Abstract
Sweden has rapidly gone from having little immigration to one of the highest levels of net migration in the world. One response to this shift has been an attempt at reframing Swedish history along American lines, as always having been a nation of immigrants. This view has little support in actual historical data. While episodes of high-skill immigration (nobles, merchants, expert ironworkers) mattered to Swedish historical development, this immigration was very limited in its scale. It was not until World War II that Sweden saw (largely temporary) large-scale refugee immigration, followed by a burst of labor migration into the booming postwar industrial sector. The wave of migration that matters most to the social issues faced by Sweden today only really began during the 1980s.
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Sanandaji, T. (2020). A Nation of Immigrants?. In: Mass Challenge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46808-8_2
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