Last May, while researching Scandinavian immigration policy through Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, I spent the first several days volunteering at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. I noticed an odd dynamic between the Danish and international participants, as we congregated backstage for training. The Danes huddled on one side, speaking Danish, while the international volunteers coalesced on the opposite side of the room communicating in English. My conversations consisted of a routine mix of introductions, names, and hometowns until I met someone named Saïd from Aarhus. As Aarhus was only an hour away from Copenhagen, I was surprised to see him on the international side of the room.

He was an Iranian refugee who had fled through Türkiye and Serbia, crossing into the Schengen area via the Croatian border. Having lived in Denmark for less than a year, he was more comfortable communicating in English than in Danish. He expressed his frustration with the byzantine process of asylum claims and a general sense of dissatisfaction with the way the Danish government had been treating him. I had not expected to start my Grand Strategy project until the following week, but Saïd’s story and the difficulty he faced integrating into Danish society epitomized the central question in my research: How can the Nordic welfare state model successfully coexist with mass immigration?

I had always seen the Nordic countries as a role model of social democratic values and a blueprint for a more equal society; after all, the Nordic economies practiced — to butcher Czechoslovak democratic socialist reformer Alexander Dubček — “capitalism with a human face.” But after taking a class on political extremism in Stockholm during summer before my junior year and briefly meeting immigrant activists and members of the far-right Sweden Democrats, I realized that the Nordic welfare state was built on an implicit assumption of homogeneity. While not necessarily intended, the high levels of taxation that facilitate the expansive welfare state relied on a deep level of public trust enabled by small populations who shared a common history, religion, language and culture. Though such a level of public trust is certainly not incompatible with mass migration, it requires reinterpreting and broadening the definition of Swedish-ness and Danish-ness. Swedish Prime Minister Per Albin was perhaps more prescient than intended in branding his economic vision, folkhemmet (“the people’s home”), as the Swedish folk has a closer meaning to the German Volk of nation-states than its English counterpart. These were the issues I hoped to explore upon returning to Scandinavia for my Grand Strategy summer research project.

This time around, I wanted to cast as wide a net as possible. I conducted over a dozen interviews with politicians, consultants, academics, and everything in between. My first planned interview was with Asim, an immigrant who had previously served in the Danish military and now worked as an advisor for the Nordic Council, the pan-Nordic parliamentary assembly. In one memorable anecdote, Asim described a conversation he had with his son the day of his high school’s all-day athletics competition. Asim’s son had painted the Pakistani flag on his face in place of the conventional Danish colors. Asim was disappointed by his son’s refusal to wear the flag of the country he had fought for, but his disappointment quickly turned into heartbreak upon learning that the choice resulted from the discrimination and unwelcomeness his son experienced in the classroom. I heard any number of stories like Asim’s during the course of my research. Such stories drove me to explore the social, cultural, and economic factors at the core of the issue and interrogate my prior beliefs on the universality of the Nordic Model.

My research centered on the differences between the Swedish and Danish approaches to immigration. Though Sweden has trended significantly to the right since former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s 2014 “open your hearts” speech, it maintains one of Europe’s most liberal immigration policies. In contrast, Denmark is notorious for its strict language policy, low visa allocations, and high barriers to entry. Each approach presents its own set of problems. The Swedes may have created a more welcoming environment than their counterparts across the Øresund Strait, but the Swedish government’s inability to absorb the massive inflow of migrants has led to a surge in gang violence. Denmark’s strictness has mitigated some of the problems associated with migration, hindering the country’s ability to successfully integrate immigrant populations already present, something which both Saïd and Asim experienced firsthand.

The more people I interviewed, the more difficult it was to argue the merits of one approach over the other. The union representatives with whom I spoke outlined a balancing act between safeguarding vulnerable migrant laborers and protecting wages from the downward pressures of large influxes of low-wage workers, a phenomenon known as social dumping. They argued that Scandinavia’s unique approach to wage setting — in which the Ministry of Finance moderates negotiations between labor and employment organizations rather than setting a universal minimum wage — makes it particularly sensitive to mass migration. Municipal officials in Stockholm, Malmö, and Copenhagen sketched out an urban landscape struggling to integrate ethnic enclaves into previously homogenous cities — something I noticed through the relative lack of immigrants in the cultural and business centers of the Scandinavian capitals compared to their share of the population. Each time I thought I made progress towards understanding the scope of the issue, new information presented itself. To tackle problems of such a scale and complexity, I realized it would be necessary to take the whole-of-society approach that forms the basis of grand strategic thinking.

I departed my flight from Copenhagen with more questions than I had upon my arrival. My interviews revealed a problem influenced as much by urban planning and subsidized language instruction as visa policy and immigration quotas. My time in Scandinavia exposed me to the nuances of immigration and integration policy, issues central not just to Sweden but to most high-income economies. The comparatively large size of Nordic welfare states and the homogeneity of their populations put in sharp relief the difficulties and growing pains industrialized nations face in an era of globalization and mass immigration. The relatively extreme conditions of Swedish and Danish societies made my summer research a sort of “altitude training” for the types of policy issues and conversations I am likely to encounter in the fall semester of Grand Strategy, as well as my broader academic and professional career.