Frosty welcome for refugees

Refugees disembark from a train and make their way to a camp in Riksgransen, Sweden. Ints Kalnins / Reuters

A refugee clears snow at the entrance of a camp at a hotel touted as the world’s most northerly ski resort in Riksgransen, Sweden. Ints Kalnins / Reuters

A refugee takes a selfie at the front of his camp at a hotel touted as the world’s most northerly ski resort in Riksgransen, Sweden. Ints Kalnins / Reuters

Refugee Wacl al-Shater shows picture of his family in Syria in the kitchen of his camp at a hotel touted as the world’s most northerly ski resort in Riksgransen, Sweden. Ints Kalnins / Reuters

A refugee girl looks outside of her camp at a hotel touted as the world’s most northerly ski resort in Riksgransen, Sweden. Ints Kalnins / Reuters

Main picture, a refugee walks to the camp at the hotel said to be the world’s most northerly ski resort. Above, displaced migrants at a dining room. Below, a refugee clears snow at the entrance of the camp.

When the first Canadian government plane carrying 163 Syrian refugees landed in Toronto last month, it was greeted by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, the premier of Ontario, and a phalanx of the world’s media.

The event was heralded as the opening gambit in the country’s most ambitious refugee resettlement programme since the Vietnam War, and the new Canadian leader made the most of the media opportunity.

“This is a wonderful night, where we get to show not just a planeload of new Canadians what Canada is all about, we get to show the world how to open our hearts and welcome in people who are fleeing extraordinarily difficult situations,” Mr Trudeau said.

For the passengers on the train that arrived, less than two weeks later, at the Swedish ski resort of Riksgransen, however, there was no such fanfare. There wasn’t even a welcoming party.

A place where foreign tourists pay thousands of dollars to ski and see the Aurora borealis (the Northern Lights), Riksgransen sits 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in an area where the sun never rises in winter and temperatures can plummet to minus 30˚C.

Largely deserted outside the ski season, the nearest town is a two-hour bus ride away if the roads are clear of snow. Riksgransen has become a temporary home to about 600 refugees, most of them Afghans and Syrians.

Photojournalist Ints Kalnins reported that the number of refugees in Sweden’s Arctic North would be even higher were it not for the fact that busloads of refugees, having seen the surroundings, often refused to disembark and insisted on being returned to warmer, more southerly regions.

As Kalnins explained, the situation at Riksgransen is an extreme but not atypical example of the measures that the Swedish government has resorted to in order to accommodate record numbers of refugees in a country of 9.8 million people.

Germany may have received more than twice the number of asylum applications since 2011, more than double the number taken by Sweden. But when those figures are adjusted per head of population, Sweden, with 3,182 applicants per 100,000 people, is second only to Serbia and Bosnia which set the European record with 5,082 applicants per 100,000 people.

Sweden accepted 80,000 asylum seekers in 2014 and the final number for last year is expected to be similar.

By comparison, a report from Canada’s federal immigration department estimated that fewer than 6,300 refugees had landed on Canadian soil by the end of last year, 3,700 less than the target set by Mr Trudeau’s Liberal Party when it came to power.

On December 22, the International Organisation for Migration announced that more than a million people had reached Europe through irregular means last year, the continent’s largest wave of mass migration since the aftermath of the Second World War, when an estimated 12 million to 14 million Europeans were estimated to have been displaced.

The overall figure represents a fourfold increase on 2014’s figures, and has largely been driven by Syrians fleeing their country’s civil war.

But Afghans, Iraqis and Eritreans also represent a significant portion of the overall figure.

If the European figures sound dramatic, the situation in the Middle East is even worse.

In Turkey, there are estimated to be more than 2 million refugees, while in Lebanon, 1.1 million Syrians form one-fifth of the population.

In Jordan, the number of registered Syrian refugees stands at 10 per cent of the total population.

Across Europe, the growing refugee crisis has resulted in a hardening of attitudes and policies. And even in countries with a reputation for humanitarianism once-marginal, far right anti-immigration parties are on the rise in the polls and border controls have been tightened.

In October, Sweden announced that it would only offer three-year residence permits to many new asylum seekers rather than permanent status. And on November 11, it announced an even more significant policy reversal when it introduced more stringent border controls.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, the decision effectively signalled the Swedish government’s abandonment of the principle of passport-free travel enshrined in the European Schengen Agreement.

“The situation is untenable. Now, to put it more bluntly, more people will have to seek asylum and get protection in other European countries,” Swedish prime minister Stefan Lofven said in November last year. “It is clear that migration politics in the EU need to be completely reviewed.”

For the outgoing head of the UN refugee agency, Antonio Guterres, who is stepping down from his position after 10 years in the post, the need for reform of EU immigration policies cannot come soon enough.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Guterres said that the EU continued to be “totally unprepared” for the arrival of refugees and was “unable to put its act together”.

“For the first time, in meaningful numbers, refugees and other migrants came to Europe, and Europe was totally unprepared for that,” he said.

“But not only it was unprepared then, it is still unprepared today.”