Immigration and the Swedish Welfare State

Christopher Caldwell's A Swedish Dilemma:

An entire revisionist history of the past hundred years of Swedish economics and politics is beginning to emerge from the work of Norberg and others. Sweden misjudged its strengths. Chief among these was that, for most of the last century, Sweden was the least protectionist country in the world. Private companies had to fend for themselves, without subsidies or tariffs. The result was an entrepreneurial energy unequalled anywhere...

In the mid-1960s, Sweden declared it was short of houses and announced an ambitious plan to build 1,000,000 units of housing in the following decade. The country succeeded in its so-called "Million Program," but harvested all manner of unintended consequences. For a decade, resources were shifted, through dramatic tax hikes, from private businesses to public-sector engineers and masons and pavers. The Million Program was the Socialists' White Whale, the preoccupation that sucked up all of the country's resources--much as integration of immigrants will be in the coming decades. Architecturally, the Million Program gave a soulless, sterile cast to a socialism that had hitherto been anything but. But the biggest problem with all these high-rises was that Swedes--unlike, say, Parisians, but very much like Americans--prefer not to live in apartments. When, in 1982, Sweden passed a reform very similar to the American mortgage-interest tax deduction, the incentives were in place for a massive flight from the Million Project. A decade later, these half-decent apartments standing empty would exert a mighty pull on immigrants from the world's trouble spots.

...in a country where, as the sociologist Åke Daun puts it, "people like being like each other," there is evidence of profound exhaustion with immigration, whether the reasons for this exhaustion are rationally well-founded or not. In the moral-superpower context, it is the equivalent of "imperial overstretch." Swedes tell pollsters they want no more asylum-seekers. (A common complaint is that prospective arrivals have figured out how to "game" the rules of asylum applications, and that the best way to render one's story unchallengeable under the law is to destroy one's identity papers.) A very low rate of mixed marriage is an indication that Swedes may not have been crazy about this immigration in the first place...

"Sweden is a special country," says Nalin Pekgul, director of the Social Democrats' women's group in Stockholm. "It wasn't a colonial power--it had no experience with immigrants."

So does being an imperial power contribute to a sort of understanding--understanding that you can't stand the people you colonized?