NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE M ost Americans are aware by now that Sweden is struggling with immigration. Among conservative Americans, Sweden — long held up by the Left as a role model — is today frequently used as a cautionary tale of what can happen if borders are left open.

Meanwhile, pundits on the left are scratching their heads wondering how such a tolerant and progressive people could have suddenly turned against helpless refugees, going as far as to elect a right-wing government supported by the national conservative Sweden Democrats party (of which, in full disclosure, I’m a member).

First, it should be noted that Sweden’s crime rate is still far lower than America’s. Even in the capital of Stockholm, the homicide rate is only a quarter of the national average in the U.S. The number of deadly shootings has tripled in just ten years but is still nowhere close to American levels. On the other hand, the number of reported rapes in Sweden is (per capita) higher than in the U.S., and the number has more than tripled over the past 20 years. You are still safer in any Swedish city than you are in Chicago, but the trend line is scary. Violent and organized crime occurs on a near-daily basis in the so-called vulnerable areas, where ethnic Swedes have become a minority. As immigration has increased, both the number and the size of these areas have grown.

While Sweden and the U.S. are different countries in different circumstances, I nonetheless believe that there are lessons that the U.S. can learn from Sweden’s failure as it struggles with its own border crisis. To do so, one must understand Sweden’s mistakes.

Lesson No. 1: If a policy might fundamentally change the makeup of your society, you need to ensure that a significant majority supports it before you implement it.

The popular narrative is that Swedish voters supported immigration until the “far right” Sweden Democrats, who first entered parliament in 2010, used nefarious, xenophobic tactics to convince them to blame foreigners for all the country’s problems.

This is giving the Sweden Democrats far too much credit. Polls show that, since the early 1990s, a plurality of Swedish voters have agreed that refugee-admission levels are too high. Yet despite the lack of popular support, the asylum-seeking population kept increasing. Sweden, unlike the U.S., has never had an annual cap on the number of people who can be granted asylum, though the government elected last year intends to introduce one. Meanwhile, in elections during that decade, the Sweden Democrats consistently received less than half a percent of the vote.

Even as the situation deteriorated, and despite the fact that a plurality of Swedes were skeptical of the country’s asylum policy, none of the seven parties then represented in the Swedish parliament dared to discuss restricting immigration even slightly. The topic became a third rail in Swedish politics.

As the saying goes, what cannot keep going eventually stops. After decades during which no party budged on its support for virtually open borders, a new one — the much vilified Sweden Democrats — entered the stage and filled the gap.

Things might not have ended quite as badly as they did had the political establishment done more to ensure popular buy-in for their vision of a multicultural Sweden. Unfortunately, instead of engaging in an open and honest national conversation, policy-makers from all parties chose to ram the idea down the voters’ throats and accused anyone who expressed skepticism of racism.

By not engaging with those worried about the influx of foreign cultures and values, politicians ensured that their fears would not be calmed. Many of these people, unable to voice their concerns without fearing repercussions and, for the longest time, lacking any party that represented their views, chose to vote with their feet, leaving areas where large numbers of refugees moved in. This Swedish version of “white flight” contributed to the creation of high-crime enclaves (those “vulnerable areas”) where hardly any Swedish people live anymore.

Lesson No. 2: Volume matters.

It is sometimes lost on Americans exactly how many asylum-seekers Sweden has welcomed in recent years. In 2002, the country’s population was 8.9 million. Since then, 757,000 people have applied for asylum in Sweden. Imagine if the U.S. over the past 20 years had opened its arms to 24.2 million asylum-seekers. Adjusted for population size, that’s what Sweden did. The U.S. granted asylum to “only” 1,024,322 refugees during that same time period.

Of course, not all asylum applications in Sweden were approved. The approval rate for this period was just shy of 55 percent, which translates to 414,000 successful applicants. (Adjusted for population, this would be analogous to the U.S. having welcomed 13.2 million asylum seekers in the past 20 years.)

However, it is unfortunately not possible to say how many of those 45 percent whose applications were rejected have actually left, as Sweden keeps no record of deportations. It is widely accepted that many rejected claimants have remained in the country as undocumented migrants. As of 2018, one in ten Swedish municipalities — including Stockholm and Malmö — has allowed undocumented migrants to collect welfare, making it easier for them to stick around.

Also, it should be noted that the 757,000 asylum claims do not include family-reunification migration, i.e., migration of the spouses, children, and parents of individuals who had previously been granted asylum in Sweden (often known as chain migration). During the same 20-year period, another 166,000 people gained entry into Sweden through that route. Until recently, Sweden did not even require that refugees be able to provide for any family members who joined them.

Lesson No. 3: The incentives for government workers and migrants matter.

Perverse incentives, meanwhile, have encouraged Swedish Migration Agency caseworkers to approve asylum applications at a higher rate than they otherwise might have. While approving an application could (at least until recently) be done in a matter of minutes, each rejection took hours or days to process, as the burden of proof was on the caseworker to explain why the application should be rejected. As more and more people applied each year, caseworkers had less and less time to spend on each case, making them less likely to take the time to reject an application.

With migration numbers as high as Sweden’s, assimilation was always going to prove difficult. While most who immigrate to the U.S. have at least a basic understanding of English and have had some exposure to American culture (not least through movies and TV), the same cannot be said for those who come to Sweden. Having a good understanding of the Swedish language is necessary for just about every job. Every worker, regardless of sector, needs to be able to understand his co-workers and supervisors. Education in the Swedish language is offered for free, but acquiring even basic, conversational-level knowledge of Swedish requires on average two years of classes, whereas professional fluency can take between five and seven years. The older and less educated a migrant is, the longer it takes. Crucially, however, attending classes in Swedish is not required to collect government welfare. In fact, proficiency in Swedish is not even required for citizenship.

Unemployed refugees are entitled to the same benefits as any other unemployed Swede. This includes a free apartment, electricity, heating, renters’ insurance, and a tax-free allowance to cover other expenses such as food and clothing. The size of the allowance depends on the size of the family. For a household of two adults and two teenagers, it equals an astonishing $1,600 per month. These benefits can be collected indefinitely. In addition, refugees are also given access to Sweden’s taxpayer-funded health care and other universal benefits.

Given so many benefits and so few incentives to learn Swedish, many migrants simply choose not to learn the language, seeing no point in ever getting a job. Others do learn the language but then realize that many of the jobs they are likely to get pay little more after taxes than what they already receive in benefits. They may also realize that, even after they have become fluent in Swedish, they lack the skills necessary to enter the Swedish labor force at all — which brings us to the next lesson.

Lesson No. 4: As the number of unskilled jobs in an economy decreases, so must the number of unskilled migrants.

Sweden is an extremely high-tech economy. High minimum wages ensure that most manual jobs that immigrants in other countries, such as in the U.S., start out with simply do not exist here: We have no greeters, no baggers, no nannies or babysitters, hardly any gardeners, and our agricultural sector employs only 2 percent of the workforce. (Agriculture in the U.S. employs more than 10 percent of the American workforce.) Most of those granted asylum have no Western education, and even an advanced college degree from many of the poorer parts of the world might not be valued highly by a Swedish employer. A refugee may spend the first several years of his time in Sweden just learning the language and then several more years in education or training. Depending on the age of the migrant at the time of arrival, by the time he’s finally skilled enough to get a job and start paying into the system, many employers might consider him too old for entry-level positions.

Lesson No. 5: Assimilation requires that migrants be broadly geographically distributed in their host country.

Vulnerable areas were the result not only of white flight but also government policy. Back in the 1960s, Sweden was suffering from an extreme housing shortage stemming from nationwide rent-control policies that are still in place. Rather than free-market reforms, the government opted to launch the Million Programme, which would see 1 million housing units built over the course of ten years. Instead of only expanding existing urban and suburban areas, the program also created entirely new districts, mostly within major municipalities such as Stockholm, Gothenburg, and, most famously, Malmö.

Sadly, in order to make this new housing affordable, the Million Programme had to cut some corners: Many of the new districts were made up almost solely of concrete high-rise apartment buildings. In addition to the fact that these looked like something out of East Germany, the districts usually lacked proper recreational areas. Understandably enough, these districts soon developed a bad reputation. With few people willingly moving there, a high proportion of the districts’ populations consisted of those with few other options and those on welfare.

Over the 1970s and ’80s, as the number of people granted asylum began to climb, Swedish municipalities increasingly began to assign newly arrived migrants to accommodation in these areas. On paper, this did make some sense: Rent was lower in these areas, and most of the older areas where the Million Programme wasn’t implemented had very few available apartments anyway. Given this high level of geographic concentration, newly arrived migrants who were unable to find work and had hardly any Swedish neighbors also lacked interactions with Swedish society more broadly. These migrants by and large defaulted to using only their native languages and keeping their ways of life. Unfortunately, these sometimes included cultural views on women, sexuality, and the ethnic and religious differences that characterize the Middle East.

Sweden’s open-border policy was never going to end well, but by not sufficiently spreading out refugees across the country, and by allowing municipalities to assign refugees to certain enclaves, the outcome became far worse than it had to be. Making matters worse, many migrants who have lived in these vulnerable areas for years or decades have no desire to leave them, preferring to stay where they can be around their relatives and fellow countrymen who speak their language and share their values. In fact, many refugees not assigned to these areas still end up moving there, sharing cramped apartments with friends and relatives from their home country. This would not have happened had refugees not for decades been forcibly assigned to these areas. By the time Swedish policy-makers realized their mistake, it was far too late, and this ethnic and religious segregation was by then a reality.

The crux of the issue is that, with high levels of immigration, assimilation cannot be assumed to happen automatically but instead requires government action designed to facilitate it, including policies that ensure a wide geographic distribution of migrants. While one may object, for example, to Ron DeSantis’s and other governors’ flying asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard, such wealthy neighborhoods must be willing to take their fair share if a liberal immigration policy is to work.

These are but a few of the many lessons the U.S. needs to keep in mind as it deals with its own migration crisis. By learning from others’ mistakes, you can avoid repeating them. As a friend of the U.S., I truly hope you learn from Sweden’s.