> If you have 'an army of low skilled workers' then there's no room 'to absorb so many low skilled migrants', surely?

Why? The world doesn't work by laws of semantic symmetry. The Swedish economy is structured on automation, on lack of personal service roles, and on skilled industry. Swedish furniture manufacturers use robots and those on the shop floor that remain are required to have skills to operate those robots. Neither will you will find a huge pool of labor cutting people's lawns or being nannies or replacing roofs because there aren't many lawns to cut, roofs are made to last longer and be less labor intensive, and personal service is stygmatized. It's like Holland, which is the breadbasket of Europe but is a pioneer in agricultural automation and does not rely on large amounts of cheap migrant labor, whereas the US agricultural sector does. Even for something like restaurants, Swedish culture makes much less use of them -- e.g. San Francisco has 500 restaurants per 100K, But once you transition to a high skilled economy it becomes much harder to absorb low skilled workers.

Here, things like labor policies play a role. A high minimum wage, generous benefits and travel may pencil out for a high skilled worker that is willing to be paid 1/2 what they could get in the U.S., but they don't pencil out for a low skilled worker unless the low skilled worker's wages are high enough so that the various costs pencil out, which means there can't be too many of them as the services they provide will be more expensive means and thus have smaller utilization. That is why people complain about things like taxis, restaurant meals, bus trips, etc., costing a lot in Sweden, which is why Stockholm has 1/10 as many restaurants per 100K compared to Tokyo and 1/5 as many compared to San Francisco. Those high wages basically require a more capital intensive production processes and don't leave a lot of room for low skilled jobs.

Btw, that is one of the arguments for high minimum wages and generous benefits. The idea is that it will force firms to invest in more capital so that labor becomes more productive. That's the phenomena of McDonald's creating robot tellers and getting rid of workers. That's the process by which the revenue generated per worker is high enough to justify generous benefits. And the question with that approach is always can the economy transition to a high skilled economy or will there be a permanent underclass of unemployable low skilled workers. And Sweden has done a decent job of making this transition, although there is always a problem with high unemployment, it hasn't been the fiasco predicted, as most of the labor force has transitioned to high skilled work. But then that creates a problem when you dump a lot of low skilled workers on the economy -- they find themselves in the permanent unemployed class.

The U.S., on the other hand, has lower costs of employing labor and thus is able to absorb low skilled labor but the flip side is you do not have the same pressures towards automation and capital investment, so the US economy overall is much more mixed. It's not a high tech economy, it has a lot of low skilled jobs as well, and those low skilled jobs don't enjoy the same level of benefits.

It's a tough call which approach is "better". Culturally, the US will never become Sweden, but there are pros and cons of each approach.