The story is being reported at one of America’s left-leaning news outlets—National Public Radio. In this case, we are told that the “refugees” flooding into Sodertalje are mostly Syrian and Iraqi Christians—very needy ones. The unemployment rate is high for the immigrants who must first learn to speak Swedish and there is a desperate shortage of housing.
Sweden’s migration board projects that 95,000 people, many of them refugees from Syria, are expected to arrive in 2015. That would be a record in this country of 10 million people, which already has taken in more refugees, relative to its population, than any other country in Europe.
But the arrival of so many refugees is testing the country’s famously tolerant identity.
Swedes voted out centrist Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt this September after he gave a speech asking people to “open their hearts” to those fleeing war.
Instead, an anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats, won seats in parliament and helped bring down the center-left government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven earlier this week.
One member of the Sweden Democrats, Linus Byland, told reporters they would fight any government proposal that would increase funding for immigration.
“There was a sense that our government didn’t have a clear plan for how to manage immigration,” says Boel Godner, the mayor of Sodertalje. “And the question that has come up lately, is, can the welfare system bear us all? What’s going to happen to everyone who comes here? No one has given the answer to that yet.”
Sweden’s cradle to grave welfare system can’t possibly bear them all, so I guess we all sit back and learn an important lesson about what happens when a country runs out of other peoples’ money.
See our complete ‘invasion of Europe’ archive by clicking here. And, see all of our posts on Sweden, here.