LEADER • Sweden’s extremely high immigration does not only need to continue but also increase further – otherwise, we will not be able to sustain welfare. This is stated in a recent report by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions. The conclusion has been endorsed by the repeatedly convicted and left-wing extremist researcher in critical whiteness studies, Tobias Hübinette. This should be enough to realize that it belongs in the trash, but let’s examine it a bit more closely.

In just under ten years, there will be 1.8 million foreign-born individuals of working age in Sweden. These constitute only a subset of the total number of foreign-born individuals, who in turn are only a subset of the total number of people with immigrant backgrounds, the majority being of non-Western origin.

This is under the assumption that what critics label as ‘mass immigration’ continues as before, with approximately 100,000 residence permits issued annually. Previously, many argued that this is a development that enriches Sweden, both culturally and economically.

However, the reality indicates the opposite. Culturally, Sweden has faced significant challenges in areas such as views on women, Jews, and homosexuals. The escalating gang crime has almost its entire recruitment base in immigrant groups, as do Islamist terrorists.

Statistics also show that the employment rate among the largest immigrant groups is very low. Many rely on benefits, and even more do not generate sufficient tax revenue to sustain Sweden’s publicly funded welfare services. Economically, immigration has been a loss for Sweden, to the tune of approximately 100 billion SEK annually.

The last enthusiasts

However, not everyone has given up hope that the current immigration policy will prove to be beneficial for welfare in the future, and that what we have seen in recent decades are just teething problems that can be rectified with some fine-tuning. Some even argue that immigration needs to increase to even greater volumes, and that if it does not, this poses the greatest threat to Sweden’s welfare.

Among the last enthusiasts are the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR). In a recent report, they argue that immigration at its current level, as it has been in recent decades, is not sufficient to sustain the healthcare and social care sector.

Expert support not what it used to be

It has become increasingly difficult to find experts who are willing to endorse such an analysis. Now, one must venture to the extreme left and turn a blind eye to things such as a heavy criminal record and a deeply racist past. SKR – and Dagens Nyheter, which has given great attention to the report – have lowered their standards to find Tobias Hübinette, a researcher in critical whiteness studies (?!) to testify that the public healthcare and social care employer organization is not off track.

Based on available immigration figures, he points out that ‘foreign-born and second-generation individuals will be in the majority in the labor market‘ in the not-so-distant future. However, in reality, there is a huge difference. For decades, Sweden has imported men and women of working age from all corners of the earth. Even after ten years in Sweden, less than half of them have found employment, and even then, the definition of ’employed’ is very generous.

More recipients than contributors

This group has become a burden on working-age Swedes, where the term is synonymous with being employed. In addition to support to cover rent and living expenses, the working-age but non-working migrants have full access to all publicly funded services.

Even if SKR optimistically assumes that all migrants who come to Sweden go directly into work within the healthcare and social care sector, it would not be a net gain to ‘sustain welfare‘. Migrants not only work, but also require care and support like everyone else.

At best, it would be a zero-sum game, but considering that the migrant groups SKR wants to recruit have, on average, significantly poorer health status than Swedes, it would be a negative, as this group will demand more care and support than Swedes. This is assuming that, as if by a miracle, all newcomers suddenly arrive in Sweden on Sunday and go to work on Monday instead of to social services.

Being of working age does not equate to being employed

Hübinette’s and SKR’s assertion in the report ‘Välfärdens kompetensförsörjning‘ that ‘the number of foreign-born individuals aged 20-66 will exceed 1.8 million by 2033‘ if mass immigration continues, is not incorrect, even though one fervently wishes it were. However, the belief that a working-age migrant is the same as an employed migrant is, in hindsight, such naive wishful thinking that one wonders under which rock SKR’s investigators have been living for the past few decades.

They write that ‘this means that up to one-third of jobs will then need to be performed by a foreign-born individual, which is historically high‘. However, what foreign-born individuals ‘need‘ to do is certainly not the same as what they will actually do – both in terms of definition and experience.

Increased immigration = increased strain on welfare

When SKR, based on the above incorrect premise, claims in the next breath that ‘additional contributions of foreign-born individuals are needed to sustain welfare‘, it is utterly perplexing. Additional contributions of foreign-born individuals would, in fact, further strain the already heavily burdened welfare system.

Just as today and in recent decades, the proportion of this new influx who work in welfare would be small compared to the proportion who use welfare services. And the errors in thinking continue.

A strict guest worker system might work

In SKR’s and other reports, including those from the Swedish Confederation of Enterprise, which also indicate an increased need for foreign labor, they not only assume that new arrivals will work instead of relying on benefits and will not burden welfare in any way. They also seem to believe that they will not bring any dependents, such as children, with them, nor will they acquire any after arriving in Sweden.

With a strict guest worker system, where individuals of working age can come and work without bringing any dependents, live in barracks adjacent to their workplaces, have extremely limited access to publicly funded welfare systems, and return home as soon as they are no longer needed or reach retirement age, one might come close to a positive result. But this is far from what SKR envisages.

‘Dramatic change’ – towards the brink of collapse

When Tobias Hübinette, interviewed by DN, informs us that ‘in eight years, foreign-born individuals and second-generation individuals will account for over half of the available workforce‘ and that ‘this is a dramatic change‘, we should take him seriously as a serious warning about where Sweden is heading.

If as much as half of the available workforce in Sweden consists of immigrants, where a low proportion work and a high proportion do not, the costs of immigration will spiral further, and welfare will be even more overburdened than it is today – likely beyond the brink of collapse.

Apples and oranges

The next fallacy in SKR’s report is when they state that ‘foreign-born individuals already make up a significant portion of the workforce – over a third of nursing assistants and the majority of healthcare assistants‘. The demographic composition within a specific profession says nothing about the employment rate for foreign-born individuals, which is the economically relevant figure for whether welfare can be sustained or not.

And the fact is that the group as a whole is a significant burden. And the most burdensome within this heterogeneous group are the non-Western migrants that SKR envisions will serve the rest of us with welfare services without having any welfare needs that cost taxpayers money.

Old worn-out cards

SKR and Hübinette also play the old worn-out cards about fewer individuals of working age as nativity rates decline and many born during good years with high birth rates reach retirement. In contrast to the reality of the catastrophe that mass immigration has been for Sweden, the reality of variations in birth rates and retirement does not pose any problems for keeping society running.

In their report, SKR states that ‘the group aged 85 and older is expected to be 60 percent larger in 2033 than it is today‘ and extrapolates from this that ‘an additional 65,000 positions will be needed solely within elderly care to meet the care needs‘. There is much that SKR omits to mention.

Swedes’ public health and others’

Firstly, public health among the elderly has improved significantly and continues to do so – for Swedes. If Sweden were so ethnically homogeneous or at least dominated by inhabitants from the Western world, the vast majority, except those in the most demanding professions, would be healthy and work until an older age, and would also be healthier when they reach the age of 85.

What counteracts this development in terms of resources is the steadily increasing proportion of the population with foreign-born individuals from the third world, where public health, by Swedish standards, is extremely low and will also have significantly greater care and support needs in old age.

What also counters this development economically is that a significant proportion of this highly care-dependent group during their working years in Sweden did not generate the tax revenues on the scale required to sustain publicly funded elderly care. And this continues when they reach retirement age.

A burden when of working age – a burden in old age

Many of them, on the contrary, have been a burden even during their working years and continue to be so when they reach retirement age and old age. This is how it goes on in the report, and this is how one could easily continue to refute every claim that suggests that further increased mass immigration is the salvation of the Swedish welfare state, when in reality, it would be utterly devastating.

Racist to desire Swedish-speaking healthcare and social care personnel

If we focus on healthcare and social care, it is already more common than not for Swedish patients and the elderly to be unable to communicate with the staff for the simple reason that those employed cannot speak our language. However, wanting to meet Swedish doctors, nurses, and home care workers as a Swede is, of course, considered racist, so perhaps SKR believes that this issue does not need to be addressed.

The significant overrepresentation of healthcare and social care staff with a foreign background who abuse, neglect, or even commit violence against their clients, and how this is expected to increase with SKR’s solution to welfare challenges, is also conspicuously absent from the report.

What happens to our country’s culture, values, and democracy?

And naturally, SKR does not mention a word about what happens to our country’s culture, values, democracy, and so on when half of the population comes directly from developing countries in the third world. The geographical distance between those countries and Sweden is not the only significant gap.

Bodil Umegård, head of the data and analysis section at SKR’s employer policy department and one of the minds (well) behind SKR’s report, tells DN that ‘we cannot solve the increased care needs through education; there will not be enough individuals to recruit‘.

From that statement, one can draw one of two conclusions. The first is that more low- or uneducated imported labor should be sent into healthcare and social care than today. The second is that one should drain poor countries of the few educated individuals they have, and thus keep them in poverty.

Sweden should be able to educate the workforce it needs

Contrary to what Umegård says, it should be obvious that a country like Sweden should be able to educate its own healthcare and social care personnel. It is also a matter of decency and morality not to colonialistically steal educated individuals from the third world.

Not educating the enormous workforce of foreign-born individuals who are already here and currently rely on benefits, and instead importing new foreign-born individuals for the jobs, perpetuates the exclusion that is often claimed to be broken. The mantra that language and jobs are the key to integration suddenly disappears.

A net gain, a net loss might work

Based on the report, it seems that there is no intention of implementing a ‘one in, one out’ policy – for every new foreign-born individual hired for a vacant position in healthcare or social care, one foreign-born individual who has proven unsuitable for the Swedish labor market should be deported. The ‘large group of unemployed non-European immigrants‘ that SKR at least parenthetically acknowledges exists in Sweden as a result of decades of mishandled immigration policy seems to be something they expect us to accept and live with without complaint. It is the non-working Swedes that SKR wants us to lament over as a burden.

Regarding decency, it should also be obvious to welcome the more reasonable wage requirements agreed upon by the new government and the Sweden Democrats that will apply to labor immigrants. It is remarkable that even the political left protests and wants to continue the trend that has created an ethnified underclass in Sweden.

Is wage dumping supposed to solve the Swedish welfare economy? Does the principle not apply here, as it does everywhere else, that you get what you pay for? Good healthcare and social care cost more than subpar healthcare and social care.

Fixation on foreign-born individuals reveals hidden agenda

Throughout, SKR, Hübinette, and the Swedish Confederation of Enterprise, among others, speak of ‘foreign labor’, never just ‘labor’. The fixation on the idea that those they want to work in Sweden should be foreign-born feels so forced that it is impossible to resist the suspicion that there is another underlying and hidden agenda.

There is a fundamental aversion to countries with homogenous populations. The idea of completing the experiment with a multicultural Sweden seems to take precedence over everything else. None of the objections to the reasoning in SKR’s report require one to be a rocket scientist. They are self-evident truths with a track record both here and in all other countries where these left-liberal ideas have been tested.

Swedish society succeeded – the multicultural one fails

Of course, Swedes are capable of sustaining welfare on their own, without the help of individuals from countries that have clearly failed to build any welfare at all. The journey from poor Sweden to welfare Sweden was largely made by Swedes themselves.

It was with the era of mass immigration that welfare reforms began to reverse, with austerity measures, cutbacks, staff reductions, fewer healthcare and social care facilities, deteriorations in safety nets, poorer pensions, and so on and so forth.

It is a frightening continuation of what more and more describe as a population replacement that SKR outlines with current immigration volumes maintained. Even more frightening is that such a heavyweight advocate is proposing to further accelerate the pace.