It probably makes a political difference yes, but I mean that if you woke a swede in norway, they wouldn't really notice apart from that everyone sounded funny.
> much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states.
The biggest recently is Syria, followed by Eritrea (2014).
I'm not saying that immigration is a net positive economically in Sweden (this is a hot topic, which isn't PC to talk about btw), short term at least that is very hard to believe, especially for refugees. Long term you get a different set of factors though when you weigh in demographics etc, the opinion on immigration is somewhat positive here though.
Going slightly OT here but I'm pretty sure that racism/xenophobia against muslims in Sweden is no worse than elsewhere. I'm not saying things are peachy, but incredible seems like an overstatement in this case.
If anything, I'm surprised how tolerant this society is.
It absolutely does make a difference to have the world's largest sovereign wealth fund[0], as well as the economic status that allows you to leave it untouched. Simply having guaranteed future access to that kind of wealth changes your political and economic options today.
> Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration
Sweden is also comparably small (same size as NYC proper), and much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states. Sweden refuses to publish data on ethnic backgrounds[0], but by all accounts it is overwhelmingly white[1]. Of the top ten countries of origin for Swedish immigrants, 6 are predominantly-white European countries, and the rest are countries with majority Muslim population[2]. Muslim immigrants in Sweden have on average a dramatically lower quality-of-life than the general Swedish population and compared to what is being discussed here. On top of that, they face incredible racism and xenophobia.
So if anything, this supports the point that allowing free migration (as all US cities do) brings average quality-of-life down, not up. (Or to put it another way, it's very easy to maintain a high quality-of-life when you have the freedom to exercise strict control over your borders).
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24049876
[1] Manhattan, by contrast, was majority non-white for most of the 20th century, and only just surpassed 50% white in ~2011.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden#Populat...