2015-08-05 06:58:20
By Shaun Ley Presenter, BBC Radio 4
"Blessed land." This description, given to The World This Weekend by one migrant to Sweden, neatly explains why the people trying to get into the UK from Calais are unlikely to give up easily.
Plenty of British politicians have journeyed to Sweden in recent years, believing it may have the answers to big policy questions.
Free schools, for example, were inspired by similar innovation in the Swedish system.
If they look to Sweden for answers to immigration, they may not like what they find.
Instead of looking for ways to discourage those seeking asylum, the Swedes have bent over backwards to help.
Last year, half the Syrians who applied were told they could stay for three years; the rest were told they could stay for good.
The UK accepted 10,000 asylum seekers last year. Sweden, one sixth of the size in population terms, took in 30,000.
Number of non-EU applications for asylum accepted 2014:
Germany: 40,560
Sweden: 30,650
Italy: 20,580
France: 14,815
The Netherlands: 12,550
UK: 10,050
Morgan Johansson, minister for justice and migration, says this is a better option than Britain's approach to Calais, which he likens to trying to block the bridge between Denmark and Sweden.
It would be inaccurate, though, to suggest that immigration is causing any less anxiety there than in the UK.
Encouraging risk
The Swedish Democrats, a party hostile to the scale of immigration the country has experienced, says the open-door policy encourages desperate people to take risks, such as crossing the desert and sailing across the Mediterranean in overcrowded, unsafe boats.
Even some of those who are quite liberal on the subject have their doubts about the Swedish approach.
A migrant tries to jump on to a train in Calais
Azram Yakood, who leads the Assyrian Federation of Sweden, says too many people are being admitted, and that creates problems for everyone.
One is lack of integration. Many who have adopted Sweden as their new home not unnaturally stay close to settled populations from their own country.
This leads to ghettos, calm, comfortable ones perhaps but ghettos nonetheless.
The UK has tried dispersing immigrants in the past. Now the emphasis here is on things like language tests.
Those who speak English find it easier to integrate, and need not be so reliant on their particular community.
It may also reduce some hostility from those who are frustrated by dealing with a nurse or traffic warden who isn't fluent in it.
Still, the British government believes that prevention is better than cure.
Over the last 11 months, it has announced a total of 20.4m to be spent on security in and around the railhead of the Channel Tunnel.
In a joint newspaper article published in the Sunday Telegraph, Home Secretary Theresa May and Bernard Cazeneuve, her French equivalent, warned that "it is not for the UK and France to solve these problems alone".
Bernard Cazeneuve says other European countries must do more to combat migrant movements
Clearly, they think countries on the Mediterranean coast, including Greece and Italy, should do more to interdict migrant journeys.
Since the agreement called the Dublin Convention, people seeking asylum in Europe are required to apply for it in the first country they reach.
Geography means that is rarely France or the UK; hence the suspicion that many of the thousands camped in and around Calais have been quietly passed on from elsewhere in the European Union.
Yet the UK's request for "communautaire" from its EU partners may receive short shrift.
Only a couple of months ago, Mrs May said Britain would not be part of a plan, drawn up by the European Commission, to disperse across Europe migrants washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean.
The UK wasn't the only country to object but it does make it harder to lecture anyone else.
EU summit
An EU Summit in Valetta, the capital of Malta, to be held in November will try to thrash out an agreement.
Perhaps whilst there, the heads of government could visit one of the island's migrant holding camps, as I did a few years back.
Crowded in to a disused military base, wholly inadequate for the number of people it housed, I heard the migrants' stories, of the frightening journey and the uncertain future that awaited them.
I also spoke to the country's then interior minister. He told me he had been lobbying his EU equivalents to take a share of the arrivals.
The British home secretary at the time expressed sympathy, but said UK public opinion made it politically impossible.
Malta continues to struggle with the scale of those who make their way to its shores.
At the Valetta Summit it may find that politically, little has changed.