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March 28, 2025,

On Aug. 12, 2004, celebratory headlines festooned the pages of Swedish newspapers, hailing a huge milestone: On that day a baby would be born as the nine millionth Swede. After years of fretting over declining birthrates, a modest increase in babies born and, crucially, robust migration had pushed that sprawling but lightly populated nation over a longed-for threshold.

Twenty years later, almost exactly to the day, the Swedish government trumpeted a very different achievement: More people were leaving Sweden than were migrating to it. By the end of the year, a country that had long celebrated its status as a refuge for people fleeing war and repression was touting the fact that fewer people had been granted asylum in Sweden than in any year since comparable records have been kept. To the government, led by the center-right Moderate Party and backed by the hard-line anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, this retrenchment was nothing but a good thing.

The celebration completed a stunning reversal. Sweden was for decades one of the most open and welcoming nations in the world, to the point where its foreign-born population stands at about 20 percent. Now it is among the most restrictive. By hardening asylum requirements and creating an unfriendly atmosphere for new arrivals, it has dramatically stemmed the flow of migrants. Arrivals have fallen year over year. Not satisfied, the government has cooked up new schemes to induce migrants already in the country to leave, offering a $34,000 payment per adult. In much less than a generation, Sweden has gone from safe haven to heavily fortified citadel.

In this, Sweden offers some an example to emulate. As wealthy countries across the globe turn against migration and ascendant right-wing parties push harsh restrictions, Sweden stands out as a country that has gone hard and fast to keep migrants out — first under a center-left government and then a more right-leaning one. It is a case study of backlash, where the fantasy of draconian border restrictions has been enacted. The story, on its face, may seem a simple one: After being overwhelmed by an influx of asylum seekers from Syria and other war-tossed Middle Eastern countries in 2015, the country sought to assert control over its borders and its population.

Yet when I traveled to the country earlier this year, I found something much more complicated. There is certainly antipathy toward migrants: In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.

In the global imagination, Sweden is a social-democratic paradise, a cradle-to-grave welfare state that cossets its residents with free, high-quality schooling and health care, along with affordable housing and a guarantee of a comfortable retirement through government-backed pensions.

At one point, this was a fairly accurate account of Swedish life. As the Swedish sociologist Goran Therborn has written, in the postwar period Sweden’s Social Democrats built an exemplary nation, characterized by “full employment, a prosperous open economy that was competitive on world markets, a generous welfare state and an egalitarian society which, by 1980, had the lowest rates of income and gender inequality in the world.”

The reality of the past few decades has been markedly different. A series of reforms, beginning during an economic crisis in the 1990s, have slowly frayed the social safety net. A country that had once presided over the construction of a million new housing units now builds few affordable homes. Housing costs have soared. Its schools are still free to attend but a wave of privatization, coupled with the increasing geographic concentration of poverty, has meant that the savviest and usually wealthiest families get their children into the best schools, while poorer children crowd into less rigorous ones.

Medical care is free, but patients complain that the system is strained by long waits and overcrowding. The country’s economy has thrived in some ways, though at a cost. Sweden has a bumper crop of billionaires, three times as many per capita as the United States, and inequality has grown fast. Pensions have been squeezed.

So it is perhaps not surprising that when more than 160,000 asylum seekers arrived in 2015, a tattered Swedish state struggled to match its welcoming message with material support. And given how many Swedes had seen what they saw as their birthright — a promise that the government would care for them from birth to death — it is equally unsurprising that many of them balked. But I wondered whether that response was not merely to migrants but also expressive of a deeper frustration with other ways Sweden had changed.

This slower, less remarked-upon transformation — of disquiet and discontent slowly accumulating in the wake of socioeconomic changes — is woven through the story of a man named Lamin Sonko. He was born in Sweden, but his parents had come here from Gambia, a tiny country in West Africa, as students. I met Sonko while he waited for his son Elliot to finish basketball practice at a community center started by a local politician who was also a basketball fan.

“Sweden used to be a real socialist country,” Sonko said. He grew up in the Stockholm suburb of Akalla in one of the so-called Million Program developments, part of a vast effort by the Social Democrats to build, as the name suggests, a million affordable homes for working Swedes in the 1960s and ’70s. Even during his childhood, when migration from distant nations was increasing, the neighborhood was still largely Swedish, he said.

But as the decades passed, that changed. “A lot of Swedish people moved,” Sonko said. “It’s more segregated now.” The country’s economy is more vibrant, he said, but it had become harder for new people to move up in society as his family did.

His father had not planned to stay in Sweden but ended up meeting the woman who would become Sonko’s mother and settling down, finding work as an adult education teacher. Yet he felt ambivalent about Sweden, Sonko said, and didn’t get his Swedish citizenship for decades, always thinking he’d ultimately go back to Gambia. After retiring, he did just that.

“To be honest, I think a lot of people don’t want to leave their countries,” Sonko said. “If they could stay in their countries, they would.” His father prefers the weather in Gambia, Sonko told me, and being close to all his old friends and relatives. Plus, it’s cheaper. “Here in Sweden, the pension is so low right now, so you don’t get a lot for your money,” he said.

With his towering height and lean build, Sonko still looks like the point guard he was in his youth, competing on the Swedish national team. He narrowly missed his chance to play in the United States because of N.C.A.A. eligibility rules at the time. His 14-year-old son Elliot is now one of the top-ranked youth basketball players in the country, and he, too, dreams of a life somewhere else: in the United States, where he hopes to one day play in the N.B.A. like his idol, Kobe Bryant.

Sonko has a good job — he is a digital analyst for a television station — but he thinks of leaving Sweden, too, even though he was born there and has spent his whole life there. Maybe he’d try southern Europe, he said, or somewhere in Africa.

“It’s pretty tough for a second generation because you’re not Swedish, but you’re not totally African,” he said. “I think a lot of kids now feel hopeless. Like they have nowhere to be.”

That sense of hopelessness has fueled the problem that Swedish voters have said is their biggest concern: violent gang crime, in some cases involving young children as perpetrators. The week I was in Stockholm, a trial concerning a particularly gruesome crime dominated the headlines: A teenager allegedly shot and killed a man taking his son to a swimming pool in a rough suburb of Stockholm. Sweden has one of the highest rates of gun violence in Europe; bombings and kidnappings are shockingly common.

As crime has risen, the government has embraced harsh new policies that permit longer prison sentences for teenagers and intrusive surveillance and stop-and-frisk tactics in neighborhoods populated by migrants and their children.

The far-right Sweden Democrats, who surged in popularity and captured more than 20 percent of the vote in the 2022 election, have seized on organized crime as proof of the perils of migration. Ludvig Aspling, a member of parliament for the party and its spokesperson on migration, said the rise of violent gangs is “very clearly linked to migration” and the failure of newer migrants to integrate into Swedish society.

“In the past, when we had migrants primarily from Europe and the Balkans, we never needed an integration system or an integration policy,” he said. “We just kept assuming that was going to be the case, even though we’re bringing in migrants from Iraq or Somalia, and obviously they don’t integrate in one or two or even three generations. We have no idea how many generations it’s going to take before people from Somalia become fully integrated.”

There is, of course, little evidence to support his contention. In fact, over the past few years a group of global economists have been using empirical data, like tax returns and immigration records, to establish that newer arrivals in developed countries follow a similar pattern to older ones: The first generation struggles, but their children quickly catch up to those of native-born parents of similar class backgrounds.

“What’s going on is not about the composition of what types of migrants you get,” said Leah Boustan, a Princeton economist who is helping lead the study. “It’s more about the country itself.”

But as is so often the case, perception is quite immune to empirical evidence. This was especially striking in conversations with some more recent immigrants to Sweden. Just like their counterparts in the United States, some have gravitated toward anti-immigrant politics, and have some sympathy for the Sweden Democrats’ perspective.

One such migrant I met was a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Yemen. Though he has been in Sweden less than three years, he told me that he already speaks fluent Swedish, a language he picked up as easily as English and Hindi, which he learned during a stint in India.

“If I was Swedish and there’s a guy who came to my country just sleeping, taking my taxes that I’m working for, I would be mad,” he said. The young man, who did not wish to be named to protect his vulnerable family in Yemen, has a bachelor’s degree in business but was studying to be an electrician. Friends advised him that as a migrant, he’d have little chance of getting a white-collar job in Sweden.

I went along with him to one of his lessons at a technical school in Stockholm. His classmates included a former grocer whose family roots were in Balochistan, a young Palestinian man who had married a Swede and a Swedish truck driver who was retraining after losing his driver’s license. The man from Balochistan, Majid, agreed with his Yemeni classmate.

“In our country, we would kick them out,” Majid said.

But their Swedish classmate, Stefan, felt they were being too harsh. Many Swedes also lived off welfare, he said. As for the language, he noted that his mother had moved to Spain years ago and has yet to learn to speak Spanish.

“She doesn’t speak Spanish because she’s with Swedish people,” he said of his mother’s little group of fellow retirees. “These small communities of Swedish go to the Swedish shops, buy Swedish food and everything.”

One evening in the southern city of Malmo, a very different conversation played out between exactly the kind of high-skilled workers the Swedish government claims it wants to attract: tech workers from India. Sitting on plush banquettes at an Indian restaurant with a wide view of the bridge that connects Malmo to Copenhagen, we discussed the ups and downs of life in Sweden.

“It was so hard the first few years,” Kannan Krishnan, a software engineer who moved to Sweden two decades ago, said. “I felt like I made a horrible decision.” He moved to Sweden from the United States, where he had worked in Silicon Valley. But gradually, he said, he came to appreciate many aspects of life in Sweden, especially the more parent-friendly work culture and greater leisure time.

His companions, all of them long-term residents, mostly agreed. But they had gripes, too. Each mentioned that they struggled to make Swedish friends and that taxes are high. Ashish Rawal, a software sales executive who has worked in Sweden and Denmark for the past two decades, said that many young Indians with engineering degrees are choosing to remain in India.

“When we started our careers, every person who got an opportunity to go out never declined it,” he said. But newer graduates “are getting much better career choices there, very well paid,” he added. “On top of that, you have your family all the time. You know the entire culture, you know the whole system there.”

Eventually, the discussion turned to the broader political climate. Though the government’s focus was on deterring asylum seekers, the overall atmosphere was changing, said Rajeshwari Yogi, a telecommunications engineer who works at Ericsson, one of Sweden’s leading companies.

“Even if we are skilled laborers, are we still welcome here?” she asked.

Europeans may see themselves today as besieged by migrants, but it was not so long ago that their forebears were themselves impoverished migrants, leaving their home countries in great droves to seek fortune, or simply survival, in colonized lands. Between 1850 and 1930, more than a million Swedes crossed the Atlantic to settle in the United States — about one-fifth of the population, the same proportion that, in a neat symmetry, is now foreign-born.

Among them was a 14-year-old girl named Laura Carolina Thun, who in 1892 boarded a ship called the Hekla, bound for New York. She traveled alone, in steerage. She left behind a Dickensian childhood. She was born to unmarried parents — a seamstress and a cobbler — in Stockholm. They gave their infant daughter up to an orphanage when she was only about a month old. She spent much of her childhood shuffling between orphanages, foster homes and her parents’ house, which, like many Swedish homes, was very crowded. It was little wonder that she decided to make the journey into the unknown, across the fathomless sea to a new life on the American plains she could scarcely imagine.

This migrant girl was my great-great-grandmother, one strand in an endless braid of migrants who form the identities of most Americans. Her great-grandson, my father, would in some ways follow in her footsteps, seeking to make a life far from the country in which he was born, marrying a woman from Ethiopia and raising my brothers and me largely on the African continent. Although I was born in the United States and have always carried its navy-blue passport, I have spent much of my life abroad. I have always stood ambivalently at the psychic borders of American belonging.

I heard powerful echoes of my ambivalence in so many conversations with people from migrant backgrounds in Sweden, often people in whom the country had invested a great deal over the course of their upbringing and education. One in particular was a woman named Amira Malik-Miller.

Malik-Miller’s father came to Sweden in the 1970s, a scion of a celebrated family of left-leaning Sudanese intellectuals; her mother was from more modest stock in the Swedish working class. Growing up in Lund, Malik-Miller sensed from an early age that her claim on her country of birth was contingent and set her sights on a life elsewhere. She went to university in London and had a career in global humanitarian aid — we discovered that we had both spent time in Sudan during the Darfur crisis in the 2000s.

She eventually returned to Sweden, somewhat reluctantly, to start a family with her husband, a Scottish Ghanaian fellow aid worker. Since the 2015 crisis, she has felt the old ambivalence about her homeland sharpen.

“I can’t speak for everyone, but it makes me feel that I’m not welcome,” she told me. The most mobile and skilled descendants of migrants, young people like her own children, who are now teenagers, can’t be blamed for wondering if they are better off migrating themselves.

“I just think: What a loss for Sweden,” she said. “You’ve invested everything in them.”

That critique is something officials don’t want to hear. They talk only of stopping people coming, never of getting them to stay, and dismiss out of hand the idea that the most promising migrants might turn up their noses at Sweden.

“You need an open heart, but you also need to have a cool brain, because you need to look at all the challenges that are connected to having immigration,” Sweden’s migration minister, Johan Forssell, told me. “Over the last 20 years, people have been naïve.”

But if Sweden was once naïve about its ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, it may now be making an equally naïve assumption: that there will always be more people who want to live in Sweden, to build lives and families there. As the country’s birthrate falls to a record low, that assumption could prove disastrously mistaken. Without migrants, who will care for the country’s rapidly aging population, refill government coffers to pay pensions and provide the labor that is the economy’s backbone?

In opening itself up to these questions, Sweden is taking a big gamble. It’s also saying something about itself. “Migration is a bellwether phenomenon,” the sociologist Hein de Haas, a leading scholar of migration, told me. “If you look at the bigger picture, isn’t this growing fear of immigrants showing the lack of confidence of Western societies?”

(This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.)

Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.

Excerpts: The Newyork times