How to welcome Ukrainian refugees – Lisa Pelling
Lisa Pelling starts a new one Social Europe column with lessons for integration — especially from Sweden.
Europe experiences its largest refugee movement since World War II: UN High Commissioner for Refugees expects more than four million from Ukraine will need protection in the European Union. Its member states must prepare themselves for not only a gigantic logistical endeavor but also an unparalleled integration challenge.
Fortunately, there is experience to build on. All crises are specific, but several lessons from previous sections – and from Sweden in particular – can be drawn.
Not everyone, but many are here to stay: refugees always hope to return but they often stay. Migration is costly, even emotionally, and once they are forcibly uprooted, many families will hesitate to pull up their children’s budding roots and move back to their homeland. Even in the best case scenario, where hostilities cease quickly and Ukrainian independence and democracy are reintroduced, refugees are unlikely to be able to return in the near future.
In many places there will not be much to return. Across Ukraine, infrastructure has already been severely damaged: bridges have been bombed, roads destroyed, schools smashed. In Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol there have been entire residential areas turned into soot-black skeleton.
Integration is an investment: Recognizing migration will not be temporary, the challenge is to treat integration as a long-term investment. There is no virtue in highly educated people wasting their skills on the first available job, while those who are not yet educated remain unemployed.
Every refugee should be given the opportunity to use their skills, learn the native language and acquire the skills needed to participate in the labor market. Investing in skills will pay off, whether the individual remains or returns: Ukraine is our neighbor, its wealth will be our welfare and its democracy a defense of ours.
Think big, build big: In 2016, Paul Romer, the World Bank’s chief economist and Nobel laureate, suggested that Sweden – one of Europe’s least densely populated countries – should set aside a piece of land to receive the many refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. A city like Hong Kong, he said, did not need many square kilometers to thrive.
Why not? Let us take the opportunity to build the self-sufficient cities with zero emissions that we dream of, with feminist urban planning and gender-promoting social housing – though not, as in Rome schedulecut off from the surrounding society: Europe needs fewer borders, not more.
Either way, most integration will still take place in fairly ordinary neighborhoods, in existing cities and towns – with their existing challenges. A progressive integration policy must ensure that the arrival of refugees does not deepen the housing crisis, increase school segregation or put further strain on healthcare systems. This will require conscious choices and a long-term perspective.
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Get rid of harmful dichotomies: the fact that many Ukrainians will not return does not mean that they will not remain Ukrainians. They will, in heart and soul, but they will also become Parisians and devoted Dutchmen, they will feel at home in Lapland and settle in Sicily. It is possible to be Ukrainian and Swedish (and much more), at the same time.
The study of transnationalism indicates that identities are constantly changing and manifold, and rarely exclude each other. My father’s family comes from the Baltic island of Gotland, my mother from Stockholm and I feel equally at home in both places – as I do in Uppsala, where I was born and raised. Part of me belongs to Managua, Nicaragua, where I also lived as a child, but my capital will forever be “Red Vienna”, my home for more than a decade. After an educational year as an exchange student at Queen’s University Belfast, the rain-soaked streets of this Northern Irish city will always be a part of who I am too.
I share the experience of several identities with countless Europeans and new identities are created all the time, when people meet and mate, mix and mingle. We really need a Europe based on the power of diversity and an ethos of hospitality.
Beware of the backlash: while there is solidarity now, there will be a backlash later. Refugees, migrants, all who can be branded as “the other” have always been scapegoats for the misconduct of society. Ukrainians will also fall victim to this. As in the past, it is important to relentlessly confirm that municipalities in all parts of Europe – their politicians, officials and activists –provide daily evidence that it is possible to build welcoming communities.
Valuable experience
Just after Luxembourg, Sweden hosts the largest proportion of migrants in the EU: 19.5 percent of Swedes – one in five – were born abroad. Many came to Sweden as workers from Finland and the former Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 60s, others as refugees from Latin America in the 70s and the Middle East in the 80s and 90s.
The largest number of refugees arrived from Bosnia-Herzegovina and other Balkan countries in the 1990s and from Syria, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa during and around 2015. That year, Germany received the largest number of asylum seekers outside Sweden. absorbed most in relation to the population. Sweden was actually among the top ten refugee reception countries globally, adjusted for population, during the decade 2011-20. Valuable experiences are still relevant today.
A crucial lesson from the large refugee reception in the 1990s was the “raising of knowledge” (the promotion of knowledge) – conceived by the current EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, who was then Swedish Minister of Education. Adult education was greatly expanded to meet the deep economic crisis that Sweden had undergone during that decade. The opportunity to attend upper secondary school preparatory courses for both higher education and vocational education was opened to everyone who has unemployment benefits, regardless of whether they are native Swedes with limited education or newly arrived refugees.
Part of the success of the initiative was that it was not branded as integration, so its rather significant costs were not perceived as “spending money on migrants”. However, the expansion of adult education made a decisive contribution to the integration of refugees from Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands spent their first years in Sweden in school instead of spending money and were well equipped to take up employment when the labor market resumed.
The refugees from the former Yugoslavia had come to a Sweden in severe crisis, with huge cuts in public spending and sky-high unemployment. The first years were difficult, but over time the refugees gained a foothold in society. Their integration did not go fast but it was successful. This is especially true for those who were children when they arrived – three decades later, they enjoy virtually the same standard of living and income as their native peers.
Not so burdensome
About 90,000 sought refuge in Sweden in the 1990s. This number was matched in 2014 and almost doubled in 2015, when 163,000 submitted an asylum application. In a recent book, Peo Hansen, professor of politics at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society at Linköping University, writes analyzes what happened to the economy when Sweden had to “bear the burden” (as it was often expressed) of the refugees who arrived during the recent large influx.
His conclusions are clear: “refugee crisis” was a blessing for the Swedish economy. Their reception not only benefited cities and villages throughout Sweden whose empty apartment buildings and evacuation schools were now filled – the labor market also gained momentum.
Hansen questions the auditors ‘view, where immigrants’ contributions to the economy can be measured by their tax contributions minus welfare benefits. This does not take into account the contribution of refugees to the real economy, with their talents, entrepreneurship and manpower.
Especially if they are employed in the low-wage sector – as immigrants often are in the beginning – their contribution to the economy cannot be measured by the small taxes they pay on too low wages. Today, not only 60 percent of the Swedish cleaners and half of the country’s taxi drivers are immigrants; likewise is one in seven nurses and one in three doctors. Healthcare in Sweden would not be possible without the caregivers from Syria and Somalia.
Rain on the roof
Receiving millions of refugees is undoubtedly a daunting logistical challenge. In Sweden, Minister of Migration just announced that camps, sports halls and tents will be used to receive the Ukrainian refugees.
The refugees from Bosnia were received in tents. Another former Swedish Minister of Education, Aida Hadžialić – a first-class student and talented politician – was one of them. Aida’s first memory of Sweden was the sound of rain on the roof of the tent she and her family first slept in. Other children, from other parts of Europe, will now spend their first nights in a tent, and perhaps listen to the sound of raindrops falls on the canvas.
Hopefully, they too, like the Bosnian refugees of the time, will write together another chapter of successful integration.
This is a joint publication of Social Europe and IPS-Journal
Lisa Pelling is a political scientist and head of the Stockholm-based think tank Arena Idea. She contributes regularly to the daily digital magazine Today’s Arena and has a background as a political adviser and speechwriter at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.