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thank you all for coming. as mentioned earlier, my name is tino sanandaji. i’m a kurd from iran, and i moved to sweden in 1989 at the age of nine, together with my mother and brother, nima sanandaji. i graduated with a master’s degree at the stockholm school of economics. then i earned a phd at the university of chicago, where i was postdoc for a year. i returned to sweden three years ago and worked at the research institute of industrial economics for two years. presently, i’m affiliated with ehff – the institute for economic and business history research at the stockholm school of economics. my research has never been about immigration, it’s an issue you could say i’ve found myself addressing. deliberately, i’ve never researched immigration to avoid having doubts cast on the research. instead, i’ve referred to other people’s research.

however, economics is obviously not that specialized; the economics of immigration is… …a subcategory of general economics, labor market economics, public finance, and so forth. my own specialization is on the one hand entrepreneurship… ...and on the other hand public finance / public sector economics… …but also economic history, which i specialized in at chicago. most of my current research focuses on economic history and the significance of… …cultural factors, social capital, and so forth for today’s economic development. in sweden, the debate about immigration has been a major issue for several years… …and has become increasingly pressing.

but it is a very taboo issue, and as you all know, it has been set against a background of… …the racist movement, which exploded in scandinavia in the 90s. we have seen xenophobia, polarization and social conflict, and a tendency to brand those… …who take part in the debate – those who like so many of you have blue eyes and blond hair – as racists… …if they present facts or make claims not supportive of the positive consequences of immigration: “aha, you sound like a skinhead!” since i’m a kurd, i haven’t been bothered as much by this, and that’s why i have felt that… …i have a duty to take part in this debate, because it is an important issue. ok, now i would like to start by explaining to you – and you have all seen the news the past weeks and months

– why the mediterranean, in just a few years, has turned into a mass grave. to everyone who sees images of dead children and dead adults, and reacts emotionally to this… …with compassion, the first question would be, “why have they died?” – in order to stop it. if you don’t understand the mechanisms behind these deaths, you can’t prevent other people from perishing. we can put it this way: these are un figures. there have been fluctuations, but in essence, nobody drowned in the mediterranean – no refugees died during the 80s. then, after some fluctuations in the 90s and 2000s, in 2010 twenty people drowned… …and less than 10,000 tried to cross the mediterranean to enter into europe. so far this year, around 600,000 have tried to cross, and the year’s not over yet, so we’re seeing an annual 100-fold increase.

around 3,000 have drowned, which is more than died during 9/11 – about three times the number who died during the falklands war. these are no trivial numbers. and it goes on. with these numbers, on a monthly basis, it goes on. the reason i was late today is that i wanted to use the most current numbers; this is happening so fast that my previous presentation, just a few weeks ago, is already obsolete. in order to understand why this is happening, one must grasp something that, until recently… …hardly anyone in sweden understood, which is how swedish immigration policy is designed. in sweden, generally anyone from syria, and also eritrea, and the great majority from e.g. afghanistan, has a right to asylum. if they manage to get to sweden and ask for asylum, they will get it. this year and last year, 77% of those asking for asylum have been granted it – basically 100% from many countries.

ok. there are 12 million refugees from syria: 8 million in syria, and 4 million in neighboring countries. there are 3 million refugees from iraq; there are many millions from afghanistan, eritrea, ethiopia, somalia … – and sweden grants them asylum. this was also the case if you came during… …the wars between iran and iraq or from lebanon, and many other wars that have taken place. why don’t more people come? if there are 12 million refugees, and sweden grants asylum to everyone who arrives. why aren’t more arriving – why don’t they fly to europe? does anyone know? i’m putting the question to the audience … [audience] – they can’t fly here. – why?

[audience] – they can’t afford it? it’s not the airlines that won’t let them; the airlines are just implementing what sweden’s… [– the carrier liability] – no, that’s just a detail. [audience] – they must have visas, thank you! you’re the first to answer this question. i ask this question at every seminar, and you’re the first to give a correct answer. sweden does not grant visas to potential refugees. so if there’s war in a country, and [former prime minister] fredrik reinfeldt goes on tv to say that everyone will be granted asylum… …then sweden makes sure that hardly anyone from syria is able to fly here. if they succeed, it’s because they were able to cheat, got a business visa, or have relatives already living here – then you can get in.

but these policies are not just practiced in sweden, it’s throughout europe. visas are just not issued to persons from these countries. and the carrier liability, that’s how the airlines, ferry operators and so on respond to this. i mean, that’s totally the wrong issue to focus on. they didn’t decide this. they’re saying that you need to have a travel permit to be able to fly to sweden. if you don’t have it, ok, we would get fined if we flew you there, so we won’t do it. and even if that was repealed, you still wouldn’t be able to skirt this issue, because then the border control… …would probably stop you from entering the country, at the airport. so the carrier liability issue is just a distraction.

the core issue is that the swedish policy has been that we don’t issue visas to refugees. why isn’t this done? it’s quite paradoxical: if you manage to get here, you’ll be granted asylum, but we won’t allow you to get here. if the intention was to save everyone from syria and provide refuge to everyone… …then one would have done the opposite and just said: “we’ll fly you here”. now they won’t even allow people to pay for their own flight tickets. the answer is that they’ve always known this, and this is something that e.g. [deputy prime minister] ã…sa romson is aware of. if you listen to her (or others) in interviews, they never explain it in clear terms but resort to bureaucratic swedish… …so nobody can understand – and that is that too many people would come.

because these five countries – syria, eritrea, iraq, somalia and afghanistan – have a population of around 100 million there are other countries where some have reasons for asylum, like ethiopia... ...and there’s always war somewhere, and there’s always dictatorship somewhere. if one were to say that anyone can fly here, then that’s potentially 100 million people... ...and sweden does not want to receive that many. but at the same time the politicians want to go on tv and say that we’re providing refuge for everyone... ...because it’s appealing to the public. and they have created this paradoxical system, where a “death lottery” has been created, very consciously so. this death lottery says that we’ll provide very generously for you if you manage to get here...

...and set foot on our border, we’ll grant you asylum, and we’ll provide for you for the rest of your life. but in order to have a chance to do this, you will have to face a 2% chance of drowning in the mediterranean, you and your family. like [professor of international health] hans rosling has pointed out, the politicians are fully aware of this. ordinary people aren’t, and neither are many journalists. but the politicians, who are responsible, they understand this. this is apparent if you read between the lines in interviews. they know what they’ve done. but they continue to do it anyway, because they’re stuck in it. this is the swedish system. they haven’t created a system where they say that “we would like to accept 100,000 and we’ll let the un choose who are most in need of coming"

– orphans, the sick, people in need of medical care and so on – instead they act this way. so why has this occurred now, one might ask? well, what has happened is that… the core issue is schengen... and the breakdown of the external border controls. these are historical numbers that show how many asylum seekers sweden used to receive. i will soon explain the relationship – asylum seekers, those granted asylum, and immigrants – these are three different things. historically, about 40–45% of the asylum seekers were granted asylum, this has now climbed to 70–80%, which is an increase. at the same time, these numbers don’t include a category which is at least as large: relative immigrants

anyway, between 1990 and 2010, around 25,000 arrived per year. in the 80s, also short of 25,000 arrived per year. then the numbers increase, following the deal with the green party, and new conflicts that have sprung up. it increases gradually. last year, 81,000 asylum seekers arrived. that’s not a record number of asylum seekers but last year saw a record number of granted asylums and permanent residencies for relatives. in august this year, 12,000 arrived this september, 24,000 arrived. last week, 8,000 arrived and currently, on a yearly basis, 400,000 arrive

and sweden was the oecd country which received the highest number of asylum seekers already, even before this surge and the reason is that sweden, before these policies, said that we’ll be very generous, if you manage to get here. but because of this, we’ll also build really high walls that you can’t get over. and these walls consist of… most asylum seekers in sweden, with the exception of chile, have come from north africa and the middle east these are the countries people have come from, as well as yugoslavia. this means that it’s hard to get to sweden. because then you have to pass through turkey, greece, italy, austria, germany, denmark, sweden it’s really hard, because this is a very isolated country, in the far north. for historical reasons, located in the topmost corner, sweden has never really been invaded

– for the same reasons: it’s hard to get here, it’s isolated. in every country, a refugee has to pass through the border controls, because he or she has no visa. and this used to thwart almost everyone so how were people able to get here? the answer is through refugee smugglers. essentially, everyone who arrived did so illegally, in some way. or they exploited loopholes in the system, like arriving as a job-seeker, then abscond and seek asylum, things like that. there have been no legal ways of getting to sweden as an asylum seeker. it has been official policy to keep it this way. but no one has ever explained it. why? because the debate has been stifled.

it has not been possible to discuss these issues in a rational, fact-based way. therefore, ordinary people haven’t understood how sweden has been conducting its immigration policy. in my opinion, people engage in a childish fantasy where, when asked why not more people have come, they say that “maybe they didn’t want to”, “it’s too cold”, “they couldn’t afford plane tickets”. that’s childish, it doesn’t work that way. in the middle east, a typical citizen, or very many of them, are able to afford a plane ticket. it’s not that expensive. or a train ticket, or whatever. and in surveys, by gallup for example, even in countries where there is no war,

in the middle east and africa, 20–40% state that they would move to the west if they could. i assume you would, too, if you were in the same situation. but like i’ve said, they weren’t able to! it wasn’t possible, it was really difficult. they had to take a huge risk, pay a smuggler $20,000, and they would probably still not be able get in. and perhaps not be granted asylum if they got in. so what’s happened is that after schengen, sweden and the countries in between sweden and the middle east, have eradicated the border obstacles. so now, there’s free passage: anyone who manages to set foot in greece or italy has free passage to sweden, more or less. there are different paths to take, and so far there’s always been some route,

so if hungary stops it, then you go through serbia or wherever – people find a way. this the heart of the matter, this is the reason for what has happened: the border controls have been abolished. and on top of that – it’s secondary but it also matters – there’s been a shift in immigration policy towards more liberal assessments. also, they haven’t been adjusted. certain things have always been policy, but they were possible to do while the firm border controls were still in place. but when the border controls are gone, these policies or practices result in radically different consequences, but they haven’t been replaced. and in the deal with the green party, [former prime minister] reinfeldt and the greens stated that greens stated that it’s fundamental that sweden has a generous policy. that it should be made easier, instead of harder – in all respects.

and a very important aspect of this is not so much amendments of the law, but rather that the immigration agency’s assessments have been revised. sweden has signed certain treaties, but these treaties, which finland and iceland and all the other western countries have signed, are very flexible. there is nothing in these treaties about permanent residencies – you can grant temporary residence. there is nothing about immigrant’s relatives, that there’s an obligation to take them in. and you have to be able to identify yourself, which 90% don’t do. and so on… and sweden has, in the deal with the green party, appointed administration executives by order of the government, with the goal of cutting down turnaround times, instating lean management and so on, meaning that asylum will be granted more readily.

for those who are not granted asylum, it’s been made much easier not having to return home, and currently, the majority don’t return home, they stay on, wait a year and a half, and reapply for asylum – because then the limitation period has lapsed. and during this time, they’ve been provided access to the welfare state, so absconding isn’t very difficult. recently, the dublin treaty has stated that you’re obliged to seek asylum in the first country you set foot in. so if you’ve arrived in greece first, which is a dublin treaty signatory, sweden can send you back and tell you to apply for asylum there. these treaties include obligations both for the signatory states and the asylum seekers. one of these obligations is to comply with these regulations.

but sweden and other countries like germany have stated that, by their own choosing, they have decided to not observe these regulations – regulations which they have a right to uphold. in this way, through this combination, you weaken the border controls, you deputize from having several borders to having a single border – which is the external border of the eu – and in addition to this, it’s been made easier. the regulations have not been revised to become more strict when the borders have collapsed. if you think of an aircraft carrier or rather an oil tanker, it has multiple hulls for protection, so if there’s a leak in one hull, it goes to the next, and the next, and then the next. and this what it used to be like for sweden: there were five or six countries which had to be passed before you could get here, making it very difficult.

but now, with schengen, we have only one border, and if this springs a leak and people enter greece, then they’re free to apply for asylum anywhere they want in europe – and asylum will indeed be granted. this is what has happened: while there has always been tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, wanting to go to europe from the third world, they have never been able to do so. when these border controls are removed, there will be an avalanche. the rest is details – that the smugglers use twitter, the carrier liability – those are just details, explaining how it works. i’m moving on now… in sweden, during several years, i would say that there’s been an atmosphere of debate where in essence every single detail of the refugee policy has been taboo.

and in every single detail, politicians, media and public service have been falsifying reality. almost nothing they say is correct: how many arrive, why they arrive, how much it costs, what the consequences will be, and so on. one example is that many people believe that what’s happening is because of the war in syria. this is quite easy to refute, though. syrians are around 35% of asylum seekers, holding steady around that number. this means that two thirds don’t even come from syria. they’re not even claiming to come from syria. and using last week’s statistics, we can see that the syrians are a minority.

and the increase has been even faster from countries other than syria. we’ll take afghanistan as an example, which has endured a long war the war is not completely over yet, there is still war in parts of afghanistan, but it’s not full scale war. and afghanistan has had war for over 30 years, with some lulls, and perhaps two million people have died. it’s one of the most brutal wars in the world. and during the war in afghanistan, about 1,000 asylum seekers in total came from afghanistan. last week, 1,800 arrived from afghanistan. you would have to be an idiot or a toddler to believe that the reason for this is simply war. that wars for some reason have multiplied.

and eritrea – a country that isn’t even at war. eritrea had war, twenty years ago, a very brutal war. not many refugees arrived then. that war is long over. now eritrea is a dictatorship, and sweden has stated that the long drafts and suppressed freedom of speech – it is indeed a brutal country – are now grounds for asylum. while eritrea is a very brutal dictatorship, it’s not like there hasn’t been brutal dictatorships before. in the post-war period, sweden has had brutal dictatorships much nearer than eritrea – and more brutal. that didn’t lead to a thousand asylum seekers per day. and the reason for this is that they weren’t able to come. but now they can. and, i must say, it borders on mass psychosis when persons in authority state that sweden is now experiencing world war iii.

this was from dn debate a few weeks ago. “this is wwiii; there has never been as many wars there are now”. this is also absurd and shows a lack of knowledge of history. this is from the huffington post; research on the numbers who die in conflicts. there has been an increase the past few years. while there was a brief period in the post-war years which was less troubled than today, we now have syria and ukraine which are brutal wars that would have been top of the list during the post-war period. but to state, like [professor of international health] hans rosling does, that syria is the most severe war since wwii simply shows a lack of knowledge of history. have they forgotten vietnam, have they forgotten cambodia?

in 1994, 800,000 died in rwanda in a few weeks. the iran-iraq war, the war in afghanistan, the war in iraq – you can make your own list. and you can see here: if you do this subjectively, it creates an emotional impact, and people can say that we now have wwiii because there’s a lot of footage in the media, and i’ve never felt this before, so it must be wwiii, there have never been this many wars, and it must be true. this is why this shouldn’t be dealt with subjectively; we need to approach it as objectively as we can. this is why i use numbers, which is what social scientists do to make things objective. it’s not true there have never been as many wars as now. and during the war in the kongo perhaps 2–4 million people died, which was also recently.

this is not to trivialize the war in syria. like i said, it is one of the most brutal wars that have occurred. but at the same time, the war in syria does not explain what’s happening right now. those are two different things. and that things are bad in syria doesn’t mean that other wars should be trivialized, either. so i’m just going to say a few more words about this. if my explanation is correct, which i can easily support – that this has to do with dismantled border controls, that this is no temporary peak that has been reached. and as the un and the unhcr state in their reports about today’s levels: “this is the new normal”.

there are numbers for how many are refugees, international refugees and asylum seekers – these are three different things. the number of refugees is about 60 million, which fluctuated around 40–45 million over the past 10–20 years, so there has been around a 50% increase. but these are still not record numbers of refugees. i think the record was in 1992, when there were more. what is a record are the internally displaced refugees, because out of these 60 million, 40 million are domestic refugee – e.g. someone who goes from one part of afghanistan to another to escape war or for other reasons. these numbers also include people who flee for other reasons than war – e.g. natural disasters, persecution and such. the un has only tracked these numbers since the late 1980s, and also, the world population has tripled since wwii.

so when people say that never before have as many people been refugees, they’re technically correct, but it’s a bit misleading. sure, it’s a record, but it’s not an international record. it’s definitely not a record when adjusted for population size, and we don’t know how many refugees there were in the 60s and 70s, because no records exist. numbers have only been tracked since the late 80s. further, the number of refugees is not a law of nature, as if people were robots – it depends on how easy it is to flee. the easier it gets, the more people will try it. therefore, what sweden is currently facing is something unique. it’s a momentous issue.

the coming of winter will probably lower the numbers and perhaps also the housing crisis, but currently these numbers are increasing daily. there's no reason to believe that it’ll stop. and it won’t stop because there will be no more migrants left. so like i said, the reason so many people die on the mediterranean is because of policies that have been deliberately implemented by europe’s leaders. and fredrik reinfeldt, [eu commissioner] cecilia malmstrã¶m and those people carry a great responsibility for this. and when you hear about refugees crossing the mediterranean, we can’t just make believe that this is only about those specific thousands of people, and if we accept them, the problem will be solved.

we have to think about if we make a policy change, how will that affect the people it involves? that could be hundreds of millions of people, or at least one hundred million. and as long as there’s an incentive, as long as there are grand prizes in the death lottery, people will continue to come. and the more you accept, and the easier you make it, the more people will come. this is just logical, if you’re able to grasp basic incentives. if you refuse to comprehend this, then you’re an accomplice when more people get killed. if your reaction to pictures of a dead child is to have more of the policies that caused that child’s death, then you’re not a humanist. you’re at best an irrational humanist, which may be better than being a racist egotist, but it’s worse than being a rational humanist.

at the end of this presentation, i will get back to what i think would be preferable solutions. but as long as there’s no understanding of what is happening – if people don’t want to know, and get hysterical, aggressive and stop listening – then i think that with such a life-and-death issue, they are morally culpable. bear in mind that sweden is no small player in this. last year – sweden has 1.9% of the eu population – sweden granted 19% of all residence permits in the eu. so at least 1/5 of all the people who drown in the mediterranean have been enticed to attempt going by sweden. now, what is your question? question (q): – what’s your opinion of the people that are picked up from wrecks by european rescue ships, why are they still being taken to europe, why aren’t they returned to north africa?

answer (a): – it’s not considered humane to do that. australia had the same problem, with several hundred drowning per year, and they instituted strict regulations – perhaps to severe, at least in their implementation. they have some islands, and they decided that everyone who attempts to cross will be taken to these islands, with no chance of being permitted to stay in australia, to ensure people stop coming. there have been reports of harsh conditions on these islands. while i’m not fully informed of whether this is correct, what i can say is that even if that would be the case, it’s just a detail of how they’ve implemented this policy. the policy itself has been a success.

this year, i believe a single person has died, from several hundred just a few years ago. so there’s been a 99.5% decrease. i find it interesting how [swedish national television] svt in their reporting claims as a fact that this has had no effect. they just straight out lie through their teeth for the cameras. and who’s going to call them on it? they get away with these lies. it’s not like one (state tv) channel’s news program is going to expose the other (state tv) channel’s news program. but obviously, these policies work. they say we won’t accept anyone, we will send back those who come, or have them stay in a refugee camp that is not very pleasant – because the reason people come is to get a better life.

if they’re aware that they won’t be able to stay, they won’t attempt to come, and they won’t drown. i must also say that people react in this way because of the false image that has been created: that this is a question of life and death – that these people would never have attempted to come except that their only alternative is to get killed – that they’re fleeing death camps. and again, [sweden’s largest daily] dn and others compare this with the jews who fled from concentration camps. so if you’re against receiving asylum seekers, that’s equivalent to racists who wanted jews to get gassed to death in wwii. and a lot people believe this. they genuinely believe that this is the actual reality of the situation. but this is what it’s really like: the un has statistics on this, and very few come straight from war zones – extremely few. even people who originally come from countries where there is war have first gone to countries like turkey

– where there isn’t war, and where they have found shelter. the un has tracked this, and in their polls, 90% of the respondents state that they have first stayed in turkey before coming to greece. alternatively, they come from countries where there is no war, like eritrea and ethiopia, and maybe go through libya. and why do they come to sweden? in order to get to sweden, as i think most everyone knows – fredrik reinfeldt has flown over scandinavia so he has probably seen this – you have to first pass through at least germany and denmark. and these are perfectly ok countries. there’s no war in denmark, as far as i’m aware. there are no grenades, like the prime minister says that people are fleeing from. but people don’t want to stay in denmark, people prefer sweden, because it’s easier to get residence permits here,

it’s easier to bring in your relatives, and denmark has cut back on benefits and this is what people themselves say openly if you ask them – we’d rather be in sweden. they don’t lie and say that it’s because we have grenades raining down on us in denmark. this is why this case they’re trying to make is completely invalid: “if you’re against this these people will die”. i wouldn’t have died had i stayed in iran. this image that everyone is fleeing death camps, and that no one would ever risk a 2% chance of drowning in the mediterranean in order to be able to live in a welfare state in northern europe. during the transatlantic migration – while they mostly didn’t drown, but died from disease and starvation – 5–10% of those trying to get from europe to america perished.

naturally, people take risks with their lives. perhaps irrationally, perhaps risking the lives of their children. and the refugee smugglers don’t care, which is why they use the cheapest boats, they don’t give the children life vests, so they drown – because it’s cheaper. they want to maximize their profits. this is business. the mafia and others who organize this maximize their profits, find ways to cram in the most people the cheapest way possible. and people go, we can call it out of desperation, but it’s not like they’re in fear of getting killed where they come from – people aren’t being killed in turkey – it’s because they want a higher quality of life. it’s not something we need to moralize about – like calling people “luxury refugees” and such – it’s a perfectly normal human reaction, when there’s a much higher quality of life in sweden than in turkey.

and it’s probably preferable to seek asylum in sweden than in stricter countries like italy. this is incentive enough, and nothing to moralize about. and correspondingly, we can’t moralize about the fact that sweden has a right to make decisions about its migration policies based on self-interest. ok, i’m going to change tracks now. i will return to this specific issue, but i’ll now explain the consequences of the immigration that sweden has already received – if we’re pondering how much immigration that sweden should have in the future. like i said earlier, people are being lied to about almost everything, in every aspect: they lie about what is taking place, how it’s developing and why, and they also lie about how it has affected sweden. immigration, from an economic perspective, is not a uniform phenomenon. it depends on the country that takes in the immigrant, and it depends on the immigrant himself.

sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t work that well, and sometimes it’s somewhere in between – it depends. for a country, immigration is similar to recruitment for an organization. that is to say, it depends on who it is you’re recruiting, from an economic point of view. if an organization has a great employee from the royal institute of technology who does a great job, it can’t make the argument that therefore, it’s always good to always recruit, and to recruit anyone. that would be illogical, and it’s the same with immigration. there are historical examples of successful episodes of immigration; foremost and the most well-known being the transatlantic immigration to the united states, which chiefly came from western europe.

since the us is so economically and culturally dominant, not least in sweden, this is what has shaped our views of immigration – the american example. but it’s one country, and it took place under very specific historical circumstances. since around 80% of popular culture is american, many swedes think that they live in the us, and say things like “sweden has always been a nation of immigrants”, which isn’t true. but they believe what they see on tv. there are also other examples of successful immigration, like people from the soviet union who were jews, or at least claimed to be, who went to israel after the fall of the berlin wall. these people were often highly educated and integrated quickly into society. this is a good example.

there are also other examples, like the immigration of highly educated people to canada and australia. less successful examples – because they’re there, too – include france’s immigration from its former colonies, which has let to large-scale alienation, permanent poverty, social problems, criminality, thousands of burned cars, and so on. another example is the romani migration to sweden and western europe, and while the romani are a very exposed group, that doesn’t change the fact that they for various reasons – i’m sure through no fault of their own - haven’t been able to become integrated in the west. sweden has had romani immigration for a long time, and according to the studies that have been carried out, around 80% have no jobs. according to a study of the romani in malmã¶, only 0.5% have secondary school education.

there aren’t any composite statistics for this, but there are local statistics. all the studies i quote are official government studies. and there was one government study about perhaps the largest romani school in sweden, rosengã¥rdsskolan, which has since been shut down, and which was the school for hundreds of romani students. the national agency for education asked the school how many of its roma students proceeded to secondary education, and the answer was that it had never happened in the school’s history. and this failure – sweden’s failure – most people don’t know about, because it’s a sensitive issue. and when someone like dick harrison at [daily paper] svd says that this shows a lack of historical knowledge, and that all immigration has always been successful.

so what does he have to say about this? most likely, he’s not aware of this. he only knows about the positive aspects, because you get socially rewarded from talking about the walloons and so on. speaking of walloons: around 1,000–2,000 walloons came to sweden during a 50-year period, excluding those who moved back home in the 1600s. since people mix, many swedes have some walloon blood – around 100,000 swedes have some form of walloon ancestry. but to use these 2,000 – and sweden had population of around one million at the time – to claim that sweden has always been a nation of immigrants, then you have no knowledge of history. you have no sense of proportions. the same applies to the german immigrants who came during the medieval period,

and we also have the numbers for this, it’s not something you can just vaguely make up – they were around 1 or 2% of the population, during a long period of time. there were also finnish immigrants who settled the “finnmarks” [backwoods] of vã¤rmland and cultivated the land – they were around 13–14,000 people. at the time, this was a huge wave of immigrants. it shaped local identity, and people still remember it. but they were still very few. during wwii, 150,000 came of which – according to [statistics sweden] scb – most returned home. so at the end of wwii, there were fewer than 200,000 immigrants in sweden. this included everyone who had ever moved to sweden before this date. at this time, sweden had a population of around 6 million people.

so even these comparisons lack relevance for what is taking place today. and almost consistently, no numbers are provided. timbro (liberal think tank) – johan norberg, fredrik segerfeldt and migro – published a book claiming that sweden had unrestricted immigration in the 1800s, something they made up and which is inaccurate, legally speaking. during this period, sweden gets around 5,000 immigrants per year, of which the majority are returning swedes from north america, and the rest are west europeans and similar. in this book, which has been praised for proving that sweden had unrestricted immigration, there is not a single number showing how many who came. they just use anecdotes and the walloon example, over and over,

until people start thinking that the walloon immigration was some kind of huge event. returning to examples of successful immigration over which there has been a debate: the recent mexican immigration to the us, guest workers in germany, somali immigration to the us and canada – i would say that these, too, are examples of failed immigration. others disagree. the existing numbers point in different directions, so at least there’s room for debate about it. regarding the guest workers in germany: their numbers have been vastly exaggerated, german studies also show that they contribute less to the welfare state, they have larger numbers who go on early retirement, and so on. but some of them worked hard, at least at the time, and they had a high degree of employment. so that goes both ways.

somali immigration to canada – which both the government and various think tanks have raved about – claiming that it’s sweden’s fault that somalis are not doing well, and that they’re doing really well in the uk, canada and minnesota. this is not true, and there are numbers on this. according to canadian statistics, the somalis are the poorest group in the country. 46% of them are employed, in sweden 25% of them are employed – on the other hand, canada and the us have very low wages, so it’s not like they’re actually earning a lot more than they do in sweden. it’s just that in the us, the half who do have jobs earn around 13.000 [swedish crowns] per month, while in sweden, 25% work and receive average wages, or slightly below. that’s the only difference. moreover, in england 20–25% have jobs. just like in sweden.

still, it’s been claimed – just google this – in anecdotal articles, without any numbers, how fantastically well somalis are doing in england, which is said to prove that it’s sweden’s fault; that sweden has to abolish its employment protection laws, and things like that. sweden has the highest numbers of asylum based immigration, which is why it’s not easy to compare sweden with countries with totally different immigration policies. when you compare people from the same countries, with the same reasons for seeking asylum - and studies have done this - there are no apparent differences. they’re doing as well in canada as in sweden. i believe canada has slightly higher salaries, but otherwise there’s no difference. to quote george borjas from harvard, the world’s most quoted scholar in this field, himself a cuban immigrant:

“the most important lesson of the research is that the economic impact of immigration will vary by time and place, and that immigration can be either beneficial or harmful.” then we go to sweden – sweden/finland – the country where modern vital statistics were invented in 1749, when the charting authority was formed. so there’s probably no country who has better historical data, yet it’s also a country where this data is almost never used – a very interesting paradox – and where people believe in totally absurd myths about their own country. anyway. in 1940, 1% was born outside of sweden. currently, it’s 16%, and has now probably passed 17%. by now, i mean by the end of 2014. another 5% have two parents who were born in another country, and are counted as having immigrant background, which is an official, statistical term.

that’s 21%. of these 21%, half are european immigrants. it’s useful to understand these numbers – only around 10% of the population are non-european immigrants. there’s still no more than that. lately, there’s been an increase. but the numbers haven’t been that high. and some of them emigrate. but last year, sweden had a greater influx of immigrants than the us had at the peak of the transatlantic migration, adjusted for population. and this is net immigration. those who return home have been deducted. it’s interesting that sweden has greater immigration than the usa had in the 19th century – and that is before the recent surge. despite this, [minister for integration] erik ullenhag on the government’s fact page, timbro, the extreme left and others, claim that sweden has very little immigration.

this means they lie even about something as simple as the number of immigrants arriving. click on a number, there’s no room for interpretation! everyone can agree that the swedish statistics agency is not controlled by [sweden democrats leader] jimmie ã…kesson. but they lie even about this. and it’s easy for them to do. the general public gets confused. they don’t know how to navigate statistics. the go clicking on web sites like migration info, unaware that it’s a propaganda site by the [pro-immigration] center party. and the media quotes these false numbers and sow confusion. [artist/comedian] henrik schyffert claimed that sweden received 40,000 immigrants last year. i don’t even know where he got that number from. it’s not even a plausible lie. i think he just made it up.

or maybe he googled it and came across a disinformation website, and he believes it because he wishes to believe in the low estimate. it’s interesting that it’s possible to lie about something so simple, something so easy to verify, about which there’s so little room for interpretation, as the number of people arriving. then how easy is it to lie, deceive, dupe and fabricate in complex issues like economic consequences? if someone is not being honest about the number of people arriving, then you shouldn’t trust a single word of the rest that person has to say. because this is so easy to check. anyway. . and they confuse people by claiming that people emigrate – and they do, which i’ve included in these numbers but refugees don’t usually emigrate, but migrant laborers and students do, in high numbers

- after ten years, the majority have gone back home – but for the refugees, after ten years, 90% are staying. quite logically. also, there’s a net emigration of native-born, who have a greater tendency to emigrate than the immigrants. around 5,000 more people leave than those who return, which is important to adjust for when calculating net numbers – so an emigrating swedish born person is not subtracted from an immigrating iranian, with a result of zero net immigration. sweden is the country which has the greatest gap in employment between native-born and foreign born in the oecd. no country is worse at this than sweden. it changes from year to year, last year holland was the country that was the worst at this, but now sweden has reclaimed the gold medal. and importantly, the swedish definition of “employment” is very broad. people on long term sick leave are counted as being employed, people in labor department programs are included,

if you work very little and have almost no income, you’re still counted as employed, because you’re doing something. there are other ways to measure employment which i prefer, like employment rate which is based on actually acquired income. these numbers are less uncertain. regardless, most western european welfare states have a gap. there really is no example of a western european welfare state that has been able to successfully integrate low-qualified, non-western immigrants. there are certain countries that do better, in two categories. one is the anglo-saxon economies, which usually receive a different type of immigrants, and have much more liberal policies and so on. the other is certain countries like italy, where low-skilled immigrants do better than the italians themselves are doing.

again, one reason for this is that they don’t accept as many refugees, these are low-skilled laborer immigrants. the other reason is that this method compares the immigrants with country’s native population. if the native population has a very low level of employment, like the italians have, then the immigrants do better. but in sweden, the native population has a much, much higher employment level, which makes the immigration appear correspondingly less successful. number of people employed is a term used by statistics swedish, which like i said is more reliable, but even this number is overrated, because 1) it still includes a number of labor department programs, and 2) these have increased, they doubled under (former prime minister) reinfeldt – who doubled labor department programs and called it real jobs,

and [former minister for integration] erik ullenhag who declared that these are real jobs, because you go to work. regardless of it being financed by the tax payer’s money. but that was his definition – if you go there, then it’s a real job. this gap between immigrants and native-born has widened since 1990. and it’s not true, like you keep hearing again and again, that immigration is now working better. these are lies. they manipulate. or they don’t actually know. either way, they’re spreading falsehoods. during 2013, which are the most recent numbers available, 58% of immigrants aged 20 to 64 were employed. if you deduce second generation immigrants from the native-born population, 84–85% were employed. and 52% of non-european immigrants. european immigrants have higher numbers. bosnians, who are the best performing group, were at 69% employment.

so even the group that is doing best, has a level of exclusion that is twice that of native swedes. on top of this, there are major disparities in net income. it’s not only whether people have jobs, but immigrants tend to more often have low-qualified, low-paid jobs. you had a question? q: – could you clarify the difference between gainful employment and employment? ts: – employment is based on surveys that are mailed out to people, thousands of them every month, asking them “what are you doing?”. and they fill it out – “i go to work”, “i’m on sick leave”, whatever it is. and by definition, in sweden, e.g. long term sick leave counts as employment. as long as you haven’t quit your job - you’re employed.

if you work one hour a week and make almost nothing - you’re employed. and if you’re on a labor department program – you’re employed. and a great many people are in these programs now. a lot of people. gainful employment is based on something else entirely. it’s based on tax registry data on salary statistics filed by employers. sweden has register data, we have personal identification numbers, so we keep tabs on everyone. everything they do. and the authorities can cross reference these records. if you notice that the authorities know a whole lot about individuals, it’s because the personal id number allows all the data that’s been collected about me to be accessed, effortlessly, by the authorities.

they make it hard for people in general to access it, but you can if you’re a researcher requesting anonymized statistics. and let me just briefly mention that there are those who call this “ethnic registration”. ethnic registration means that i know your ethnicity, it’s been recorded with your name on it. to have information on group averages for hundreds of thousands of people is statistics, not ethnic registration. the gainful employment is calculated by the statistics agency by processing the employer’s records using complex mathematic models. in practice, if your yearly income is $5,700, you are considered gainfully employed. these two numbers differ quite a lot, i must say. but even this number - the gainful employment – is not completely free from inapposite data,

e.g. the 4% who are in labor department programs are still included. so it’s still not free from that. these are numbers from 2010, the lighter graphs are immigrants, the darker graphs are those who are born in sweden. this gap exists for all ages, and if you look here, it’s interesting to see that for those who (former prime minister) reinfeldt labeled “swedes in the midst of life”, there’s still close to full employment. almost everyone is working. for swedish-born men between 40 and 45, it’s 90%. and immigrants never reach these levels. going back for a second – they like to manipulate in order to embellish, and they’ve often done it by claiming that on average, it takes seven years before an immigrant gains employment. this claim has been circulated by public service media, most other media, many politicians - even many sweden democrats repeat these claims.

these claims are utter nonsense. after seven years, one half of immigrants have jobs; refugees and next-of-kin immigrants. slightly more than one half of all immigrants after seven years. and these numbers are based on an old report stating that after seven years, half the group had worked, or had been in labor department programs, at some time. also, it wasn’t seven years, it was eight years. and it wasn’t right after having immigrated, it was after introductory programs - so in practice it was nine years until they had some form of employment; which they also may have lost. and e.g. a six month labor department program still counted as having a job. if it were the case that 50% of the population of stockholm were unemployed

no one would think to claim that on average, stockholmers have jobs. ok? this way of putting it, that half of them are working, that half are employed, it’s a way to deliberately manipulate. it sounds credible, it makes the problem seem less significant. people think seven years is not that big a deal. and it’s very common to hear clichã©s like that it takes 25 years for a swede to start working, and since it just takes 7 years for an immigrant, the immigrant is actually more valuable to society. firstly, that people have employment after 7 years is incorrect. after about 15 years, around 60% are employed. after that, it increases slowly, but the numbers don’t really go up, because after 30 years people exit the labor market, since immigrants don’t live forever, the typical immigrant is 35 years old when he arrives, and on average, he retires at 63. the difference is that if someone arrives when they’re 35 and get a job after 15 years,

that leaves them less than 15 years to pay back to society, while a swede who starts working at 25 have 40 years to pay back. and needless to say, researchers have taken this into consideration. obviously, it’s not like henrik schyffert or some other comedian is the first to have discovered that the immigrants don’t have to pay to go to school. the previous conservative government’s minister of labor, elisabeth svantesson, her dissertation is about this. so she’s fully aware of it. and the numbers i quote are here, they haven’t changed. we’ve had roughly the same numbers for 15 years. and the numbers i quoted earlier, it got worse in 1990 when the gap was at its widest, then it got better during the crisis in the nineties. but since 2000, it has stabilized, there has been no change since.

you can quote the numbers from any year. and people think that by now these immigrants have been integrated into society – without considering that meanwhile, a new, large wave of immigrants have arrived, and they start from zero. this is a stable balance. but allow me to change tracks somewhat: what’s really the reason for this? one explanation that the swedish left likes is to blame swedish racism, the center right blames socialism, and the sweden democrats blame the immigrants for being lazy and unwilling to work. none of that is correct. the central, fundamental explanation lies in human capital, and productivity – which depends on human capital. it depends on education, work experience, and language skills. so once it’s controlled for human capital, most of this gap – albeit not entirely – disappears.

an immigrant born in sweden, with a swedish education, has more or less the same income as a swede with exactly the same background. pisa measures children, but there’s also piak, which measures adults. you seldom hear about piak, but it’s at least as interesting. in 2012, adults in 23 countries were gives tests in math, languages, and computer skills. so this measures the objective level of knowledge of adults – their human capital. and while the results of young swedes has had a sharp decline, the results for people of patrik’s generation, who went to the old, proper school system, are still among the highest in the world. sweden topped the results in europe when these tests were carried out last time. once more, the gap between immigrants and the native-born is the widest in the world.

the gap in language skills is the widest in the world. there’s a very strong correlation between the gap in human capital and the gap in employment. this correlation is 0.75. so it’s pretty simple. there are studies that clearly show that immigrants are being discriminated against in the labor market, i.e. if you take two identical rã©sumã©s, sign one with “mohammed” and “sven” on the other, and send them to employers, then 29% of those with a swedish-sounding name will get replies, while those with an immigrant name get 20%. this is evidence of discrimination. but it doesn’t tell us why, or what the mechanisms are.

economists have two useful terms for this when evaluating discrimination. - statistical discrimination and preference based discrimination. preference based discrimination is: “i don’t like you, i don’t want your kind of people in my company, regardless whether you’re skilled or not”. that is racist discrimination. statistical discrimination is “i don’t know anything about you, or at least i know too little about you, and a rã©sumã© doesn’t tell the whole story, but i do know that the group to which you belong – whether it be males, or those who have gone to a certain school – they’re generally less productive than this other group. so instead of spending a lot of energy evaluating you as a candidate, i’ll make it easy for myself and say that it’s likely that this person is less competent, doesn't speak swedish as well, or whatever, so i’m not going to hire you”.

and the numbers we have for sweden are much more consistent with statistical discrimination. as an example, companies who have a lot of immigrants employed are more likely to discriminate. and immigrants appear likely to discriminate against other immigrants, as well. these are indications that this is not only to do with preferences. i think it's a very strong indication, that immigrants who have been adopted; if it was due to racism if it was due to racism – they look just like all the rest – but they do almost as well as the native-born, with just minor differences. regarding this, you should know that there are also minor differences between adopted swedes and other swedes. so adoption itself seems to have some kind of negative impact on the outcome of people’s lives. even for immigrants who are born in sweden to foreign-born parents who have swedish educations, most of this gap disappears.

why would a racist swede discriminate a swedish-born arab any less, or any more, than an arab from arabia? that wouldn’t be logical, really. but it would be logical if this was due to statistical discrimination. needless to say, this is an awful thing for people to be subjected to. because they’re powerless, they can’t do anything about it. and those who complain that no immigrants are discriminated against are wrong. i’ve never been discriminated against in the labor market. i’m an academic, productivity can be measured very objectively, and so on. but i’ve seen first-hand how friends of mine, who aren’t in my field, have been discriminated against.

i have friends who have changed their names so they don’t have to deal with it, because they find it hard. even if they’re iranian patriots, they swallow their pride and do it. and there’s also a degree of subjectivity in this – the immigrant might make more spelling errors, you could magnify that and use it as an argument to say that the individual is not as good. it’s also clearly the case in the housing market, on house rental websites where people don’t want to rent to immigrants as much, even with identical applications. when i tried to find an apartment for my father, i realized that it was very difficult. when i was at the stockholm school of economics, we couldn’t get into the clubs around stureplan. we had a chance of getting in if we came early, went with a group of girls,,

but if a group of iranians from the school of economics tried to go to a club, they weren’t allowed in. another example is airlines, who discriminate against me all the time by making extra security checks. personally, i don’t really have a problem with this. because if i were designing the system – the airlines use to spot terrorists, i have to have a moral understanding of their perspective. – i would also check young males born in the middle east more than i would check old ladies from japan. so that's manageable. but most people do get resentful by being treated this way. my own brother has been really angry when he has been treated this way, from racism. anyway – if it were the case that the discrimination is statistical,

it could be mitigated by having standards, insisting on people finding more information, allowing for a bit more leeway when it comes to language skills and so on, maybe also showing more understanding that immigrants might not know all the social codes. but basically, there’s nothing that can be done about racist discrimination, other than changing the group average. in this case by increasing productivity and level of education. immigration is a process, which theoretically, very efficiently, destroys a country’s specific human capital. so if you were to move to china tomorrow, regardless of the fact that i’m sure most of you are really productive, very competent and very successful, most of you would have a very hard time initially. you don’t know the language, you don’t know the social codes, you don’t know the business culture,

you have no social network – through which a very large part of economic transactions occur – but what happens is that over a few years, the immigrants to the host country improve their human capital faster – they learn the language, they acquire networks, learn tonality, rules for conflict, all kinds of things. this used to be the case in the united states, but unfortunately it isn’t anymore, because it’s been decreasing but after seven years, the immigrants caught up, and then they outperformed the others. this was the case just 100-120 years ago. it took 10–15 years from the swedish-americans, then they surpassed the americans. but 1) this process isn’t very fast, if you don’t get a job, if too many people come at the same time and overload the labor market, then many will find themselves stalled, never reaching the point of convergence.

in the case of sweden: 1) the immigrants and refugees whom sweden are receiving have a very low level of education, and everyone who claims otherwise is blatantly lying – we have data on this. and 2) sweden is one of the world’s foremost knowledge-based economies, with a very small proportion of low-paying jobs. and at the same time that this immigration is taking place, we have a parallel process in the entire western world, where technology, globalization, and robotization are making menial jobs disappear, replacing people with machines. what happens in practice is that the middle segment moves downward, replacing lower paid jobs – and while some service sector jobs are also created, that increase is nowhere near as fast as the erosion of industrial jobs. just go to the grocery store and see: just compared with 10 years ago, there are fewer counters, people use their own machines to ring up items, and this means that there’s less demand for those kinds of jobs.

this means that these days, sweden doesn’t have full employment for low educated native-borns, either. let me get back to this: this is the education level. many - the government, public service tv, the prime minister, and others like the minister of labor - have claimed that the syrians who are coming to sweden are highly educated, that there’s a “windfall of competence”, that these are doctors, scientists and academics. they either present fake numbers, or no numbers at all. [swedish national television] svt claims that 37% are highly educated or have (college/university) education. that is very impressive! it’s a lot more than in sweden. so what have they done here?

well, they have redefined the term (college/university) education to include any kind of post-secondary education, for any length of time. so if you have six months training as a hair dresser in syria, you’re part of this 37%. and then they compare this number with the real numbers of highly educated in sweden, which means three years of post-secondary school education. this is blatant cheating. the knowingly mislead by saying that the 37% have “up to” two years education. then you would think that they at least follow this two year limit. but think of this sentence: “up to two years”. you could just as well say “up to a hundred years” or “up to two years”. it means everybody. but they just put in the wording “two years”. they’re using the public employment service numbers.

ams (the employment service) refuses to register, or at least report, the number who actually do have higher education, according to the higher criteria. sweden does have an established way of assessing this, it’s measured by the statistics department with great precision, all researchers use this method, it has never been disputed, and it has been used to assess the syrians who came during 2009–2013. this is measured by sending out a survey. this also how the [swedish public employment service] ams measures this. this has nothing to do with validation. no documentation is required. but it seems like it’s an impossible pedagogical task for me to explain this, to the sweden democrat types as well as to the general public. they just start raving about people having no documentation and so on.

first of all, most people do have documentation to prove their education. 8 when you read that 90% have no identification, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have it. it means they’re not showing it. because it’s detrimental to their asylum application, it’s better not to show it. that doesn’t mean that everyone has thrown it away. it’s also not the case that these countries in the middle east are medieval, that people live in tents with camels. it’s not like if you lose your syrian passport you will never get it back, that you’d become stateless forever. these countries also have registers, so you can get your identification reissued should you need it. and people often carry it with them. anyway – these numbers are based on what people report about their level of education,

and we know from experience that most people don’t lie about this - there’s not much to be gained by lying in an anonymous statistic. and when spot checks are made, perhaps 5–10 exaggerate their level of education, but most people tell the truth. the immigrants themselves aren’t claiming that 37% of the syrians are highly educated. it’s a lie that is perpetrated by swedish journalists and politicians, which they have made up, in the immigrant’s names. like i said, it’s 26% in sweden – surveys aren’t used for swedes, education registers are used to gauge them, as well as immigrants who have been educated in sweden; university registers are used for that. for the immigrants, surveys and other ways of measuring are used. registers are correlated, and so on. this is really interesting, we’re in a situation where the national state television are dismissing the numbers by the [statistics sweden] scb.

they’re saying they don’t accept the scb numbers. and they make up excuses that are incorrect, saying that the answer frequency is only 40% – it’s not, it’s way over 80%. they’re just ignorant. and they say, “the new numbers are totally different” – they’re not. the recent numbers by the employment office are unchanged. we have a situation where svt are autocratic, they do whatever they want. they don’t like what the scb numbers are showing – that it’s 10% of the syrians, and immigrants in general, who have higher education in contrast with 26% of the general population. they didn’t like this, so they made up their own number. and they made this claim, they lied, and they denied having done so.

media and public service are self-regulating. if journalists aren’t scrutinizing each other, they can lie as much as they want. which they do. it’s interesting. so how many syrians actually do have higher education? according to the world bank, 4% of the syrian population have higher education. syria is not a high-tech country. have you ever heard of a high-tech syrian company? syria is even worse than its neighbors. even for the middle east, they’re among the worst educated countries – much lower than iraq, jordan and so on. iraq is a reasonably well educated country, as are the refugees from there.

the iranians are even better educated than the swedes are. that syria is well educated is just made up. further, syria has one of the lowest qualities of education, according to the world bank – just below saudi arabia. and historically, we know how they inflate the numbers – by including short-term vocational training. the fact is that they include koran schools, and call that university education. they include welding courses. that’s a post-secondary school vocational education, like our prime minister has. these are not university educations. and these lies – the fact that svt have repeated these claims, again and again and again, in very exaggerated terms,

is the best example for people who think that the media doesn’t lie. the media does lie. i learned that in school, applying source criticism. i know that fox news, berlusconi’s and putin’s channels sometimes lie. but today, there’s been some sort of delegitimization, where if you suspect that a journalist is sometimes liberal with the truth, you’re declared a conspiracy theorist. they’re trying to delegitimize critical thinking, as well as source criticism – things i learned in swedish school, where i learned to be critical of the media. now we have an atmosphere where if the scb is saying one thing, and public service tv is saying another, and i rather put my faith in the scb, it’s called a conspiracy theory. this is a way to delegitimize.

noam chomsky has a very good quote about media bias: “that is not a conspiracy theory, that is an institutional analysis”. the ability to deceive is function of power. everyone is this room has lied at some time, in our everyday lives. people lie sometimes. it’s not conspiring to point out when liars lie. if a politician lies, and it can be established that he did, there’s nothing conspirational about that. sweden has developed an atmosphere where lies are tolerated, where everything is reduced to subjective opinions, even statistical facts. “i don’t like these facts!” – well, it’s not up to you to like them or not.

they’ve created an image where anyone who is not a militant slave to authority, believing every word the media says, is depicted as a tinfoil hat, conspiracist kook. this is a very anti scientific attitude that has developed among certain groups, perhaps among the youth – and it’s a dangerous attitude. what i learned at the university of chicago, and also in swedish schools, was that i should always scrutinize all the facts, and always ask for sources. it’s ok to question anyone; anyone can be wrong at some time, most people are dishonest sometimes, and if there’s nothing to regulate this, then the incentive to deceive will become even greater. and why are the media being dishonest? because it’s a question of power. we have an information economy, we have a democracy. in a democracy, information is power.

q: – what’s your source that iran and iraq are so highly educated? a: – scb is my source. q: – they seem very successful… a: – do you think iraq is a successful country? q: – no, i don’t think they’re very successful. a: – ok. people in iraq, in general, have lower education than in sweden. but iran is not far off, anymore. but those who come to sweden tend to be more highly educated. i think i have numbers for iraq here – 20% have a post-secondary school education, compared with 26% for sweden. q: – but the countries in general?

a: – i didn’t say the countries in general were better educated than sweden, i said they were better than syria, you misunderstood me. and the fact is that iran is a very well educated country, for being a developing country. iran has an educated culture, they’ve spent a lot of resources on it, and if i recall correctly, the number with university education iran is 16% compared with 19% in sweden. so it’s not that far behind. however, there’s a higher number who are low skilled. my sources are scb and the world bank. it’s good that you question me. also, these people with shorter vocational educations, they insist on aggregating them in order for the syrian numbers to look better.

so they’ve come up with this two-year definition, where they claim that 32% of syrians have two years of post-secondary grade education. but the swedish public employment service is refusing to report how many of these have post-secondary grade education, using the established way of measuring this. but some things we do know: e.g. 1.4–1.5% of the general population have post-graduate education, but only 0.3% of those who are in the employment office’s job stimulus programs – which is from where public service tv got their numbers. it’s possible that if you would count absolute numbers, there’s never been a greater number of people coming who have postgraduate educations – but there’s also never been a greater number of refugees. we have to calculate the percentages. it’s always the group average that affects the country, not the absolute numbers.

and they constantly talk about doctors, and keep repeating it. but they never provide any numbers. there’s this constant mention of syrian doctors. so i contacted the public employment service – i may have sent them ten emails. i had to threaten them using legal language, and threaten to report them to the parliamentary ombudsmen. at long last, they responded. so how many doctors have come? what they do is they report anyone who has any form of medical education, yet again including vocational education. so of the 50,000 who were in the job stimulus program, 41 were doctors, who had had their papers approved and were looking for work. last year, fewer than 200 people from outside the eu were approved as doctors by the national board of health and welfare. and this includes the us, china etc.

so we know that there aren’t very many doctors, and my joke is that the prime minister has probably mentioned syrian doctors more times than there actually are syrian doctors. they’re so few, that [minister for justice and migration] morgan johansson could go through their cases one by one and validate them himself. it’s very telling that they keep repeating this, but they never say how many of these doctors there are. it’s a fairly obvious question to ask, if someone claims that huge numbers of doctors are coming. well, how many are they? they never say, and they’re never pressured to answer. the journalists and the parliament never pressure them, the only thing they do is start raving about validation and other things that have nothing to do with the issue. so, how many claim to be doctors? can’t they at least tell us that? that would be fairly basic.

just google syrian doctors, and you will get thousands of hits. we’ve been bombarded by the svt with this, and despite this, no one has ever asked them how many doctors who have come. and naturally, if 50,000 refugees arrive of whom only a small portion are doctors, this will lead to a greater shortage of doctors in sweden. my final point, about post-secondary education, we know from experience that short syrian post-secondary educations aren’t in very big demand in sweden, like people with a syrian mechanic’s apprentice education. but highly educated syrians find jobs. 70% of them work. a perfectly fine number. but there aren’t any differences between those with a secondary education and those with brief post-secondary educations. but it’s not relevant to try to mix those in with the numbers. they do it to embellish the situation.

and they’ve been saying this for a long time now. the public employment service has a new director general, mikael sjã¶berg – cousin of [former prime minister] gã¶ran persson – who has been reported to the parliamentary committee on the constitution for corruption. he worked for gã¶ran persson, who then made his cousin the head of the national institute for working life, which is a research institute, despite the fact that he only had a two-year college degree as an auto mechanic. this was a scandal, as people were infuriated that gã¶ran persson’s cousin, with just a two year auto mechanic education, was allowed to be head of a research institution. then [former prime minister] reinfeldt made him the head of [the public employment service] ams. after this, despite the fact that the underlying numbers remained exactly the same, they began to change their rhetoric,

and started playing along that this is going fantastically well, people are getting jobs, they are highly educated, and so on. these are numbers that are just a few days old. they update their figures every six months. this was released just a few days ago, and i didn’t see any media about it. 6% of new arrivals find jobs after they exit the two-year establishment program. and this number hasn’t increased since last year, or the year before. yet they keep claiming that this is something new that’s happening, now the highly educated are coming! then why aren’t they finding jobs? this is not consistent with the story about a “competence windfall”. but it is consistent with my story – that there is no change. most immigrants are low skilled; a small group have higher education, and they find jobs, but it’s not enough. and even for those that do, it takes time.

the same report shows that 49% have only primary school education, of which 33% have less than 9 years of school. in sweden, only 10% of those with jobs have only primary school education. half of the refugees, but 10% of the jobs. this is the fundamental explanation of why they’re never becoming integrated in society, no matter how many billions you keep throwing at the problem. it’s also the reason the [previous] center-right government made no progress with this either, despite all their programs. it’s not the immigrants’ fault, it’s not the refugees’ fault. if we look at female dependents, half of them respond that they have never worked in their home countries. it’s really hard to find a job in sweden. it requires work-life experience, education, and so on – for young swedes as well. so just imagine how hard it is for a woman at midlife, from some other country.

she’s never gone to school, she’s never worked. and then she’s supposed to compete in this labor market. blaming her is absurd. it’s also absurd to lie about it, or blaming swedish employers and calling them racists. in sweden, working didn’t use to pay that much. in 1990, the difference between a household where people were working and where people didn’t work were around 25%. the difference wasn’t very big, because the welfare state was equalizing it. but that was then. that has changed. benefits have been lowered substantially, and taxes have been lowered. wages have increased, and wage dispersion has increased. now, i believe the difference is 80% between working and not working. that's a very big difference. and your benefits and your pension are tied to how much you have worked. for the great majority, working pays off. and we know that immigrants try to find work, even more so than unemployed swedes.

it’s complete nonsense that the immigrants prefer to be poor and unemployed. of course they don’t, why would they want that? but they can’t get any jobs. the employers are showing weak demand. people say we need the center-righ approach – lower the wages, that’s the solution to all problems. lower the wages. it’s a keynesian solution. and abolish [the employment protection act] las. and lower the taxes. so, they have the same solutions to all problems. it’s exactly the same arguments as during the 80s, thinking that the solutions which were applied then, can be applied to the immigrants in exactly the same way. abolish las, lower the wages, and reduce taxes. there’s a saying: “to the man who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

everything will be solved once we abolish las. but las has already been weakened, a great deal. it’s not 1985 anymore. it’s time to update the worldview. back then, sweden was one of the most regulated countries in the oecd. now, sweden is slightly below the mean. above all, sweden has very flexible forms of temporary employment, so you can try someone out for a few years. and las can be canceled out by negotiation, and so can the “last man in, first man out” rule. also, they have introduced forms of employment with 50–80% subsidies if you hire a refugee. still, this resulted is no more than 40,000 jobs. and when this subsidy runs out, they can’t stay on. and this probably edges out real jobs, as well.

the reason for this is that businesses in a modern knowledge economy aren’t as wage-sensitive as they would have been in a less advanced economy. most organizations in sweden are really productive, they have a really productive work process, they are close-knit, (avoiding) even small disruptions in quality, higher costs etc., and every productive person (in these organizations) needs a middle manager who can lead them. this is why the price sensitivity regarding low-paid work force is low. according to various studies, youth unemployment is estimated to have a demand elasticity of 0.2–0.3%. this means that if the sum of wages fall, if the wage sums are halved, employment will go up by 10%. so you could cut all wages in half and create mass poverty, and it still wouldn’t have a great effect on employment. a small, subtle point is that people claim that immigrants work in the us.

firstly, if we look at low-skilled people from the third world, no western country has high numbers of employment for this group. this includes the uk, the us, the asean and so on. it’s below the mean – everywhere. but the us has coped with it better. they have higher employment numbers. half the somalis work, mexican immigrants work about as much as americans do. but it’s not as simple as low wages being the cause for all this. most likely, and this is what i believe, the strongest effect come from low benefits, and what is called the income effect, which forces people to work. not that it’s profitable for businesses to hire, because wages are lower. the income effect means that if i cut your earnings in half, you will be forced to work. because you want to increase your income. and in the us, if you don’t work, you’ll starve. it’s a bit exaggerated, you will get some benefits but they are really meagre.

there are benefits there, too, but it’s much more limited – you will be poor, for real. so you will be forced to work. when people are hungry, you can have this low-income sector with crappy jobs – with bad terms, long hours, unpleasant tasks and services and so on. in sweden, we know that it’s not enough to lower wages, because we have these experiments with subsidized wages. what would be needed is the [liberal pundit] fredrik segerfeldt solution – the rice diet. i believe he proposes that benefits should be reduced to $115 a month, and wages cut down to $350, and then the immigrants will start working, and we can have free immigration. he has calculated that $50 per month is enough to keep your belly full, with rice –provided you have no other expenses. he thinks that this proves that it’s possible to subsist in sweden on the same level of income as in somalia.

firstly, this solution, and it‘s not a solution – it’s a way to destroy society, for both immigrants and swedes. secondly, this won’t work either, because the immigrants won’t agree to it. when they’re the majority of the voters, why should they? as long as there are people who are highly paid, people are going to want higher benefits. and you cannot survive on $115 a month. you can eat rice, but would get deficiency disorders. you have to have something to cook the rise with – are you supposed to live in a shoe box? these are childish but naively radical ideas. still fredrik segerfeldt and johan norberg are quoted as experts in the media, and are invited to immigration debates by the center party and others. they’re taken seriously in neo-liberal circles.

these childish fantasies – these dystopian fantasies. lower the wage, abolish las – it’s not going to work. that’s not going to create full employment. it’s just wishful thinking. even if that would be a desirable outcome. here’s a graph. after all, isn’t immigration on the whole beneficial to sweden, when more people are working? like [former prime minister] fredrik reinfeldt said: “as the population expands, more people work, and we become more wealthy.” like bangladesh. they have more people working than sweden has. that’s why bangladesh is wealthier than sweden, right? or isn’t it? these are kindergarten calculations, with no adjustment for population. they just measure numbers – the number of new jobs. yes, 300,000 more immigrants are working. but there are 200,000 more immigrants who don’t work. and the population has increased.

during the past years, sweden, under fredrik reinfeldt, has had close to zero economic growth per capita – which is the measurement of prosperity. people learn this literally during their first economy class at university. you take the country’s economic production, and divide it by the country’s population. this is why we don’t think nigeria and india are wealthier than switzerland. if you have enough common sense or economist skills, you realize that you have to divide by population. during the past 8 years, sweden had the worst bnp-per-capita growth figures in the eu, and the least increase in productivity. they managed to spin this into the “swedish economic growth miracle”, using various machinations. this isn’t just because of immigration, not even mostly because of it, it’s because of the crisis, and other things. but this image that sweden is doing fantastically well is nonsense. i can say that i’m pretty alarmed by the signs the economy is showing.

and this is not only because of immigration. there’s a housing bubble: the income per person has grown 3% since 2006, whereas household debts have increased by 60%. these are not signs of a healthy economy. net exports are declining, many businesses have problems and so on. so in this situation, with problems not mainly caused by immigration, they have these problems with immigration as well. what effects have immigration had on sweden? i try to summarize it here, hopefully in a pedagogical way: - 16.4% of the population are immigrants by the end of 2014 - 21% have foreign background, which means that you are either born in another country, or that both your parents are - 49% of all the employed are immigrants

- 55% of the long term unemployed are immigrants - 60% of all benefits go to households with immigrant backgrounds - immigrants make up 20% of those at working age 20–64 - immigrants make up 15% of those who have jobs - immigrants make up 37% of those who don’t have jobs, it’s a group with high levels of social exclusion - immigrants represent 13% of all incomes, much less in taxes - 50% of long imprisonments, according to the economist. there are also positive findings: - 32% of doctors are foreign-born (2/3 are from european countries)

- 70% who run restaurants are immigrants if we factor in everyone with a foreign background – and i’ve only done this because i lack data, otherwise i would have done this consistently – - 21% have foreign background - 13% of those who found companies with more than 50 employees are immigrants - immigrants have 69% of overall child poverty - immigrants make up 76% of members of criminal gangs, according to research by su, based on police registers q: – what’s the difference between unemployed and non-employed? a: – “unemployed” means those actively looking for jobs.

“non-employed” include these, too, but also includes those in labor programs, people on welfare, people who have given up etc. there’s the difference – very good question! these are numbers by the swedish agency for economic and regional growth. you sometimes hear things like “almost one in every five companies is founded by an immigrant or someone with a foreign background”. but those with a foreign background make up more than a fifth of the population, so that’s not very impressive. what’s relevant is always the average for the group. and it’s not true that immigrants are over-represented in entrepreneurship, either. even here, it’s because many immigrants have one man companies, barbers, taxi drivers, pizza parlors, and so on. but with real companies, with many employees, there’s an under-representation of immigrants.

this number here is one of the most important, because it sums up everything i have said: ultimately, the welfare state isn’t based on the number of people who have jobs, or even on people who are employed, or even on income – it’s about the amount of taxes. regardless that the group has a better demographical profile and has a higher number of people at working age, the gap in employment, frequency of employment, the gap in mean income, and the gap in mean wage are so great that immigrants pay around 40% less taxes than native-born – despite being younger. so those who claim that there’s a demographic advantage, that immigrants are younger - that’s true. but that’s a limited advantage, that has to be weighed against the drawbacks. it’s not like you can solve the problems with pensions by taking in young unemployed people and finance them, too,

at the same time, on top of the problems with the pensions. this is quite logical, and there is no study that actually calculate revenues which claims that immigration is a solution to demographic challenges. it would probably exacerbate things, since the immigrants place an additional burden on the system. ultimately, it really isn’t any more complicated than to calculate how much is being put in, and how much comes out. this is a bookkeeping task! and yet, we have so much debate about it. why is that? because media and the politicians don’t like what the research shows. no studies – there have been studies by jan ekberg, storesletten, joakim ruist at the university of gothenburg, and others – none of these studies show that immigration is profitable. the net numbers don’t change. they’ve been stable.

just briefly, the second generation immigrants are having huge problems at school. here’s a recent esu (government agency esu) report: around 80% of those with a swedish background have secondary education by the age of 25, while only 60% of the immigrants who grew up here, and 65% of those born here. this is a ticking time bomb. because when the next generation enters the labor market, this will exacerbate poverty and social conflict, and because people are low-educated, they will have lower wages. it’s hard to catch up once you’re fallen behind. sweden hasn’t succeeded in giving immigrants equivalent educations. that we have government ministers who claim, like [former minister for integration] erik ullenhag, that the immigrant children are doing better at school, and he gets slapped on the back by the media and in social media – “he’s so humanistic!”

a person might also be lying or distorting facts about immigration in order to provide a counter argument to racists. but i can’t help but note that if you’re a minister with a responsibility to provide young immigrants with a good education, and you’re from a party where another minister is responsible for schools, and you know that the truth is that this is a disaster – then you have an opportunistic, egotistical incentive to lie. when we have a climate of debate where lies and embellishments are rewarded – socially, academically and career-wise – then people will lie whenever there’s something to personally gain from doing so. the center-right government lied about their failures, and the media, historically not fans of non-socialist governments, they played along and were sympathetic, because this was all done in the name of humanism and anti-racism. and then it’s ok to lie. and this paves the way for corruption.

and it creates a generation, who are born or raised here, who are now entering the work force, and who don’t have the education that is necessary. and will ullenhag and reinfeldt take responsibility for this? the answer is no. they will just start lying even more. or pass the blame. or employ some rhetorical evasive maneuvers. sweden is not the land of “lagom” [= balanced, just right], like your self-image may be telling you. when it comes to immigration issues, this is the land of extremes. according to the oecd, sweden has the largest number of asylum seekers per person, the largest gap in employment, the third largest gap in pisa results, and the largest increase in inequality since the 80s – i’m quoting the oecd here, this is all oecd. of this increase in inequality, since 1991, 40% can be directly tied to immigration. it’s an entirely mechanical effect.

many people have trouble thinking about this. but if you alter the composition of the population and increase the proportion of the low-paid, the inequality will increase. it’s really very simple. this 40% number – make a calculation including everyone, and then make a calculation including only those born in sweden. the difference is the result of immigration. and that’s a 40% increase in inequality. this is never discussed. the left says something along the lines of “the problem is not immigration, it’s unemployment, or inequality”. but immigration can increase unemployment and inequality. sweden has the largest drop in school results of all countries in the world, since measuring was started, and 29 % it’s caused by immigration. this is a much more significant explanation of the problems with schools, but immigration has contributed to this.

it’s very easy to calculate this mechanical effect, just like a bookkeeping exercise. but it’s much harder to gauge the effects of immigration on the native population. this is a much harder task, which has just been ignored. probably, because then the school results would drop even further, because there are less resources. if we take the first city of the swedish labor movement – malm㶠– the discussion is that they’ve encountered “problems” and “challenges” (which is obviously something different than “problems”). “we’ve had challenges, but over the long term, it’s going well” – because everything that is bad in the short term just has to be good for the long term. we want to look at the long term, and one way of doing that is to look at malmã¶. it’s a city which is 25 years ahead of the rest of sweden, demographically.

in every measurable aspect, malm㶠is at the bottom top 10 of sweden’s 290 municipalities. malm㶠was an average municipality as recently as the 80s. malm㶠also has the highest level of child poverty, close to the lowest growth rate, the widest income disparities, all of that. and malmã¶â€™s finances still break even, because it’s a small city, and the rest of the country contributes with 5 billion per year to the city, and 5 billion to the county of scania. malm㶠also has 12 billion of its own tax revenues. it’s like this: the municipal equalization system was designed for sparsely populated areas. currently, malmã¶, botkyrka and sã¶dertã¤lje receive almost as much as the entire northern sweden. it has become a system for social exclusion.

despite the fact that these three cities have a much smaller population than northern sweden. malm㶠is making do. they don’t have gigantic budget deficits. in sweden, by law, municipalities can’t have deficits for more than three years. but this is only because they get an enormous contribution of money from the rest of sweden, where there are less immigrants, higher income, and so on. but what happens when the rest of sweden catches up with malm㶠– then the rest of sweden will be unable to support malmã¶. and if malm㶠didn’t receive these 5 billion, it would have a larger structural deficit than greece. they can make it work as long as they’re a small city in relation to the rest of the country, and they can construct nice new buildings and projects with tax payer’s money from the rest of the country.

but already, malm㶠is in fact bankrupt. and if this is the long term, you have reasons to be afraid. this is the tax-paying power of the three most multi-cultural cities in sweden – malmã¶, botkyrka and sã¶dertã¤lje. here you can see that botkyrka was average, malm㶠was just below the mean, and sã¶dertã¤lje was considerably above average, with no large differences. and this is where the series start, this is why it starts in 1995. this is long term. it’s a curve that is slowly going down, with no sign of turning back up. if you call this “a long-term investment”, i’d say we make a deal – in 10 years’ time, the cities that have received the highest numbers of refugees will start paying back to the rest of sweden. would the social democrats agree to this? they have claimed that this is an investment.

they’re currently discussing taking eu investment loans in order to finance immigration. it’s not an investment. no calculations show that this is an investment that is recoupable. and even if there’s an initial cost, if you’re to have a return on investment it has to show a profit at some time. you can’t have negative figures forever and call it an investment. ok, but let’s call it an investment. would they agree to this deal? in 10 years, you will start paying back, because by then these promised gains will have started to materialize, and we all you know it’s an investment, because that’s what you said it was. so would they start paying back? the answer is no – they know that this is not an investment. calling it an investment is just an excuse, to keep people calm. what the eu is doing with this refugee crisis is childish.

they’ve now spent a lot of time discussing how to allocate 160,000 refugees – it’s 120,000, they’ve already decided about 40,000. munich received 16,000 refugees over a single weekend. and it just keeps happening. they pretend that this is about a small group, and ignore the fact that this is a huge surge that has started, now that the borders have been opened - the result of a fundamental urge to move, which is affecting tens of millions. like [professor of international health] hans rosling correctly points out, the un refugee programs have been starved for money. sweden has taken more than 8 billion swedish crowns from its foreign aid and have warned that they’re going to make further cuts. they have almost literally taken the food out of mouths of starving children and given it to [famous refugee camps owner] bert karlsson. this has been done under a fog of humanitarian rhetoric and with cheering celebrities who understand nothing of the underlying figures – and who don’t want to understand.

what the un has received, in total, for the syrian refugees, is 15 billion swedish crowns - while sweden, just during the month of june, spent 3.5 billion on short term costs for handling refugees, and even more in the long term. these figures are deranged. if we have 60 million refugees, excluding syria, that aid would cost 40 billion, in total. the total national budget of afghanistan is 45 billion swedish crowns – including all foreign aid. currently, sweden is spending 15 to 20 billion per year just on unaccompanied refugee minors, of which the majority are afghans. this is an allocation of resources that no genuine humanist can justify. but they defend this system. with just a slight exaggeration, 99% of the resources goes to the 1% who are able to make it here. 1% of the resources goes to those who remain in their home countries.

if sweden really wants to be a humanitarian superpower, if that’s what you want, it’s easy. sweden can’t solve all the refugee crises, even the most radical leftist extremist can understand that. it’s a question of magnitude. if there are 16 million refugees – 14 million new refugees just since last year – can a country of 10 million cope with that? the answer is that it can’t. even if we were to realize [center party leader] annie lã¶ã¶f’s vision of a sweden with a population of 30 million, it still wouldn’t work. but sweden has another advantage. it’s a very, very rich country. it’s very expensive and it has a small population, but you’re still rich. so my suggestion is that for every crown they cut, you add two to the un refugee program. starting tomorrow, sweden could double the world’s total budgets for refugees. if sweden were to join up with the other nordic countries, they could triple or double the world’s entire humanitarian aid, including food aid.

the world’s entire yearly humanitarian aid is 160 billion swedish crowns; for refugees, medical care, food – everything. it’s pocket change compared with what just sweden is spending (on immigration). in norway, they made a calculation of the money spent – that would never have happened in sweden - and it was 500 billion per year to receive 100.000 syrians. these figures are mind-boggling. for that money, you could rebuild the entire middle east. but they’ve got stuck in this immigration cult – it’s turning into a religion, where you have to have immigration. immigration isn’t seen as the solution to a problem, it’s seen as having a purpose of its own. and any opposition to immigration is seen as crucial to fend off. i think that people do this - these are not facts, just my personal opinion – not mainly because of humanism, if it is, it’s very superficial – if that had been the case, they would have been prepared to listen,

learn, check the figures, have a serious debate, and try to help to make the best of it - rationally, using facts and so on. i think it’s about self-aggrandizement, prestige and careers. and also to get a chance to bully people in their own country. the immigrants are used as a pawn in a swedish contest over politics, power, money, jobs and social status. it’s some kind of “competitive compassion” – you click “like” on henrik schyffert’s made-up figures in order to be seen as a good person, and intimidate your competition, on whichever level. and if this is about love – it’s not so much love and warmth that i have to face from those who support this system – i think it reeks of hate, which emanates from the editorial pages of dn and aftonbladet, as well as public service media and many politicians – it’s hatred towards other swedes,

and towards other immigrants, who don’t agree with them about these issues. hans rosling has also stressed recently, that at the bottom of this is the polarization and opposition to a small group of racists, where you have to say that [sweden democrat leader] jimmie ã…kesson is wrong. so if jimmie ã…kesson says that the sky is blue, i have to say that it’s green. or else i’m a skinhead, or you’re a skinhead, unless you do it. it’s childish, but it’s a strong driving force – and a small group of racists – not even sd is genuinely racist, many of them are just desperate and haven’t been offered any alternatives – so now their symphatizers are at 27%, up from 3%, since 2005. in order to not allowing them to be in control, it would take rational humanists, from the business world, from academia, from the moderate party, from the social democrats, the christian democrats

and the other established parties, they must wake up, and they must raise their voices. because if they don’t, sweden will face a catastrophe. and the ones who will bear the brunt of it will be those who are already the worst off, as well as the refugees whom sweden could have helped – but choose not to, and rather chose to allow a form of mass psychosis to decide, fueled by internal, political objectives. you have a few years to do it. it doesn’t have to happen tomorrow. there’s still time, to wake up from this mass psychosis. and this consensus-tendency among swedes, where the group always has to move in the same direction, how nonconformists are bullied: those who keep going in this direction will regret it.

because it’s going to affect you, too. this is not a game anymore. this is a serious, national crisis – probably the most serious crisis sweden has faced in the postwar period. the employee funds where nothing compared to this. those were a reversible economic change. this is of a much, much greater magnitude.