In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Foreign Policy editor James Traub remarks on the challenges that the refugees that Sweden has accept pose for the country:
The truth about refugees is complicated. Sweden offers a kind of laboratory in that regard: Almost all the non-Europeans in the country arrived as refugees. The Chileans, Iranians, Kurds and Bosnians have done very well; Eritreans and Somalis, less so. Labor-force participation and educational attainment among non-European immigrants are far lower than among native Swedes. Yet Sweden has one of Europe’s strongest economies.
The question that cannot yet be answered is how well the 100,000 or so Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and other refugees who will be granted permanent residence in the country will integrate. Will they embrace Sweden’s extremely secular, extremely progressive culture? Probably not. Polls find that Muslim immigrants are vastly more conservative than native Europeans on matters of sex, family and the role of religion in public life.
I believe that’s something too little noted. The social and political views of the refugees that the United States accepted following World War II were by and large more liberal than those of the Americans who preceded them. Many arrived here intent on becoming 100% American.
The world is much changed since then and the social, political, and religious views of the new streams of refugees are significantly more conservative. Will they be as intent on fitting in to their new homes or insist they their new countries adapt to them, or, most likely, some of both? How will that work in the ethnic states of Europe? How will that work here?
Mr. Traub closes with a warning:
The answer to xenophobia cannot be xenophilia. For mobile, prosperous, worldly people, the cherishing of diversity is a cardinal virtue; we dote on difference. That’s simply not true for many people who can’t choose where to live, or who prefer the familiar coordinates of their life. That was the bitter lesson that British cosmopolites learned from Brexit. If the answer is to insist that the arrival of vast numbers of new people on our doorstep is an unmixed blessing, and that those who believe otherwise are Neanderthals, then we leave the field wide open to Donald J. Trump and Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen.
