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Mahmoud moved to Sweden 10 years ago from Iraq. But sitting on a wall in the Rosengard housing project in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, he dreams only of a return to the country of his birth.
“I want to work but I can’t find anything,” says Mahmoud, now in his fifties. “I want to go home to Basra [in southern Iraq].”
Nearby, a 17-year-old boy who declines to give his name hurries between vast blocks of flats and past the Zlatan Court — named after Rosengard’s most famous son, footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic — to catch a bus. “I have lots of friends here,” the boy says. “I was born here but I don’t feel Swedish. People just look at my skin and think I’m from Somalia,” he says.
In recent years, Sweden, which sees itself as a “humanitarian superpower”, has taken in more refugees per capita than almost any other western country. Numbers peaked in 2015 when the country with a population of 10m took in 163,000 asylum seekers at a cost of billions of dollars. The strain on public services — particularly in Malmo, the entry point for many — and signs of a political backlash prompted the government to introduce border controls, dramatically reducing the number of arrivals to fewer than 30,000 last year.
But Malmo, and Sweden more broadly, still faces the huge challenge of integration. Pressure on schools, the jobs market, housing and finances has in part contributed to the rise of the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, now the country’s second-biggest political party. For many in Malmo, the hard work is only just beginning.
“Sweden is statistically one of the worst countries at the integration of foreigners,” says Aje Carlbom, a professor in social anthropology at Malmo university. “Why? Mainly because this is a highly complex country where you can’t get a job without education. Many of those who come are uneducated — that is the main problem.” A crude proxy for integration — the unemployment rate for those born abroad compared with that for local people — bears him out. In Sweden and Norway, foreigners are three times more likely to be jobless than local people.
A trip to the almost all-immigrant area of Rosengard highlights the challenge. Only a few bus stops from the centre of Malmo, Rosengard feels separate from a city known for its good food, start-ups and commuters to Copenhagen. “This is quite a segregated city and it’s getting worse. People from Rosengard seldom go to Michelin-starred restaurants,” says Mr Carlbom.
Still, Rosengard — with well-maintained housing, open spaces and playgrounds — is nothing like the worst banlieue in France. “I had some visitors from St Denis [just outside Paris]. They laughed at me — is this what a segregated area looks like?” says Anders Malmqvist, Malmo’s director of education.
The problems in Rosengard, however, are real. Many immigrants live in overcrowded flats, often shared. Jobs are scarce. In Herrgarden, perhaps the most deprived part, the employment rate in 2015 was 27 per cent. In Sweden as a whole, it was 78 per cent. The unemployment rate for foreign-born people in Malmo is four times that of those born in Sweden.
“The problem is that we have a mismatch between the labour force and business demands,” says Torsten Elofsson, a former policeman who leads the opposition Christian Democrats in the city.
Once an industrial hub, Malmo now has more jobs that require higher skills. Education, rather than immigration, determines whether you can get a job, says Josef Lannemyr, an analyst at the Swedish public employment service. Those lacking secondary school education are more likely to be jobless than those born abroad, he adds.
With this in mind, the employment service has started a programme for immigrants. “There is a humanitarian perspective that Sweden definitely has [regarding immigration] but Sweden also has a big recruitment problem and these are the only people coming into the market,” says Christina Koch, who runs the programme in Malmo.
The education system is already under pressure. Mats Hansson, the city’s strategic planner, says that in his first 20 years in the city Malmo built three schools. Now it has to build up to three every year to meet demand from local people and new arrivals.
In Varner Rydenskolan, a school for six- to 16-year-olds in Rosengard, the problems and opportunities of modern Sweden collide. The school had to be closed for a day in 2015 due to violence. In January a pupil was shot dead at a bus stop in Rosengard.
Ingela Svahn, the headteacher, says the atmosphere at the school has improved but grades remain a problem: the school is “the worst in Malmo right now,” she concedes.
Her biggest task, in a school where every single child speaks two languages, is to show them there is a world outside Rosengard, she says. “Our children are just like every other child. But they need help in other ways. They have to compensate for what they don’t get from their parents or the area they live in.”
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As Sweden feels the strain of its refugee policy, Richard Milne talks about his visit to Malmo
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