Immigration Policies
One explanation is that the Swedish government made a mistake in implementing very liberal immigration and asylum laws, because most of the rioters were lowly qualified immigrants and asylum seekers1, who were unemployed and had no future. 15% of the Swedish population is now foreign-born (Pollard and O’Connor 2013). Illustration 1 on the left shows an increase in the absolute number of immigration, which had been continuously rising at least since the 1980s, approaching 100,000 in 2007. The solution offered by this group of nationalists is that Sweden should put in place tougher immigration laws, and only attract the well-educated and well-qualified people, who are in high demand in the labor market (Billström 2012; RT 2013). This had been the traditional approach of countries like Canada and the US, and it supposedly works out better for them.2 Many Swedish people, who are repelled by the high unemployment rate of immigrants and the lack of safety in their neighborhoods, are switching their political allegiance to the nationalist Sweden Democrats, who received nearly 6% of the vote in 2010 (Traynor 2010). According to a recent poll in November 2012, the Sweden Democrats would receive 11.2% of the vote (Local 2012a), indicating their increased popularity. Indeed, immigration has become a heated issue. In 2010, 19.1% of the Swedish population were of foreign descent.3 While labor force migration has played an important role in Sweden’s immigration policy between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, there had been a sharp upturn in family reunification migration and refugees seeking asylum in Sweden. Sweden has a long tradition of granting asylum to people of the troubled parts of the world. Polish Jews fleeing anti-semitism and Greeks fleeing dictatorship poured in during the late-1960s. Pro-Allende Chileans came in the 1970s. Kurdish nationalists entered in the 1980s. Somalis and Bosnians entered during the 1990s (Caldwell 2006). The most recent wave of refugees in the 2000s came from war-torn Iraq, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan (SCB 2013b). Iraqis in Sweden number 125,000 people and are the second largest immigrant community (after the Finnish) (Gysin 2013). Sweden takes on a large proportion of the refugees. Iraqi citizens have claimed asylum in 89 different countries, but half of those claims went to Sweden. The city of Sodertalje alone, numbering 83,000 people, took on more refugees than Canada and the US combined (NBC News 2008).