Refugees in rural Sweden

Sweden is the biggest recipient of refugees in Western Europe and establishes its quotas regarding whom to admit, i.e. from which unstable countries, from the UN’s recommendations. Some spots are left open for more individual cases (e.g. someone is unsafe in their otherwise safe country for some reason). Almost 2,000 came in 2012. Sweden is not an especially populous country so the addition each year of basically a small town’s worth of people who need a lot of support (subsidized housing, language lessons, job training, and so forth) to become possibly employable and self-sufficient can have a significant impact on Swedish society and finances. As a result not all Swedish people think it is the best thing ever to admit these refugees.

My opinions are mixed. I sincerely appreciate living in a country that puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to policies promoting the welfare of children and people in danger. And Sweden’s low birth rate means it could use more young people to keep its pension system afloat. But, sure, refugees require resources that otherwise would be spent on people who already live here, and due to a combination of factors are more likely to be unemployed and engage in, if not outright illegal, then certainly un-Swedish social behavior; I can see why some people are not psyched about taking in refugees. The whole thing is, of course, extremely complicated and I’m comfortable not having a formed opinion on the subject in the abstract.

For most people here, ideas about refugees are only impersonal. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suppose that the majority of ethnic Swedish people don’t really know any refugees personally. Maybe they get irritated when they see foreign names associated with crimes in the paper, or are perturbed by their behavior on the bus, but from what I can tell most ethnic Swedes are pretty isolated, associating socially with only people who are like them.

I, however, happen to know quite a few refugees. Some I went to Swedish classes with (which they were disincentivized to finish, knowing their student benefits were more than unemployment benefits) and most of the others, weirdly, from local rural villages. This is because lately my region in Sweden has decided that a good way to find cheaper housing for its refugees, and (I suspect) to keep them from all living in one place together which inevitably becomes ghettoized, is to distribute them around in small villages. While I appreciate the intent, in reality it makes things for the new refugees really difficult and isolated (though inarguably better than whatever they were fleeing from). Let’s take the case of three families, given pseudonyms of course, whom I know personally:

Elena, from Honduras, whom I met at a state-run indoor play place one village over. She speaks no English or Swedish, poor thing, and fled here a few months ago, just her and her toddler, to escape potential kidnapping in her native country based on financial/political motives I can’t claim to understand fully. I heard her speaking Spanish to her kid and struck up a conversation, and we got together a few times in her bare, one-room apartment, furnished with a few pine furniture pieces courtesy of the government, when I was dropping off Swedish books for her to study (she wasn’t eligible yet for Swedish classes, or childcare even if she was) and hand-me-downs from Little Girl. Her child had only two toys and hardly any clothes (they escaped Honduras with the clothes on their backs).

While visiting, Elena needed help from me in understanding the letter from the government, written in Swedish (so helpful, Migrationsverket; and on a side note, I was super-impressed with myself for being able to translate bureaucratic Swedish into comprehensible Spanish), which was denying her request for extra money for additional winter clothes and a stroller. Elena also wanted to understand how to prepare soup she had bought in the tiny village store which was not the soup she had intended to buy; that kind of mix-up is particularly stressful when you can’t afford to waste money on food you can’t figure out how to eat.

Bana, from Eritrea, where many refugees are coming from nowadays. She and I met at a church-run indoor play place in a nearby village, where she was with her two daughters under two (her two other children still live in Eritrea, where she says they are safe; tragically, she says she’ll never be able to see those children again). She speaks lovely English despite having left school at age 13, and was the grateful recipient of more hand-me-down clothes and toys, not having very much for the girls (I swear I don’t befriend these ladies just to clean out my closets.) Somehow she managed to get her hands on an aged double-stroller so she can at least take her two babies out, at least the few times a day the bus shows up in rural Sweden. I saw her out and about with a Syrian friend, also a recent refugee, the other day. It is the village church, and not the government, that is providing the most support to her and other refugees in the form of social gatherings for refugee women and beginning Swedish lessons.

Azhar, from Pakistan, whom I introduced myself to today at my kid’s village school at pick-up time, psyched to see another non-Swedish person; his children’s presence means Little Girl is no longer the only immigrant! Azhar had a lot of complaints and questions regarding why his children can’t take the bus to and from school (he lives .1 kilometer less than the two kilometers far away you have to be to be eligible) and what he is going to do about that if he ever works, and also about how infrequently the city bus comes to the village, and furthermore why does he lives in the middle of nowhere? I sympathized. I don’t know how people can live out here without a car, and not speaking Swedish to boot. Good luck. (His youngest kid is in the grade above Little Girl; I’m thinking about offering to give him rides home on Wednesday, when the younger grades let out early, so Azhar doesn’t have to make three trips to the school that day.)

I don’t have any clever conclusion to share here about the situation of refugees in Sweden. If I did I would write the government and let them know and not muse about it on my blog. I do what I can, personally, to try to help those I meet and make them feel welcome in their new lives here because I feel a kinship to them in our mutual alien-ness to Swedish society and, shit, it’s hard enough to be a foreigner here when you have all the advantages I do; I can’t even imagine how it’d be without.