Also outside the centre is Freddie, a 19-year-old Ghanaian who came to Sweden two days earlier. Why has he claimed asylum here, I ask. “My grandfather died and my father died too, so I thought I’d come to Europe,” he said. “There are more opportunities here. A friend said ‘Try Sweden. It is possible there’.” He tells me he would like to go to London eventually. “There are many Ghanaians there,” he says.

Therein lies the challenge not just for Sweden but for all of Europe: muddled in with those fleeing conflict are those doing what people have always done — leave home in search of prosperity, not just security. Last autumn, British-Somali poet Warsan Shire’s “Home” became something of a rallying cry for those who thought every European government should be as generous as Sweden. Benedict Cumberbatch recited part of it on stage after performances of Hamlet at the Barbican. (“Fuck the politicians,” he added at one show.) But the poem’s opening lines — “No one leaves home/unless home is the mouth of a shark” — are entirely at odds with the motivations of many of those coming to Europe. Doug Sanders, a journalist who has spent considerable time reporting on cross-Mediterranean migration, has written: “The most insidious notion is the one that holds that the Africans on the boats are starving villagers escaping famine and death. In fact, every boat person I’ve ever met has been ambitious, urban, educated, and, if not middle-class (though a surprising number are, as are an even larger number of Syrian refugees), then far from subsistence peasantry.”

When the Swedish government announced that an estimated 80,000 asylum seekers would have their applications rejected, few Swedes had confidence in the authorities’ ability to prevent them settling in Sweden or somewhere else in Europe. Seven out of ten of those facing deportation simply vanish.

The open invitations offered by Sweden and Germany, coupled with the collapse of the European border last summer, have helped to create a perverse status quo that rewards those rich and strong enough to survive the journey to Northern Europe, while refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey remain perilous and underfunded. This year, the Swedish government will spend nearly as much on Afghans in Sweden — including a large number of unaccompanied minors — as the Afghan government’s entire budget, including defence spending. Well-intentioned policymakers have created a Darwinian process for sorting those they help from those they ignore.

Kent Ekeroth has had enough. “This is the most insane country on the planet — except maybe North Korea,” he tells me. Not a tinpot dictatorship or a banana republic. Not a repressive monarchy or a corrupt plutocracy, but inoffensive, bland Sweden. I laugh at his claim but Ekeroth, a 34-year-old member of parliament for the Sweden Democrats, isn’t joking. His words jarred with the scene around him when we met in a blandly-decorated café in the Rikstag. Neatly turned out parliamentary officials sip subsidised coffee. Outside, slabs of ice drift downstream, past parliament and towards the Baltic Sea. Stockholm looks affluent, orderly and well looked after. This is the country Ekeroth wants to preserve; it is also the country he thinks has gone mad.