Over a few days this past summer, as I was putting the finishing touches to this book, my daughter developed a pain in her left foot after having twisted her ankle. As the pain persisted we went to see a doctor. In the waiting room at the local clinic I took note of the fact that seven of the ten doctors in the corridor had foreign names, three of which were Muslim. I have seen doctors from both Iraq and Romania at this clinic, which was no coincidence given that Iraqi and Romanian doctors make up two of the largest groups within the cohort of foreign-born doctors in Sweden. More than 30 per cent of all doctors in Sweden are born abroad, and in the case of Iraqi doctors most of them arrived as refugees in the noughties. My daughter was examined by a doctor from Germany – another major sending country – who swiftly referred her to the main hospital for an X-ray.

We took a taxi to the hospital, and here as well the person servicing us was foreign-born, maybe from Syria. Around a half of Sweden's taxi drivers are foreign-born and the great majority have come as refugees. The driver dropped us off at the emergency room entrance, and from there we had to ask for directions to the X-ray department. We were helped by a doctor and nurse who came walking our way. Judging from their ID badges it seemed as if the doctor was from an African country and the nurse from a Middle Eastern country. In all likelihood, the nurse who took care of my daughter in the X-ray department was also from a country in the Middle East.

Luckily, the X-ray indicated no fracture (a couple of days later the pain was gone), and so we headed for the bus stop to go home. There was a bus sitting at the kerb, but the driver told us that it would take a while before it would depart. With my daughter in some pain we decided to take a taxi again. This time our driver might have been from Somalia; the same probably applied to the bus driver.