Sweden election 2018: Immigration among the most important issues to voters

Hussam Al-Homsi came to Sweden in 2015, along with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing unimaginable horrors in the Syrian war. Three years on, he finds himself part of a demographic group that’s at the centre of the biggest shock to Sweden’s political establishment in a century.

The country of about 10 million people will hold national elections on September 9, and polls show that immigration is among the most important issues to voters right now—if not the most important. The Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that advocates much tougher controls on the number of migrants allowed in each year, appears poised to capture the largest number of seats in the legislature.

Lost amid the political rhetoric is the story of the bounce that people such as Al-Homsi have delivered to the $540 billion economy. Sweden’s rapid intake of huge numbers of refugees and migrants, about 600,000 in total over the past five years, has produced some of the highest growth rates in Europe and will also help it address the challenges of an otherwise aging population.

“These refugees and immigrants came at precisely the right time,” says Lars Christensen, an economist and founder of Markets & Money Advisory, a consulting firm. “I’m worried about the lack of incentives [to work] in the Swedish welfare state, but I’m not worried about the 250,000 refugees that have arrived.”

Gross domestic product increased more than 3 per cent in the first two quarters of the year, which is considerably faster than the euro zone’s roughly 2 per cent growth. In recent years, Sweden has granted thousands of work permits to information technology developers, berry pickers, and cooks. Foreign-born workers accounted for all the job growth in the industrial sector last year and for 90 per cent of the new jobs in the welfare sector. Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson said the new arrivals are now getting jobs twice as fast as immigrants who arrived late in the last decade.