That result occurred partly because the Swedish majority populace has gone about the business of absorbing the newcomers with the famous Scandinavian seriousness of purpose. There are programs to help new arrivals learn Swedish. There are programs to help them find housing. And there are generous subsidies for those who aren't working.
In France, black and brown faces are largely nonexistent in politics, government, the news media and the top echelons of business -- anywhere outside of sports and music. But in Sweden, immigrants have assumed a much higher profile.
Timbuktu, 29, a hip-hop artist born in Sweden, performs songs about racial prejudice and stereotypes.
(Keith B. Richburg -- The Washington Post)
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Foreign-born Swedes hold a significant number of parliamentary seats. The top Swedish chef, Marcus Samuelsson, is an ethnic Ethiopian. Some of the most popular comedians on television are foreign-born, including Ozz Nujen and Shan Atci, both Kurds. One of Sweden's top filmmakers, Josef Fares, came to Sweden from Lebanon. And Sweden's silver medal-winning Olympic wrestler, Ara Abrahamian, was born in Armenia.
"We have a news anchor who is mixed, black and white," noted Timbuktu.
But Sweden's quiet transformation has not been without problems. In Malmo, the biggest problem is unemployment. In Rosengard, the most heavily immigrant district of Malmo, the unemployment rate is around 65 percent, said Jahangir Hosseinkhah, division head of the district's employment and training office, and an ethnic Azerbaijani who emigrated from Iran.
Hosseinkhah said Sweden's generous welfare system is partially to blame. "We have a welfare system in Sweden that is usually a help to people, but it is also a problem," he said. For some immigrants, he said, "they don't need to get a job, because they get an allocation from the state." He said his office has handled immigrants who had lived in Sweden as long as a decade and had never worked.
The influx has also forced the Malmo school system to adapt. At the Borgarskolan high school, 30 percent of the 1,400 students are from immigrant families; other public schools have an even higher percentage. One problem is that the school does not have enough interpreters available for parent-teacher meetings.
Some students interviewed at Borgarskolan said they felt no discrimination at the school, because the classes are so heavily mixed. But in the wider community, they said, they sometimes feel caught between two worlds.
"They don't assume me to be Swedish," said Kamelia Tadjerbashi, 17, who has lived in Sweden since she was 6 months old, the child of an Iranian mother and a Turkish father. "Swedish people get impressed that I speak Swedish so well."
Another 17-year-old student from Iran, Honey Ghaffari, agreed. "They look at you and see dark hair and assume you can't be Swedish," she said. Ghaffari has also lived in Sweden almost her entire life.
"Sometimes, in small stores, if there's an old lady, she'll look at me like I'm shoplifting something," said Charles Anderson, 18, who came here from Cameroon to play soccer for a Swedish team. "I think people have a problem with other cultures. It's a problem of time. People haven't been to Africa. They travel to Thailand, and maybe Spain."
But the biggest problem in Malmo, and in other parts of Sweden, is what people here call "ghettoization": White Swedes typically live in certain areas, in this case the city center, while immigrants are increasingly clustered on the outskirts in their own communities. As Hosseinkhah put it: "People physically live in this area, but they mentally live in their former countries."
"They don't feel they are a part of this community," he said. "They don't know this society. They don't know the codes. . . . There's that feeling of 'we' and 'them.' " He said he has met refugees who have traveled thousands of miles to get to Malmo, but once settled, have never visited the city center.
Ghettoization is a problem that also unsettles Timbuktu.
"Will it be like the United States," he asked rhetorically, "where all the Somalis live in one part of town, and all the Koreans in another?" He added, "I get the feeling that tension is going to increase in Sweden over the next 25 years."
