decade to more than $3 million from about $632,000.
After an economic crisis in the early 1990s, Sweden lowered taxes and reduced spending, trimming unemployment benefits and pensions. Complaints about delays in the health care system have grown.
But in Filipstad, as in other communities, the refugees now take the blame for nearly every social problem. Driving the narrative is an assumption that money spent trying to integrate refugees is money wasted. Beyond Sweden, this sort of thinking tears at the foundations of the Nordic model in an era of mass migration.
“People’s willingness to continue paying the very high taxes needed to finance the social welfare programs is not something that can be taken for granted,” said Marten Blix, an economist in Stockholm. “We are now beginning to see the emergence of some serious cracks.”
To outsiders, the Nordic model may seem governed by benevolence, a desire to ensure that no one goes without fundamental needs like health care and housing. But Sweden’s experience with refugees suggests a more transactional conception of the social welfare state, a sort of membership club in which people pay dues for expected services. If too many people get the benefits for free, faith in the system is imperiled.
“Before, we got something back,” Mr. Grahn said. “Now, we’re not getting back what we paid for.”