THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION (March 28, 2025):

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

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.

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.

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.

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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?”

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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist at The New York Times.