[amanaplanacanal]

Just pointing out that 'piece' is an editorial, not a news article.

The US has had multiple waves of immigration from most of the world, over the last few centuries. And there has been similar pushback from nativists over and over again. If that long history is any indication, Sweden will be fine.

[TangoTrotFox]

What do you think would be a comparable migration in the US? I see three key distinguishing factors that make Sweden quite interesting as a test case:

1) The first is of course just sheer volume. Sweden has gone, in less than a single generation, from a mostly ethnically homogeneous nation to one where about 20% of the population is foreign born and that's only going to keep rising. The US is at record setting levels recently, with a foreign born population of less than 14%. And it's always been a rather diverse nation.

2) Relatively incompatible cultures. Large chunks of the migrants to Sweden are coming from backgrounds that hold very different cultural values on a wide range of fundamental issues. By contrast the vast majority of migrants to the US tend to hold quite similar cultural values.

3) Distorted migratory motivations. Throughout the US's history, migration has been about work -- in the past and present. People's motivation for coming here is to work. When the economy tanked in 2009, so did immigration. As it picks back up, so does immigration. Sweden, by contrast, is attracting people exclusively because they offer extremely generous benefits, particularly for refugees. They are attracting individuals that are only moving there because they can get more stuff from their government than they can from other nations. Ideally this could just be a liminal phase, but the current outcomes are far from promising. If people end up beginning to take the government handouts for granted, I think this would be a serious problem.

[ck425]

Point 2) here is important. Folk migrate to the US due to some variation of the American Dream. Therefore the migrants bring and reinforce part of American culture.

[fiblye]

The US was also in a different hemisphere while the rest of the world was ravaged by 2 massive wars that destroyed everything they had, letting the US take the reigns of the world economy for a very long time. Without WW1 and WW2 helping to make the US economy an absolute beast unlike anything the world has ever seen, things would be quite different.

[linksnapzz]

...for someone, presumably.

It'll merely no longer be recognizable as "Sweden" for people whose ancestors considered themselves "Swedes".