generalspeaking

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Refugee Life in Sweden

"These immigrants don't speak the same language. 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."
"Either it's higher taxes, or you have to cut something."
"People don't want to pay taxes to support people you don't work."
"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."
Urban Pettersson, local council member, Filipstad, Sweden

A church in Filipstad, Sweden, where roughly one-fifth of the nearly 11,000 inhabitants are now foreign-born. CreditNora Lorek for The New York Times

In Filipstad, Sweden there was a downturn in industry. Not enough workers. Its iron ore mines were shut, a factory producing machinery for the logging industry as well. The town's population was half its original size. And then, in 2015 a solution appeared. Refugees from Syria, Somalia and Iraq arrived and they were viewed as potential workers who could occupy vacant homes, learn to speak Swedish adapt Swedish values, take jobs in home care for older Swedes and of course pay taxes to help finance the social welfare programs that would benefit them.

Those same social welfare programs that made Sweden famous for its humanitarian care of all its population as a social welfare state. Four years have passed and with it the aspirations of a solution that failed to materialize. Swedes now view those refugees as contributing nothing to the social weal, much less the economy, much less in support of the social programs that have buoyed them as refugees. They have become a public finance drain, resulting in public antipathy to their presence that has failed to benefit Sweden, much less the refugees.

The kinder gentler nation that has long been Sweden is nowhere to be seen at this juncture. Protecting their population from economic dysfunction faced by so many other countries so vital to the Swedish outlook for equality of opportunity and outcome has come to a selective, screeching halt. The influx of immigrants into Sweden representing the largest per capita of any European nation where at the peak in 2015, 160,000 refugees found asylum in a country of ten million people has encountered a bump in public opinion.

The reality that many of those refugees will continue to rely on welfare for years has some Swedes balking at the toll it will take on their own economic well-being. "People are quite open to showing solidarity for people who are like themselves. They don't show solidarity for people who are different", observed Carll Mellin, policy director at Futurion, a Stockholm research institution.

Local officials in Filipstad received assurances from the central government when it brought refugees into the city in 2012; they would be receiving financial assistance from the national government anxious to place refugees in small towns other than hosting them in cities like Stockholm with its scarce and expensive housing. National authorities would cover rent, food, clothing and medical care for the first two years. And after that? well of course the refugees would be working, paying taxes, becoming citizens.

Only this is not quite what has occurred. Municipalities inherited responsibility for the social upkeep of the refugees; figured initially to be not much at all. One-fifth of Filipstad's 11,000 inhabitants are foreign-born now. Among them there are 750 people of working age, 500 of whom have less than a high school education, and two hundred are entirely illiterate. "The state keeps saying we need to prepare people to get jobs fast. That's impossible. You have to educate them", pointed out Hannes Fellsman, manager of work and education programs of the local government.

The cost of social programs for refugees runs about one percent of Sweden's annual national economic output. According to economists, the Nordic model is a proven one fully justifying taxpayer investments in settling refugees whose children will grow up speaking Swedish and will graduate from Swedish schools into jobs. But for the present, people must wait weeks to see dentists, local housing complexes are full of foreigners, preschools have been "inundated" with refugee children and the local government's welfare payments soared over the past decade.

"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. We are now beginning to see the emergence of some serious cracks", observed Marten Blix, a Stockholm-based economist. "Before, we got something back. Now, we're not getting back what we paid for", said bus driver Johnny Grahn in Filipstad.