by Desirée Enlund

Amid an increasingly hostile climate toward asylum seekers in Europe, rural Swedish municipalities have come to view asylum seekers as a possibility for rural revival. This has had varying results but ultimately proves difficult in reversing the long-term problems with which rural areas contend.

In the autumn of 2015, the number of asylum-seekers arriving to Sweden reached an all-time high and began being described as a ‘crisis.’ Sweden has long been a safe haven for people fleeing regions rife with conflict and repressive regimes. While Germany received the highest absolute number of asylum seekers in Europe in the mid-2010s, Sweden received the most asylum seekers per capita among OECD countries. During the peak period in 2015, 162.000 people arrived from Syria and other countries in conflict, including high numbers of unaccompanied youth. The number of people seeking asylum has since decreased, largely because of stricter asylum regulations and border controls pushed through by the Swedish government.

The large number of people arriving in 2015 presented great challenges to local municipalities and civil society, among them providing housing to youth and families and schooling for children. These tasks were largely taken up by civil society, sometimes in collaboration with municipalities. This was seen in urban centres as volunteers in Malmö helped people find housing during their first days in Sweden and healthcare workers attended to asylum seekers' care needs at the train station in Stockholm. Similar efforts were seen in rural areas where volunteers, often women, provided people with necessities such as clothing for the approaching winter (Jarnkvist & Giritli Nygren, 2019).

It is important to highlight that the idea of a ‘crisis’ is not the perception among the many depopulating municipalities across the country. Here, both civil society and local governments often view newcomers as a potential resource. Why? And what are the possibilities for rural revival through this immigration?

The Rural Context

Rural Sweden, particularly the north, has long suffered from the effects of de-industrialization and subsequent depopulation (OECD, 2017), with youth moving to urban areas and the south in search of education and employment opportunities. Earlier, one of the focuses of the Swedish welfare state was to counteract this development through regional development policies, the so-called “The whole of Sweden shall live” policies. This intention has later been abandoned and replaced by place marketing whereby municipalities compete in attractiveness for people, investments, and economic prosperity (Westholm, 2013). It is in this context that a growing population could offer a means to halt the economic decline and possibly counter the withdrawal of not only industrial jobs, but recently even the most basic services, such as closing gas stations, delivery wards and emergency hospital care in rural places (Cras, 2017; Larsson, 2018). In my own research I explore the increasing contestation of closures of healthcare facilities in rural areas, where social movements are protesting and organizing themselves in citizen cooperatives in order to self-organize healthcare in rural communities (Enlund, forthcoming).

Asylum seekers in rural places

While local governments were not equipped to handle the sudden increase in asylum seekers in 2015, they have generally viewed the arrival of asylum seekers in rural towns as something potentially positive. The promise of asylum seekers lies in the opportunity they provide to reverse the long-term decline of rural and peripheral areas shared by many rural and shrinking areas across Europe. In Sweden this boils down to some elements of the Swedish welfare state. The first relates to municipal income via taxation, as municipalities with low rates of working-age people and high rates of pensioners generally are poorer. If a municipality can attract young people, such as asylum seekers, and entice them to stay and work, municipalities could increase their tax base. The second factor is that at the national level, the Swedish Migration Board, a government agency, is responsible for arriving asylum seekers. While processing asylum applications, the Migration Board provides housing and a small monthly stipend for the asylum seekers to sustain themselves and their families. However, the agency does not own their own housing. Rather, it signs contracts with the municipalities to provide housing for a specified number of asylum seekers. The municipalities, being sovereign with elected governments, enter into these agreements at will or not; many rural municipalities have been eager to do so. The municipalities stand to gain twice—first through the rent payments by the Migration Board, and second through extra funding from the state tied to integration projects targeting municipalities receiving large numbers of asylum seekers.

Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, many asylum seekers prefer to live in larger cities in order to have better access to services, labour markets and social capital through migrant networks (Eriksson, Wimelius & Ghazinour, 2018). Herein lies a tension between the individual and the state: While individual asylum seekers can decline the housing offered by the Migration Board, doing so means they need to find their own housing. Due to the housing shortage in urban areas (Christophers, 2013), this is difficult. The paradox is thus that asylum seekers get ‘placed’ in areas where there is available housing but where there is a lack of educational possibilities, job opportunities and accessible welfare services. Just as this results in large rural outmigration by local youth (Svensson, 2006,  2017), so also are asylum seekers affected by the same structures, which leads to many of them similarly moving to where the opportunities exist once granted residence permits. That asylum seekers would offer a solution to these structural inequality between affluent urban and poorer rural areas with an increasingly elderly population might be hoping for too much. When it comes to the persistent patterns of uneven regional development, these require more structural approaches by the state to maintain public services, local economies and demographic pressure rather than places and regions being commodities in a competitive global market.

References:

Enlund, D. (forthcoming). Contentious countrysides - Social movements reworking and resisting public healthcare restructuring in rural Sweden. (Human Geography Doctoral dissertation). Umeå University, Umeå.

Jarnkvist, K., & Giritli Nygren, K. (2019). The gendered and gendering of rural refugee reception – Voluntary (older) women’s labour and Church initiatives. Paper presented at the G19 - Swedish Conference for Gender Studies: ‘Rethinking Knowledge Regimes - Solidarities and Contestations’, Gothenburg, Sweden.  

Desirée Enlund is a doctoral candidate in Human Geography at the Department of Geography and affiliated to the Graduate School of Gender Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. Her work examines the impact of healthcare restructuring on rural areas of Sweden through the lens of social movements contesting the withdrawal of welfare services and citizen cooperatives self-organizing healthcare in rural communities.