Sweden: demographics
Sweden has one of the world's highest life expectancies. As of approximately August 12, 2004, the total population of Sweden for the first time exceeded 9,000,000, according to the SCB. As of February 2006, the population was 9,060,430.[6] About 86.7% of the population is ethnic Swedish. The largest non-Swedish ethnic group are the Finns, who make up about 5% of the whole population and in the areas near the border to Finland 50% of the population. A big group that has immigrated is from former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. The original population of Sami people (a folk group living in 4 countries) is only about 20,000 persons. Approximately 77,500 of the nation's population is of sub-Saharan African ancestry. The majority of Afro-Swedes are immigrants who came for political refuge and economic opportunity, including Ethiopians whom fled from Communist rule in the 1970's and 1980's, and Somalians sought work as "guest workers" in Sweden in the 1990's.
Sweden has been transformed from a nation of emigration ending after World War I to a nation of immigration from World War II onwards. Currently, almost 12% of the residents were born abroad, and about one fifth of Sweden's population are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. The largest immigrant groups are from Finland, Southern Europe (i.e. Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain), the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East (i.e. "guest workers" from Turkey), a sizable community from the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) since the 1940's but these countries restored independence after the USSR collapsed in 1990/1991., and other Nordic Countries, in that order. This reflects the inter-Nordic migrations, earlier periods of labour immigration, and later decades of refugee and family immigration.
Soviet intervention against the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Czechoslovak liberalization resulted in the first surges of intellectual political refugees. Some American deserters from the Vietnam War also found refuge among the Swedes, who in international politics took a clear stand against what they typically viewed as imperialism executed by both the Soviet Union and the United States. [citation needed]Following the 1973 coup in Chile, a large number of political refugees arrived in Sweden. Others came from South American countries like Argentina and Uruguay following the rise of military dictatorships. Sweden has also taken in refugees from the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and those from the Palestinian territories. And some East Asian and South Asian immigration (Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Pakistanis and Vietnamese into Sweden should be noted.
Source: Wikipedia