Ten years ago the then prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt asked Swedes to “open your hearts” to refugees. Now the country’s migration minister is celebrating the fact Sweden has “negative net immigration”, with more people thought to be leaving the country than entering for the first time in more than half a century.
“The number of asylum applications is heading towards a historically low level, asylum-related residence permits continue to decrease and for the first time in 50 years Sweden has net emigration,” Maria Malmer Stenergard announced earlier this month.
Sweden’s Moderate-led government, which is supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats, has pursued increasingly restrictive asylum policies, including plans for a “snitch law” that would legally require public sector workers to report undocumented people.
While the workings behind the government’s conclusion have attracted speculation – including from the government agency whose figures Stenergard’s statement was based on – the UN high commissioner for refugees confirmed the trend. It was surprising, the UNHCR said, that while global displacement was at an all-time high, the number of people seeking asylum in Sweden was at an all-time low.
“The statistics show Sweden having a net outflow of immigrants for the first time in decades,” Annika Sandlund, the UNHCR representative to the Nordic and Baltic countries, told the Guardian.
Stenegard claimed net emigration was evidence that “the government’s work yields results” and that the approach was “necessary for us to be able to strengthen integration and reduce exclusion”.
However, Sandlund warned: “It might not be such a good thing for Sweden as a country.” As well as playing a vital part in the workforce given Sweden’s ageing population, making immigrants feel welcome was crucial to integration, she said. “What we do know is that successful integration, which this government wants to see, depends on people feeling welcome.”
The national statistics agency, SCB, said its findings supported the government’s claim that there was negative net immigration between January and May, but that the number of emigrants during these months was in reality probably much lower, due to a recent project seeking to remove people from the population register who had already left the country. Earlier this year, the agency announced that immigration between January and March was at its lowest quarterly level since 2005.
Johannes Cleris, an SCB spokesperson, said: “As for the claim that [there are] more emigrants than immigrants for the first time in 50 years, that would be true in terms of the statistics for the whole year.” But he added: “We cannot see in our statistics whether the claim is true or not for the period January to May.”
Asylum seeker aid organisations and members of immigrant communities told the Guardian that fear over the government’s anti-immigration policies and rhetoric was to blame, actively encouraging people to leave the country or to seek asylum elsewhere.
“We are contacted by people who are very worried about the restrictive regime and thinking about leaving,” said one organisation.
Tobias Hübinette, a senior lecturer in intercultural studies at Karlstad University, said a reverse from net immigration to net emigration would be “totemic” and showed the influence of the Sweden Democrats on the governing coalition since its election in 2022.
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“If it is true, its absolutely historic because Sweden has been an immigration country for such a long time – basically 100 years,” he said.
The prospect of tightening restrictions – including on visas, citizenship and bringing relatives to the country – made Sweden unappealing, he said, particularly among highly educated people from countries including Somalia, Iraq and Syria.
Opposition voices – including in parliament – had also quietened, he said, because there was a level of acceptance. “If this had happened five years ago, it would have been uproar. Because of the two years we have seen … you just give up and accept things.”
He added that, for Swedish society, “it’s a pure catastrophe”.
The asylum seeker aid organisation Farr said it was seeing increasing concern about immigration restrictions among its member groups and the difficulty of successfully gaining asylum was creating worry.
“If you compare with 10 years ago, it has become much more accepted to be openly hostile to asylum seekers,” said Terje Holmgren, Farr’s president. “But also, more broadly, it’s commonly accepted that it’s good to be very restrictive and minimise asylum seeker applications in Sweden. All the major political parties have said that for almost 10 years.”