So that explained one mystery. And perhaps unsurprisingly, my experience of “Sweden: Uncensored” was not at all scandalous. Among the things an uncensored Swede might tell you about, if you asked: what his compatriots name their dogs (often appellations that fit old Nordic men, like Gunnar and Bosse); typical opinions on the Swedish band ABBA (from mixed to vaguely fond); the words for home-cooked Swedish food (husmanskost) and Swedish candy (lösgodis); and their politely disdainful opinions of Donald Trump (who, if he visited to Sweden, “would look for someplace to make money,” according to a truck driver I reached who gave his name as Thor). The Swedes I spoke to answered the obvious when I asked if they liked the weather. (In the summer, yes; at any other time, no.) They all said that their country is a beautiful place.

All of which led me to suspect that a country that institutes a national phone number is one that doesn’t have much to hide about itself—that the risks being taken by a tourism organization in a place whose residents report high life satisfaction, according to the OECD’s Better Life Index, are small potatoes. (Swedes also eat a lot of those.) But the dial-a-Swede campaign, in addition to the Swedes I spoke to, hints at bigger themes in Sweden’s relationship with the outside world, especially when, like many countries in Europe, it is struggling to cope with a record-breaking wave of migration.

Statistiska centralbyrån, the country’s central statistics office, reports that about 1.6 million people in Sweden, or about one-sixth of the population, were born outside the country—though the biggest source of immigrants is next-door Finland. (Sweden’s “multiculturalism” was mentioned many times in my phone calls to the country.) Last year, Sweden accepted, by proportion of its population and by percentage of applicants, more asylum-seekers than any other European country. It became overwhelmed, and now plans to expel up to 80,000 unsuccessful asylum-seekers. This reversal, from openness to border controls and deportations, has elicited headlines like “The Death of the Most Generous Nation on Earth.”

At the individual level, though, it’s not hard to find generosity. The first Swede I spoke to, Rikard Björk, is a 28-year-old actor who lives in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city. He was on his way to what he described as a “nearby Swedish-Arab community,” where he volunteers as a language teacher. He said Sweden’s help for refugees made him proud, “though it’s not common for Swedes to use that word,” but that the recent change of policy is “just legitimizing the other countries to behave exactly like Sweden is doing.”

That change does have support among the broader electorate. The refugee crisis has corresponded to the sudden rise to prominence of the Sweden Democrats, a far-right nationalist party with an anti-immigration stance that was founded in 1988 by groups with white-supremacist and fascist roots. Last December, the party polled its highest-ever projected share of the electoral vote, at almost 20 percent. In an essay for Jacobin in January, the Swedish journalist Petter Larsson noted that the rising popularity of the extreme right in Sweden is occurring at a time when immigration dominates political conversation: “This in a country where until a few years ago no issue could compete with education, health care, or jobs. Swedish politics is now trapped in a vicious circle. The larger the Sweden Democrats grows, the larger immigration looms in the public’s mind, and vice versa.” A poll published by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter last December found that 55 percent of Swedes did not want the country to take in any more refugees—a jump of 25 percentage points since that September.