In the previous chapter I discussed Rainer Baubock and Peter Scholten's (2016: 6) “realist approach”, whereby they “consider the politicized trade-offs as facts that are just as hard as if they were grounded in general social laws”. Listening to EU governments, researchers and the news media, this might indeed seem like a realist approach, at least at first glance. But, as the reader may have noted, in the preceding chapter I have already begun to display, and thus cultivate, an alternative type of realism. It comes to the fore in the scattered quotes in Chapter 2, such as when the Swedish government (2018b) concedes in a report on the future of elderly care that, “[w] ithout the foreignborn women and men, elderly care would face significant problems in fulfilling its task”. Tucked away in this report we also find this phenomenal piece of information from the Swedish government, one it made sure not to reveal during the election campaign in 2018: “The number of persons in the population belonging to the most labour active age is expected to increase from 5.7 million in 2015 to 6.3 million in 2035. It is those who are foreign-born who are expected to make up the entire increase of working-age persons” (Swedish government 2018b: 13– 14). This is refugee migration's real impact on Sweden; it has blessed it with a unique boost in the working-age population, one that puts Sweden in a uniquely fortunate position when dealing with the increase of the elderly population.

In the previous chapter, I also pointed to the severe staff shortages within Swedish and European healthcare and care sectors and how migrants and refugees increasingly are becoming the mainstay of these and other public services. Various versions of the message “Without the immigrants, healthcare collapses” are thus becoming commonplace across the European Union. As seen, many depopulating areas in Sweden and across the EU realize that welfare services are unsustainable if labour is unavailable, and this goes for welfare functions and services in urban areas too, of course.