How are countries like Norway and Switzerland not so densely populated considering the fact that they are portrayed as nearly heaven in all aspects?

Question

How are countries like Norway and Switzerland not so densely populated considering the fact that they are portrayed as nearly heaven in all aspects?

In: 8410

Answer 1

Heaven is a very subjective term. It’s fair to say those countries tend to have a great social safety net, good schools and people score high on health and happiness indexes. That said, you all hear young people talk about limited socioeconomic mobility, they’re often very homogenous…

So why don’t people flock there? Neither country is really adjacent to or close to less well off countries. Sure their neighbors may not all enjoy the same standard of living, but most of their neighbors also have decent social safety nets as well as long and deep cultural identities. With respect to cultural identity, it’s hard to go into a homogenous place and maintain your cultural identity without consequence. On the proximity of poorer neighbors point, if you flip the US and Canada, Canada would receive the waves of economic migrants that the US does. If you flip Norway with Spain or Greece then Norway would have the groups of economic migrants coming in on boats.

Some of those countries are not super welcoming of foreigners who want to stay there AFAIK. From what I’ve heard in many of those countries, it’s hard to truly make the transition from you live there to you are from there. Not only do people have close knit social groups (largely because the cost of living makes social gatherings with friends and family more affordable than going out) but they’re not known for being welcoming of strangers into the group.

As others mentioned, their immigration process is also tough so you can’t generally rock up to the border and just stay, taking full advantage of the system for you and your current as well as future kids.

Last thing I’ll say is that those countries became “heaven” largely through shared values. When you let in too many different people the chances of having shared values decreases significantly and it puts the whole system at risk. You can check youtube and news articles for the fall out that’s occurred in some of those countries when the African and Middle Eastern migration to Europe was surging.