Time and again, Swedish migration laws lead to people whom nearly everyone agrees should be allowed to stay being forced out the country. Sweden needs to do better, says James Savage.
Let’s start with the obvious: Sweden can have any immigration policy it chooses, and it has chosen a strict one, for understandable reasons. The migration crisis of 2015 saw stations in Sweden started filling up with refugees from wars a continent away and the government didn’t seem to have a plan to cope with it. It looked chaotic, and in a sense it was.
But Sweden’s immigration policy hasn’t just become stricter: due to a combination of incompetent drafting and bureaucratic inflexibility it has become unfair, counterproductive and damaging to Sweden’s national interest. And the problem isn’t just down to the current government, it’s systemic.
We saw it in 2017, when the previous government was still in power: stories emerged of work permit holders who were settled in Sweden and whose talents were in demand, being refused renewals for small bureaucratic errors by their employers, like buying the wrong health insurance. The rules were eventually made more flexible to allow the Migration Agency to look at the bigger picture, but only after much foot-dragging by politicians and bureaucrats — and too late for many people.
We saw it again with teen deportations: we knew in 2022 that the young-adult children of immigrants were being deported, often in the middle of their studies, in many cases because their parents, who came on work permits, had been granted permanent residency (children of permanent residents need permits in their own right after 18, children of work permit holders after 21). This was allowed to continue for four years until politicians acted.
The latest situation affects British citizens living in Sweden. Many people who lived here legally for years, often more Swedish than British, are being kicked out of the country because they messed up the paperwork after Brexit. Many had been granted “permanent right of residence” (“permanent uppehållsrätt”) under EU rules and mistakenly believed that this meant they didn’t need to take further action. Sweden only made fairly limited, half-hearted attempts to contact British citizens in Sweden, so many didn’t know they had to act.
Others, like John Sellers, fulfilled the criteria for citizenship and applied for that instead. The problem was, in the years it took the Migration Agency to look at John’s citizenship application, Britain had left the EU, John’s right to remain in Sweden had disappeared with it — and as a consequence he no longer qualified for citizenship. Now John, 34, who has lived in Sweden since he was 10 and has a Swedish wife, is stuck in Britain with no obvious way back to Sweden. Computer says no.
Two migration ministers have vowed to The Local that they want British people to be allowed to stay, as British and EU leaders promised they would be able to do. Yet still nothing happens. Sweden is the only country in the EU to deport significant numbers of Brits after Brexit, and coverage of the cases around Europe is now damaging Sweden’s reputation.
Again and again, Sweden passes migration laws in which bureaucratic logic takes precedence over justice for individuals and Sweden’s national interest. Again and again, everyone agrees that the victims of the latest immigration blunder should have been allowed to stay — and could have stayed if they’d just understood the bureaucracy better. Yet again and again bureaucratic logic is allowed to win. Who knows, maybe the next accidental deportations scandal is already lurking in a forgotten, lazily-drafted paragraph of one of the many immigration laws passed this parliament.
Sweden prides itself on agencies that act independently and follow the law. Ministers can’t and won’t get involved in individual cases or in steering how agencies interpret the law. This is sensible in many ways, but it means that we need well-drafted laws that take into account edge cases and avoid unjust outcomes. That’s not what we’ve been getting.
These injustices harm trust in Sweden among immigrants and make Sweden less attractive to the people the country wants to attract. They also harm the Swedish companies who employ immigrants and thereby harm the Swedish economy. Let me stress: this is not a call to liberalise immigration rules, it’s a call to make the application of the rules fair and reasonable, and to avoid yet more damaging scandals. The next government must look at why the system fails so often — and work out how to do better in future. Meanwhile, if you’re an immigrant, get a good lawyer.