When discussing social services, it's also important to discuss borders, because of the real-or-imagined threat of people doing all their tax-paying years in one jurisdiction and all their benefit-drawing years in another.
The various US states have been dealing with tenuous internal boundaries for 200 years, and it has affected the evolution of their various tax/benefit systems.
In contrast, Germany--as part of the EU--has done the same for only about 20 years, and is even now poised to break/bend the agreement to deter an influx of migrants.
TLDR: It much easier to maintain a high-welfare state when you have strong border-controls or are geographically remote from waves of immigration.
Wait a minute.
1) It's not just Germany. The Schengen area inside and partly outside the EU is playing catch-up with the consequences of increased work migration. We can even say the whole EU has tried to come up with solutions since the Eastern European states joined.
2) Currently Germany is one of the few countries /not/ trying to deter migrants. That does not only apply to refugees but also migrants from South and East Europe. It's a couple of other countries bending rules here.
3) Stop conflating intra-EU migration with the refugees.
Furthermore, none of them have more people than Germany (~80 million), the country where the modern welfare state was born (Bismark put in place the first welfare reforms as a means to try to stop the growth of the socialist groups that were becoming a threat to the political stability of Prussia; though while he gave with one hand, he outlawed dozens of them with the other).
Of course, even the Scandinavian countries subdivides provisioning of these services further, down to the county level for many types of services.
In other words: This is a problem that decomposes very nicely, and that scales up accordingly. Just threat it as a suitable number of independent systems. They still have the economies of scale to make it reasonably efficient. You have some added complications, but also the benefit of being able to study differences in the various implementations and copy the most effective practices. Scale is opportunity here, first and foremost, not a problem.
> You also have to take into account the Scandinavian cultural norms as well.
As a Scandinavian, I'm very curious about what Scandinavian cultural norms you believe makes this easier that isn't present elsewhere. Besides, it's not just Scandinavia that has a comprehensive welfare system. Most Western-European countries do.
> As we've seen in recent years, when you institute measures like this it actually creates more dependency and self reliance on the government
This is only a "problem" when you don't consider that the alternative is that these people starve, live in substandard housing or go without important medical care. Nobody wants people to be dependent on welfare, but I prefer "welfare dependence" to having people grow up destitute.
If/when there are jobs that pay enough, fine, put strict conditions in place to push people to take them or lose benefits. But when there aren't enough jobs, or the ones that are available doesn't cover housing or food nothing good is achieved by not providing support for the basics.