It’s interesting. The Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Sweden, and Finland – have reputations for being unusually open societies with comprehensive and generally successful social-welfare systems. So comprehensive, in fact, that they are sometimes mischaracterized as “Socialist.”
For years, that openness extended to immigration and refugees. Sweden, in particular, accepted large numbers of asylum seekers and provided newcomers with housing, education, health care, income support, language training, and other benefits intended to help them integrate.
But over the past 25 years, and especially since the European refugee crisis of 2015, all three countries have moved toward tougher immigration policies.
Denmark moved first. After Anders Fogh Rasmussen became prime minister in 2001, his government explicitly set out to reduce immigration. It tightened asylum and family-reunification rules, made permanent residency harder to obtain, and restricted full welfare benefits for some newcomers. In 2002, Denmark introduced its controversial “24-year rule,” which made it considerably more difficult for young immigrants and Danish residents to bring foreign spouses into the country. The government argued that the changes were necessary to reduce welfare dependency, forced marriages, crime, and failures of integration.
Sweden held to its more welcoming policy much longer. Then came 2015. About 163,000 people applied for asylum in Sweden – roughly 1.6% of the country’s population in a single year. The government said the influx was putting severe pressure on the asylum system and other public services. Border controls were introduced. Rules for family reunification were tightened. Temporary residence permits largely replaced permanent ones for new asylum cases. The government openly said that its objective was to “greatly reduce” the number of asylum seekers coming to Sweden.
Finland experienced a similar shock. More than 32,000 asylum seekers arrived in 2015, nearly 10 times the number in 2014. The government tightened family-reunification requirements, including requiring many refugees to demonstrate sufficient income before bringing family members into the country, while putting greater emphasis on employment and immigrants’ obligation to participate in integration programs.
Since then, the movement has continued. Sweden’s current policy is explicitly aimed at reducing asylum-related immigration and making requirements for integration, residency, and citizenship stricter. Finland has likewise moved toward tighter rules on asylum, family reunification, citizenship, and some forms of labor immigration.
So the interesting story isn’t that Scandinavia suddenly became anti-immigrant. It is that three countries famous for combining generous welfare states with relatively liberal attitudes toward immigration began asking whether the two policies could continue indefinitely in their existing form.
Next Time: What happened that caused public and political opinion in Scandinavia to change?
Meanwhile, here is a recent report on Denmark’s move against its Muslim invasion.
Worth Considering
Movie Review: The Invite
Seth Rogan and Olivia Wilde in The Invite
I think the most interesting thing about The Invite is that I liked almost everything except the fact that it’s a movie. That sounds harsher than the way I mean it. The acting is good. The dialogue is intelligent. It is frequently amusing. And the four principal actors – Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton – are good enough that for long stretches I was perfectly happy watching them talk.
But somewhere along the way, I began wondering why anybody had bothered to put a camera in the room.
What It’s About
The premise is promising enough. Joe and Angela are a married couple whose relationship has gone stale. Angela invites their upstairs neighbors, Piña and Hawk, to dinner. The neighbors have a much more adventurous sex life than they have, something Joe and Angela know because they can hear it through the ceiling.
Dinner begins awkwardly and gets considerably more awkward when Piña and Hawk explain that they came downstairs partly because they were interested in having sex with their hosts. You can imagine where a French filmmaker might take this. Or Woody Allen 40 years ago.
What follows is partly a sex comedy, partly a marital comedy, and eventually something closer to group therapy. Beneath the jokes, the movie is really concerned with a fairly serious question: What happens to a marriage after the sexual and romantic energy has disappeared but the two people remain attached to the life they’ve built together?
That’s a good question, and the movie occasionally gets somewhere with it.
What I Liked About It
Joe and Angela fight, flirt, humiliate themselves, and finally begin saying things to each other that they’ve apparently avoided saying for years. Their supposedly liberated neighbors gradually become less important as sexual temptations than as provocateurs. Their presence forces Joe and Angela to look at their marriage. That gives the movie more depth than its naughty premise initially promises.
Rogen is particularly suited to this kind of role. His mixture of hostility, insecurity, and comic indignation feels natural. Wilde is convincing as a woman simultaneously embarrassed by her husband and still somehow attached to him. Cruz and Norton have the harder assignment because their characters could easily have become caricatures – the sophisticated, sexually liberated couple descending from upstairs to enlighten the bourgeois married people below – but they don’t.
So the acting wasn’t my problem.
What I Didn’t Like So Much
My problem was that The Invite never stopped feeling like a stage play.
In fact, it is a remake of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, and almost the entire story takes place during this increasingly strange dinner between four people. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Some of the greatest dramas ever written consist of people standing around in rooms talking.
But theater and movies have different powers. A stage play has language. It has actors. And it has that peculiar electricity produced by real people performing a few feet away from you. Movies have all of that except the electricity. What they get in exchange is the camera.
Movies can cut. Change perspective. Compress time. Expand it. Show me what a character remembers, fears, imagines, or refuses to see. The Invite doesn’t do much with those possibilities. The camera mostly records four talented actors performing a clever script. The direction feels static because the underlying material is static, and the editing can’t rescue it because there isn’t much cinematic material to edit.
Which leaves the dialogue carrying almost everything. And the dialogue is good, but it isn’t King Lear. It isn’t Waiting for Godot. It isn’t language so extraordinary that simply listening to people speak becomes sufficient reason for turning theater into cinema. That was the reservation I couldn’t quite get past.
Still, I enjoyed myself. I laughed. I liked the actors. I was interested enough in the marriage to want to see how it resolved. And the movie deserves some credit for taking sex, marriage, resentment, and middle-aged disappointment seriously without becoming terribly serious about itself.
My Rating
So I would give The Invite a 7.6 out of 10. That puts it at the upper end of “good” on my scale. Solid characters. Very good acting. Intelligent dialogue. And enough emotional truth to make the watching worthwhile. But I can’t move it into the 8 to 9 range because the visuals, directing, and editing don’t add enough to what was already there on the page.
As a play, I might have liked it more. But when somebody sells me a movie ticket, I want a movie.
Worth Considering
Three Quick Bites
Lindsay Clancy
Behind the Attacks
A thoughtful piece on the Lindsay Clancy trial and the outrage many felt about the one “hold out” juror.
Lindy Li
“The DNC is like a Scientology cult”
An inside view of the Democratic National Finance Committee from political commentator Lindy Li.
“College Grads vs. the AI Job Apocalypse”
From the WSJ: Students on what a degree is worth when AI takes the entry-level work.
Worth Considering
Postscript: A rare moment in my Brazilian training
I complete a deep half-guard sweep and move into mount position for five points! (The training session ended at about 60 to 5, but those 5 points felt great!)
