The Death of the Most Generous Nation on Earth (Sweden and migrants)

[Recursion]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/10/the-death-of-the-most-generous-nation-on-earth-sweden-syria-refugee-europe/

When the refugee crisis began last summer, about 1,500 people were coming to Sweden every week seeking asylum. By August, the number had doubled. In September, it doubled again. In October, it hit 10,000 a week, and stayed there even as the weather grew colder. A nation of 9.5 million, Sweden expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or 2 percent of the population — double the per capita figure projected by Germany, which has taken the lead in absorbing the vast tide of people fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere.

...

The Swedish Migration Agency is responsible for deciding who does and does not receive asylum. The agency assumes that anyone fleeing Syria has a well-founded fear of persecution or death, and thus automatically accepts such applications. Large majorities of Iraqis and Afghans are also accepted. Sweden does not take economic migrants; for this reason, authorities deny almost all migrants from Albania or Kosovo. At the same time, Sweden has made only the most modest efforts to ensure that rejected applicants actually leave. Many — no one seems to know how many — remain, living in the shadows. That may now change. In late January, the country’s interior minister instructed the Migration Agency to deport approximately one-half of applicants who are now expected to be turned down. People like Diana Janse believe that Sweden must find the hardness of heart to carry out such orders, if it is to care well for those who remain.

Sweden has traditionally interpreted the standards for asylum far more liberally than most of its neighbors have. Since 2005, Sweden has accepted those fleeing persecution by nonstate actors as well as governments, and has permitted all asylees to bring in a wide range of family members. (This rule, too, has recently been tightened.) The Migration Agency accepts applications from thousands of people from Eritrea, a nation that is autocratic but currently peaceful. When I asked Pierre Karatzian, a spokesman for the Migration Agency, why Eritreans qualified, he said that many Eritreans flee the country rather than face the draft; if Sweden returns them, they will face arrest. This, however, permits the authoritarian Eritrean government to play a cynical game in which they let citizens flee and then demand that they pay a tax on their relatively lavish earnings abroad — a kind of involuntary remittance. (I was told that Eritrean embassies track down citizens abroad and demand payment.) The system guarantees a perpetual flow of Eritreans.

Afghanistan poses a particularly thorny problem. Afghans have lately swelled the great river of refuge-seekers. The country is so profoundly insecure that many of its 32 million citizens might have a colorable claim to asylum. Germany, terrified at the prospect of new millions on the march, has said that it will not grant asylum to those from relatively safe parts of Afghanistan; it now accepts slightly less than half of Afghan applicants. By the end of 2015, far more Afghans than Iraqis were applying for asylum in Sweden; many were unaccompanied minors, placing them in a specially protected category. Sweden has extraordinary laws protecting minors: Refugees who arrive without parents are taken into the country’s social services bureaucracy, operated by each municipality though financed by the federal government.

It goes on to talk about how polling of Swedes is approaching a majority in favor of accepting no more refugees, and the rise of a right-nationalist party, the Swedish Democrats, who now have more supporters than any other single party.

[Downwinder]

1. Intended or unintended result of actions in the Middle East?

[pampango]

2. "And then there is Sweden, a country that prides itself on generosity to strangers. During World War

II, Sweden took in the Jews of Denmark, saving much of the population. In recent years the Swedes have taken in Iranians fleeing from the Shah, Chileans fleeing from Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and Eritreans fleeing forced conscription. Accepting refugees is part of what it means to be Swedish. Yet what Margot Wallstrom meant, and what turned out to be true, was that Germany, Sweden, Austria, and a few others could not absorb the massive flow on their own. The refugee crisis could, with immense effort and courage, have been a collective triumph for Europe. Instead, it has become a collective failure. This is the story of the exorbitant, and ultimately intolerable, cost that Sweden has paid for its unshared idealism.

World War II created 40 million refugees. Many who made the treacherous journeys from the shattered cities and villages of Central and Eastern Europe were treated humanely; others, including many Jews, were sent back to their homelands, often to their death. When Europe reconstituted itself in the aftermath of the war, the obligation to accept refugees was embedded in such core documents as the Convention on Human Rights, the Refugee Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Signatories pledged not to turn back refugees with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted.” Organizations like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees were founded to ensure that states honored those commitments. The right to refuge was understood as a universal principle that all civilized states would honor; Europeans made good on this pledge when they welcomed hundreds of thousands who fled from Communist oppression in Eastern Europe. The United States, for its part, accepted nearly half a million people who fled Vietnam after the South fell in 1975.

The reaction against the refugees has put wind in the sails of the Sweden Democrats, as it has all over Europe. Far-right parties now rank first in polls in France, Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere. A poll last August found that slightly more Swedes identified with the Sweden Democrats than any other. This has terrified both the ruling Social Democrats and the Moderates, who have forged a tight alliance in order to keep the Sweden Democrats from power.

Like other right-wing parties in Europe, the Sweden Democrats have tried in recent years to move away from their thuggish and quasi-fascist origins. Bieler, the daughter of Polish Jews, recoiled when I compared the party to France’s National Front, a party drenched in anti-Semitism. But the Sweden Democrats have taken a hard line on the refugees. ... Paula Bieler of the Sweden Democrats describes herself as a “nationalist” who fears that an increasingly multicultural Sweden is in danger of losing its identity — “the feeling that you live in a society that is also your home.” Bieler objects, not to immigrants themselves, but to the official state ideology of integration, which asks Swedes as well as newcomers to integrate into a world that celebrates diversity, and thus casts Sweden as a gorgeous mosaic."

Great article, Recursion.

Therein lies the problem which political scientists call the "tragedy of the commons." Applied to Europe and refugee policy it means that the best situation for everyone would naturally be for the refugees to be more or less fairly distributed and the strain on each individual country would then be less significant. As long as, however, at least one country accepts limitless numbers of refugees, for the rest it’s rational and very simple at that to either wave them through or turn them away. This is how this fatal dynamic emerged: those who turn away the refugees quickly find themselves in a better situation than those who accept them and find themselves in a worse and worse situation, which in turn vindicates those wanting to close the borders and angers those accepting refugees.

http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2016-02/refugee-policy-angela-merkel-europe-eu