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cover of episode Do 79% of Swedish asylum seekers go on holiday to the country they fled from?

Do 79% of Swedish asylum seekers go on holiday to the country they fled from?

2025/1/11
logo of podcast More or Less: Behind the Stats

More or Less: Behind the Stats

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Charlotte MacDonald
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Hjalmar Strid
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Tino Sanandaji
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Charlotte MacDonald: 我对社交媒体上流传的79%瑞典寻求庇护者回原籍度假的这一说法表示怀疑。这个数字经常被用来暗示寻求庇护者并没有面临真实的危险,如果他们真的面临危险,不太可能回原籍度假。 我与一家报纸讨论过这个话题,他们对对在瑞典居住的海外出生的人群进行调查感兴趣,这个调查就是由此开始的。 Hjalmar Strid: 我是瑞典Novus民调公司的Hjalmar Strid。我们进行了一项严谨的调查,样本来自随机抽取的5万名瑞典居民中的1000名海外出生人士。调查中,我们询问了受访者是否回过他们的原籍国家度假。在所有海外出生的人群中,85%的人表示回过原籍度假,这并不令人意外,因为许多人来自北欧国家。 在被识别为寻求庇护者的183人中,79%的人表示回过原籍度假。需要注意的是,参与调查的人群并非近期抵达的寻求庇护者,他们中的大多数人在瑞典居住多年,能够流利地使用瑞典语,并融入当地社会。近期抵达的寻求庇护者很难参与到此类调查中。 调查中也包含2010年后抵达瑞典的难民,但我们没有获得他们具体来自哪个国家以及他们的移民身份等信息。我们也没有考察回国度假与冲突持续与否之间的关系。 Tino Sanandaji: 我是Bulletin在线新闻网站的共同所有人Tino Sanandaji。我认为将调查结果用于煽动反移民情绪是不对的。 对数据的解读存在两种观点:一种是恶意解读,认为寻求庇护者只是假装面临危险,实际上他们有钱有闲,回原籍享受奢华假期;另一种是正确的解读,即许多曾经作为难民来到瑞典,并在瑞典定居的人,感觉安全到可以回原籍探亲访友。 如果样本具有代表性,并且考虑到许多人是瑞典公民且抵达时间跨度长,那么该数据是正确的。重要的是要避免对数据的恶意解读,避免加剧社会对立。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

What is the origin of the claim that 79% of Swedish asylum seekers go on holiday to their home country?

The claim originates from a survey conducted by Swedish polling company Novus, commissioned by the online news site Bulletin. The survey asked 1,000 randomly selected individuals born outside Sweden, including 183 identified as refugees, whether they had returned to their country of origin for a holiday. 79% of the refugee group answered yes.

Why is the 79% statistic misleading when applied to recent asylum seekers?

The statistic is misleading because it includes refugees who arrived in Sweden over the last 80 years, not just recent arrivals. Many of these individuals fled conflicts or regimes that no longer exist, such as the Yugoslav Wars or Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. They have lived in Sweden for decades, integrated into society, and may safely visit their home countries without facing the dangers they originally fled.

What challenges exist in surveying recent asylum seekers in Sweden?

Recent asylum seekers are difficult to survey due to language barriers, lack of integration, and their transient status. They are less likely to participate in surveys conducted via phone, mail, or in-person methods, making them a hard-to-reach demographic. The Novus survey primarily included long-term residents who had been in Sweden for years or decades.

How did the Bulletin's reporting contribute to the misinterpretation of the survey results?

The Bulletin's reporting was factually accurate but ambiguous, allowing the 79% statistic to be misinterpreted as referring to recent asylum seekers. This ambiguity was exploited on social media to imply that current refugees were returning to dangerous countries for holidays, which the survey did not support. The Bulletin's co-owner, Tino Sanandaji, denied using dog whistles but acknowledged the polarized debate around immigration.

What historical context explains why many refugees in Sweden might return to their home countries?

Many refugees in Sweden fled conflicts or oppressive regimes that have since ended, such as the Yugoslav Wars, Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, or the Soviet regime. These individuals have lived in Sweden for decades, becoming citizens and integrating into society. Returning to their home countries for holidays is often safe and allows them to visit family or friends without facing the dangers they originally fled.

What does the Novus survey reveal about the demographics of refugees in Sweden?

The Novus survey shows that the majority of refugees in Sweden arrived decades ago, fleeing conflicts like the Yugoslav Wars, the Iran-Iraq War, or oppressive regimes like Pinochet's Chile. These individuals have lived in Sweden for 30 to 50 years, integrated into society, and often hold Swedish citizenship. Only 26 of the 183 refugee respondents arrived after 2010, with the most recent arriving in 2022.

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Hair growth starts from the inside at Nutrafol.com. That's N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com. Thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast. We're the program that has a good nosy round in some of the numbers in the news. And I'm Charlotte MacDonald.

The stat we're looking into this week was sent in by loyal listener David, who saw a suspicious percentage on social media. I recently saw a post on X claiming 79% of refugees in Sweden have vacationed in the country they fled from. I don't believe this to be true, but can you look into the numbers?

This figure has been bouncing around the internet for a couple of years and it's often used to imply that current asylum seekers are not really fleeing from a genuine risk in the country they fled from. If they were, you might think they'd be unlikely to return to that country for a holiday. One of those bouncing the number around is Elon Musk, who recently posted on X... Almost 80% of asylum seekers went on vacation to their home countries. So...

Is David right to doubt this stat? Well, it started with a conversation between me and a newspaper here and they were interested in doing a survey where we were talking to people who are born outside of Sweden

And we asked them a myriad of questions, opinion on different things. This is Hjalmar Strid from Swedish polling company Novus. The newspaper he was talking to was The Bulletin, an online news site which describes its politics as libertarian-conservative. And one of the questions was, have you been back on vacation to the country where you were born?

Now, Novus take their polling seriously. This wasn't one of those tick some boxes and get a prize type online surveys that produce some weird results. We only have a randomly selected panel. So there's no opt-in. There is no way to sway this by joining the panel. You have to get randomly selected. Of a panel of 50,000 people living in Sweden, they randomly selected around 1,000 who were born overseas and asked them some questions.

Of this group, the whole group born overseas, we'll get to the asylum seeker part in a second, 85% had travelled back to their country of origin for holiday. This is not surprising. Many of these people had moved to Sweden from Finland, Norway and Denmark, Germany or the UK.

And they did it because they got a job or wanted a change of lifestyle or... They met a Swedish girl or a Swedish boy and they moved there for that reason. And then probably used their holidays to go back and see their families or friends or whatever. Although the survey didn't ask them the reason why. Then we get to the refugee figure. The survey asked respondents to select the reason they came to Sweden.

Two of the answers could be used to identify those who were refugees. There was fleeing from war, fleeing for political reasons, and they would be sort of clumped into asylum seekers. They identified 183 people who likely claimed asylum and looked again at whether they'd been back to their country of origin for a holiday. 79% of this group said that they had.

People on social media seem to have seen this stat and jumped to the conclusion that they were recent arrivals.

But that's actually very unlikely. When you're in a country and you answer questions on a panel, that usually means you've lived here for quite a while. You do speak the language fluently. You feel like a part of society. Recently arrived asylum seekers turn out to be incredibly hard to recruit to this kind of survey. There are particular groups in a society that are difficult to reach.

And recent asylum seekers would definitely fall into that category. Even if you did over the phone or you did it by mail or you actually tried to go and knock on doors, it will always be a very difficult group to get. The survey in question did ask the participants when they came to Sweden. And rather than being recent arrivals, they entered the country at some point in the last 80 years.

They didn't find out which actual country they came from, but you can work out what's likely based on the migration flows into Sweden over that time period. We were talking about people usually who came from the war in Yugoslavia, they came from Chile, they came from the fall of the Soviet bloc from Eastern Europe. So these are countries where the situation is not the same as it used to be. For example, in the 1970s and 80s, Sweden took in a lot of asylum seekers from Chile –

fleeing from the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet. Likewise, Sweden took in refugees during the Iran-Iraq War, which started in 1980 and ended in 1988.

There were refugees from the Soviet regime when the USSR was still going, and Bosnians fleeing the war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. So these are people that have been here for 30, 40, maybe 50 years. It will be like my friend from Bosnia who lives here and has a child and a family and an apartment and has lived here for 20 years, came here as a kid.

Is he not allowed to go back to Bosnia and to visit his family without, you know, risking not being able to come back to his family here? Now, there were people in the survey who entered the country more recently. 26 of the survey respondents identified as refugees came to the country after 2010, with the most recent arriving in 2022.

But as to where they came from, perhaps Afghanistan, Syria or Ukraine, we don't know. And as to what their immigration status was, whether they returned somewhere that they claimed was unsafe or any other information that would help you make a judgment about these cases, we simply can't say. No, we didn't look on the reason why they left that specifically in a connection to whether or not the conflict is still ongoing. That would have taken a lot more time than we put in it.

The way this stat has mutated on social platforms like X is being implied as referring to asylum seekers in the present tense who are going back on holiday to a country they are simultaneously claiming is too dangerous for them to live in. When Yalmar sees that suggestion... I cringe a little bit because I know that's not what we asked, that's not what we surveyed. That has nothing to do with the survey we did and has nothing to do with the number that is shown.

Now, to be clear, Yalmar says that the reporting of the story by Bulletin was factually accurate. The result they reported was the result of the survey. I don't have a really big issue with it, with how they reported it. The problem with how they reported it was that it was slightly ambiguous and that ambiguity...

That's what got used for political reasons by other people who posted on Twitter, posted on social media, back and forth. We asked the Bulletin whether they'd written the article in an ambiguous way on purpose so the survey could be interpreted as saying something about refugees that the survey didn't back up, a so-called dog whistle, that people with anti-immigrant views could hear and share but others could not.

Tino Sanandadji is the co-owner of Bulletin. I'm very much against dog whistles. And it exists a lot, unfortunately. And I dislike that, this kind of exaggerated, hateful, dismissive discussion on immigration. A lot of people on the right do that. And I don't think that's constructive. And I think they're hurting themselves by doing that. And both sides have created this

polarized situation. There are people who don't like refugees. They think they're liars. They just don't want them here, or they don't care about being objective, interpreting the data. They just make the worst possible interpretation, which is people are just coming with lots of money in their pocket and pretend to be refugees. And as they're getting money from Europe, they're going back to luxury vacations in their home country. And there are people who make that type of interpretation, and that's completely wrong.

then there is a correct interpretation, which is that lots of people who at some point came as refugees, who have stayed in Sweden, feel safe enough to go back to their home country. And as long as those 183 people in the survey are representative of Swedish refugees in general, and as long as you know that a large proportion of these people are Swedish citizens, and that they arrived over the last 80 years, then this is perfectly correct. ♪

That's it for this week. Our thanks to Yalmar Strid from Novus and Tino Sanandaji from Bulletin. If you want to get in touch, please send an email to moreorless at bbc.co.uk. Until next time, goodbye.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

If you're going there, so are we. Book now on Emirates.com. Fly Emirates. Fly better. Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by.

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And for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.