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