Eventually, the discussion turned to the broader political climate. Though the government’s focus was on deterring asylum seekers, the overall atmosphere was changing, said Rajeshwari Yogi, a telecommunications engineer who works at Ericsson, one of Sweden’s leading companies.
“Even if we are skilled laborers, are we still welcome here?” she asked.
Europeans may see themselves today as besieged by migrants, but it was not so long ago that their forebears were themselves impoverished migrants, leaving their home countries in great droves to seek fortune, or simply survival, in colonized lands. Between 1850 and 1930, more than a million Swedes crossed the Atlantic to settle in the United States — about one-fifth of the population, the same proportion that, in a neat symmetry, is now foreign-born.
Among them was a 14-year-old girl named Laura Carolina Thun, who in 1892 boarded a ship called the Hekla, bound for New York. She traveled alone, in steerage. She left behind a Dickensian childhood. She was born to unmarried parents — a seamstress and a cobbler — in Stockholm. They gave their infant daughter up to an orphanage when she was only about a month old. She spent much of her childhood shuffling between orphanages, foster homes and her parents’ house, which, like many Swedish homes, was very crowded. It was little wonder that she decided to make the journey into the unknown, across the fathomless sea to a new life on the American plains she could scarcely imagine.
This migrant girl was my great-great-grandmother, one strand in an endless braid of migrants who form the identities of most Americans. Her great-grandson, my father, would in some ways follow in her footsteps, seeking to make a life far from the country in which he was born, marrying a woman from Ethiopia and raising my brothers and me largely on the African continent. Although I was born in the United States and have always carried its navy-blue passport, I have spent much of my life abroad. I have always stood ambivalently at the psychic borders of American belonging.
I heard powerful echoes of my ambivalence in so many conversations with people from migrant backgrounds in Sweden, often people in whom the country had invested a great deal over the course of their upbringing and education. One in particular was a woman named Amira Malik-Miller.