Even by such standards, what Sweden went through in 2015 is unheard of in the country’s history. With as many as 10,000 people entering Sweden on some days in September 2015 after Chancellor Merkel’s announcement, for a period the country was almost paralysed. Although 163,000 people claimed asylum in that year alone, an unknown number of people entered and disappeared into the country without trace. People visiting laundry rooms of their buildings in the tenements of Malmö found migrants living there. The city already had the lowest tax-base of anywhere in the country, with areas such as Rosengard already with few non-immigrants and some areas with as few as 15 per cent of residents in employment. Yet these are not unpleasant areas. They are better provided for than working-class areas in numerous other European cities, and until these areas became almost entirely immigrant-based, many working Swedes had saved to buy houses in them. But any prospects for integration were already dire. Even before 2015 in Rosengard, not one child in the local school had had Swedish as their first language for fourteen years. Even before 2015 the emergency services refused to enter these areas without police escorts because residents attacked the ambulances or fire engines.

Becoming alarmed at the large concentration of migrants in some cities, in 2015 the Swedish authorities tried another tactic. They decided to shift recent arrivals to remote towns and villages, particularly in the north of the country. They put 200 migrants in the village of Undrom in the Sollefteå region (a village with 85 inhabitants). They put 300 migrants in the village of Trensum, in the Karlshamn region (a village with 106 residents). Other remote villages tripled in size overnight. Of course, the migrants had not come to Sweden to live in such isolated and strange areas and police often had to drag them out of the buses used to transport them. Yet Swedish politicians insisted that their country had plenty of space to house migrants. Only once they had accelerated their migration policy did they recognise the pitfalls of this idea. The next year’s budget anticipated the cost of migration to be in the region of 50.4 billion Swedish kroner in direct costs alone (and so constituting only a portion of the true final cost). To put that in context the Justice Department budget for 2016 was 42 billion kroner and the Defence budget 48 billion kroner. Sweden is a rare country in this respect. During times of global downturn it has been able to run a budget surplus. Now, in a period of growth, Sweden faces the possibility of having an economy with a deficit.