Sweden’s message to migrants in Europe is clear: Don’t come here. “Even we have our limits, and now they have been reached,” a defeated-sounding migration minister, Morgan Johansson, explained during a press conference on Nov. 5. “Those who come to our borders may be told that we cannot guarantee them housing.”
That message, nailed down this week when the government announced that Sweden was reintroducing border controls, was a sudden shift from an administration that had claimed there were “no limits” to the number of refugees it could accept. The reversal testifies not only to intensifying challenges Sweden faces abroad, but also to the dysfunctional nature of its immigration debate at home.
Sweden’s backtracking is part of a larger trend as Europe struggles to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers. States that together with Sweden had been advocating generosity and openness — like Austria and Germany — now too are tightening their policies and calling for Europe to reinforce its external borders. Their efforts have turned to repatriating those without legitimate claims to asylum as well as relocating part of their migrant populations to more other, less inundated E.U. states like Poland, France or Denmark
Join the conversation as a VIP Member