Sweden's Refugee 'Crisis' Has "Gone Past
The Breaking Point, by Tyler Durden, 3/20/16
Sweden is too generous
for its own good as the country most beloved by Bernie Sanders is pressured by
huge migrant flows. As Bloomberg reports, when it comes to wealth,
health and hospitality, Sweden has few rivals. But the same qualities that make
the country a beacon of hope for the world’s huddled masses are straining it at
the seams.
To see how close to the
limit a record inflow of refugees is pushing Swedish generosity, visit
Halmstad, a 14th century gateway to the North Sea known for its pristine
beaches and golf courses. With no
vacant apartments, the welcome wagon here is a double row of shabby, stifling
trailers hauled in to house the overflow from the nearby Arena Hotel. There, almost 400 asylum seekers from
Syria, Afghanistan and beyond live four to a room, all but forbidden from
working until their claims are adjudicated. The process can take years.
Men with little to do but
sleep and smoke crowd the lobby as kids careen down corridors on bikes. The
sports bar, once busy with locals, is now a halal dining hall, the outdoor pool
fenced-off and abandoned. It’s a scene increasingly common across Sweden, which
welcomed 163,000 refugees last year alone, or about 1.6 percent of its
population, a ratio equivalent to 5.1 million in the U.S.
Three years after Sweden
and its Nordic neighbors were declared “The Next Supermodel” of fiscal prudence
by The Economist, the welfare system pioneered in Stockholm is starting to
buckle under the weight of Europe’s biggest migration wave since World War II.
Even
dovish politicians concede the pace of refugee spending, which is on track to
surpass that for national defense in Sweden for the first time this year, can’t
be sustained without revisions to a social contract based on high taxes,
cradle-to-grave entitlements, tight regulation and AAA credit.
Few know the perils and
promise of Scandinavian welfare better than Aida Hadzialic. She fled Yugoslavia
with her family at the age of five and settled in Halmstad, where she served as
deputy mayor before being named Sweden's minister for secondary education in
2014. And what worries her most is the viability of a model that literally
saved her life.
“If we don’t make the changes needed to maintain
trust that our tax money goes to the right thing, people may start wondering if
it’s worth paying,” said Hadzialic, 29. "Then we’d create a new gap
between people. That’s not the Swedish model, that’s not the Sweden we know.”
It’s a debate raging across
the European Union as the human tide of mainly Muslims adds to crises eating
away at the bloc’s cohesion and encouraging extremist parties. Even in Sweden,
where centrists have ruled for decades, discontent is on the rise. Polls show backing for the governing Social
Democrats hovering near the 50-year low of 24 percent it reached in January,
while support for the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats has risen five points
since the 2014 election to 18 percent.
Investors have already
registered their alarm.
As the inflow of refugees
peaked late last year, the yield
bond-buyers demand to hold Swedish debt over that of Germany, the European
benchmark, surged to a nine-month high. Though that spread has narrowed,
the government has warned that outlays for migration will further squeeze the
$110 billion national budget. Ethnic tensions are adding to the strain, with a
rash of fires and threats of mob attacks at refugee centers across the country.
For
most Swedish citizens, though, there’s little question their welfare state --
as much an anathema for U.S. conservatives such as Donald Trump as an
inspiration for left-wingers like Bernie Sanders -- is worth protecting.
Today,
Swedes can consider themselves among the luckiest people on Earth. At 82, their life
expectancy is two years longer than Americans’ and their net disposable income,
$29,185 per household, exceeds the U.K., France and Japan. What they lose with
a top income tax rate of about 60 percent, they gain back with free, high-quality
hospitals and schools, a vast program of subsidies for childcare and housing,
and some of the world’s safest and most modern cities.
But providers of public
services say they can’t keep those standards up if refugees, the vast majority
young and male, keep coming.
Building
new housing for immigrants at a time when half a million Swedes are waiting
eight years on average for rent-controlled apartments around Stockholm is
becoming a flash point, said Joakim Ruist, an economist at Gothenburg
University. The only “logical” way to stimulate new construction is to lift
price controls so developers have more incentive to build, a move that won’t be
popular with voters, he said.
“No modern welfare state has had an inflow of
refugees per capita that’s equivalent to Sweden’s," Ruist said.
"We’ve gone past the breaking point for the housing situation.”
Fearing a public backlash
over housing and handouts, which can be worth $28,000 a year for a single
mother of two, almost what the average American worker earns, Sweden is trying
to walk back its open-door policy. Citing an "unsustainable" pace of
arrivals, Prime Minister Stefan Loefven has re-imposed border controls and pledged
to step up deportations of rejected asylees. Family reunifications are also
being drastically curtailed.
Until
recently, there was little question Sweden, with debt far below the European
average at less than half of gross domestic product, had the resources to successfully
integrate its newcomers. Hadzialic, the schools minister, and Hanif
Bali, an IT entrepreneur and member of parliament for the Moderate Party, are
living proof of that.
But like Hadzialic, Bali,
who arrived from Iran without parents as a toddler in the 1990s, is starting to think his adopted homeland may
just be too generous for its own good.
“If we don’t act soon we’ll have a large group of
refugees who won’t be able to enter the labor market,” said Bali, 28.
Just the thought of being a
burden on society makes Hasan al-Bundok sigh.
The 45-year-old lawyer fled
Syria’s war in search of a better future, first to Turkey, then across the
Mediterranean to Greece and eventually Halmstad. The plan was to find a job,
establish a home and then send for his wife and four children back home. But
that was nine months ago and he’s still languishing in legal limbo at the Arena
Hotel.
"In my country, I’d wake up at six o’clock,
have breakfast with my children and go to court,” Bundok said. “But here, I’m
like an animal, just eating and sleeping. I don’t want to be a second-class
citizen. I want to work.”
Comments
With a total government budget of $110 billion
and a $1 trillion external debt, Sweden has been warned to cut back on refugee
costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Sweden
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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