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POLITICS

EXPLAINED: What you need to know about the proposals to change Swedish migration law

A parliamentary committee set up to work out a new migration policy for Sweden has now handed over its proposal to the government. We take a look at the key proposals to be aware of, from changes to the maintenance requirement for family members to a new Swedish language requirement for permanent residents.

EXPLAINED: What you need to know about the proposals to change Swedish migration law
An interview at the Stockholm office of the Swedish Migration Agency. Photo: Marcus Ericsson / TT

The suggested changes to Swedish migration law were outlined on Tuesday in a 600-page report from a Migration Committee which includes representatives from each party as well as independent experts. 

Even still, these proposals are not as extensive as first expected. The aim of the committee was to come up with ideas for a “humane, legally certain and effective” migration policy to replace the temporary laws introduced in 2016 in the wake of a mass influx of refugees. 

After cross-party talks broke down, the final report was made up of more than 20 proposals rather than a comprehensive policy, each one supported by several parties. The proposed changes fall into five categories, and would affect people who move to Sweden to join a family member, as refugees, or for special protection, as well as those applying for permanent residence.

But there are still several hurdles before any of them become law.

For that to happen, the Social Democrat-Green government would need to put together a bill, send it out for consultation, and it would then need to pass a parliamentary vote. But the Green party, the minority coalition partner, only backs a small number of the proposals, so it's not clear yet how the government will proceed.

Permanent residence requirements

Currently, non-EU citizens can apply for a long-term residence permit after five years living in Sweden with the ability to support yourself, while EU citizens can apply for a permanent residence permit after the same amount of time.

The committee suggests introducing additional requirements. Permanent residence would only be granted to those who “meet the requirements of Swedish language skills and civic knowledge, who can support themselves, and where there is no doubt, with regard to the alien's expected way of life, that a permanent residence permit should be granted”.

This is a big change; there is currently no requirement of language skills or civic knowledge for either permanent residence or even Swedish citizenship.

There would however be exemptions from the first three requirements (language, civic knowledge, maintenance) for pensioners who are eligible for a Swedish national or guarantee pension (meaning they had either worked in Sweden or retired there after living on a low income or no income) as well as for children. There would also be exemptions in other “exceptional” cases.

Moving to someone in Sweden

The proposals would make it easier for people living in Sweden on temporary residence permits to have family members move to join them.

If the person on a temporary permit (the 'sponsor') has “good prospects” of getting permanent residence, their family members would be eligible for a family residence permit. That includes spouses, cohabiting partners, unmarried children of either the sponsor or the sponsor's partner, and other close family members where a “special relationship of dependency” existed in the home country.

These permits would be valid for the same time as the permit of the family member they are moving to. If they extended their permit, they would be eligible for a temporary permit of up to two years, which could then be extended for up to another two years, as long as their permit was never valid for longer than that of their sponsor.

In certain situations, it would be possible for the relocating family member to apply for a permanent residence permit after at least three years in Sweden.


Photo: Anna Hållams/imagebank.sweden.se

Exemption from family maintenance requirements for Swedish and EEA citizens

This has been one of the most hotly-debated issues as political parties tried to come to agreement on the proposals.

One of the big changes in the 2016 temporary law was the introduction of so-called maintenance requirements for people bringing family members over to Sweden.

Unlike the changes outlined above, this applied to anyone bringing over a family member, including permanent residents and citizens. Anyone bringing a family member or spouse to Sweden must currently prove that their income and size of their home is sufficient to support the family member. Any job offer, savings or independent income of the family member is not taken into account.

The Migration Committee proposes retaining the maintenance requirement as a condition of family permits as a general rule, although it should not apply for applications for permit extensions.

There would be a significant exemption from the requirement however.

The maintenance requirement would no longer apply if the family member already in Sweden is a citizen of Sweden, an EEA country, Switzerland or the UK, and the permit applicant is their spouse or cohabiting partner. In these cases, the couple would still need to prove that their relationship was well-established, for example by showing they have lived together in another country. 

Other exemptions would apply in exceptional circumstances as well as for refugees if certain other criteria are met.

Temporary residence permits for refugees

One of the issues the committee was asked to decide on was whether people granted protection should be given temporary or permanent residence permits. Previously permanent residence permits were the norm, but since 2016 temporary permits have been the default.

That would remain the case under the new proposals, which include seven points related to the duration of residence permits.

People granted protection as refugees would be given three-year residence permits, and people receiving protection on other grounds would be given permits of 13 months. If these permits were extended, the committee proposes that these new permits also be temporary rather than permanent, with a validity of two years. Under certain criteria, it would be possible to apply for a permanent residence permit.

It would also be possible for people with these temporary permits to apply for a work permit.

Humanitarian grounds

Under current laws, people can be granted residence in Sweden for protection if they are classed as refugees or “others in need of protection”.

A new category would be introduced to cover people who are considered to need to stay in Sweden on humanitarian grounds. This would cover people who fall through the gaps under the existing rules, and the category “others in need of protection” would be removed.

The proposals state that this would apply for people who aren't eligible for other permits but are subject to “exceptionally distressing circumstances” based on an overall assessment of their situation.

This might cover their health, the ways they have adapted to Swedish life, and the situation in their country of origin. And the criteria would be applied especially generously for children, so that they might be granted residence permits even if the circumstances wouldn't be serious enough to grant a permit to an adult in that situation.

These permits would be temporary and valid for 13 months, and could be extended for two years at a time.

What do you think about the proposals? We want to know what our readers think so that we can fight your corner in Sweden. Comment below or email [email protected] to share your thoughts with our editorial team.

Member comments

  1. Do we have any updates on Riksdag for this? like how will the language be evaluated: by effort or by result driven? and what level shall the applicant to be expect to reach?

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

With the think tank linked to the Sweden Democrats openly recruiting the next generation of far-right social media 'influencers', why is Sweden so complacent about moves to shift public opinion to the radical right, asks The Local's Nordic editor Richard Orange.

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

The radical right in Sweden is at least open about what it’s trying to do.

The homepage of Oikos, the think tank set up by Mattias Karlsson, the former right-hand man of Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, is currently recruiting the first 15 of “a new generation” of “conservative” online propagandists. 

The think tank – whose controlling foundation has been criticised for refusing to reveal the true origin of 5 million kronor in funding – this week launched its new Illustra Academy, which aims to train an army of young, far-right “creators” to help win over minds on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Successful applicants, it promises, will get the chance “to meet leading actors in social media and digital political influencing”.

They will get “mentorship from established political influencers”, build “valuable contacts with influencers, digital opinion-makers, creatives, politicians and possible future employers”, and meet “businesses, political organisations, communications agencies and media actors”. 

This programme is being set up by Andreas Palmlöv, one of the many top Sweden Democrats who went to the US after Donald Trump was elected president to work for an increasingly radicalised Republican Party, serving as an intern for the former Speaker of Congress Kevin McCarthy.

After his return to Sweden, Palmlöv was photographed meeting Gregg Keller, a US lobbyist he says he met through the Leadership Institute, an organisation backed by a who’s who of US billionaire donors which has over the past ten years spent 8 million kronor training up young “conservatives” in Europe.

Karlsson, Åkesson’s former right-hand man, has even closer links to the US, holding at least one meeting with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and attending the wedding of the pro-Trump US conservative media profile Candace Owens in 2019.   

As a British citizen, I’m perhaps overly sensitive about the influence of conservative, libertarian donors and their think tanks, and of the efforts to use social media to push public opinion towards the radical right. 

Vote Leave, which led the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union, started its life at 55 Tufton Street, the townhouse near the UK Parliament where the country’s most powerful “dark money” think tanks are based, while Matthew Elliot, its chief executive, was a Tufton Street veteran. 

Since the UK left the EU, the ruling Conservative Party has been increasingly captured by these think tanks and their wealthy backers.   

Ministers, former ministers and Conservative MPs now happily speak alongside radical right figures at lavish conferences like the National Conservatism UK conference part-funded by Christian pro-Trump US foundations, or the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference part-funded by Paul Marshall and Christopher Chandler, the two billionaires who are the most open and prominent funders of attempts to shift the UK to the radical, libertarian right. 

Conservative MPs and former ministers have over the past two years been paid a total of £600,000 (8 million kronor) to appear on GB News, the Fox News clone jointly owned by Marshall and Chandler.

The Legatum Institute, Chandler’s own think tank, pretty much dictated the UK’s Brexit policy while Boris Johnson was prime minister, while during Liz Truss’s brief premiership, the Tufton Street think tanks supplied much of her team.

When her attempt to drive through their radical libertarian economic programme blew up spectacularly, she was forced to resign. But they haven’t given up, with Truss returning in February with the new Popular Conservatism group. 

I had always believed that the UK politics was immune to US levels of big donor influence, that the Conservative Party could never go the way of the Republican Party in the US, and it turns out I was wrong. 

So is that same naivety playing out in Sweden? 

The Oikos think tank has already started hosting international conservative conferences along the lines of ARC, with a conference at the Sundbyholms Slott castle outside Eskilstuna last year. 

When Social Democrat opposition leader Magdalena Andersson raised questions earlier this year about the funding of Henrik Jönsson, a popular YouTube debater, she was sharply criticised by commentators of both left and right for seeking to smear a critic without providing evidence

But in the US, there are billionaire-funded ‘educational’ YouTube channels like PragerU that follow a very similar format to Jönsson’s. Jönsson’s videos reliably follow the same talking points, questioning whether global warming is really causing extreme weather, spread disinformation about wind farms, call for Sweden’s public broadcasters to be abolished, and claim migrants have trashed the economy. 

And when a donor last year asked Gunnar Strömmer, now Sweden’s Justice Minister, how to give 350,000 kronor to the Moderates without having to identify himself under party financing laws, in part of a sting by TV4’s Kalla Fakta programme, Strömmer advised him to give it directly to right-wing “opinion-makers”, meaning, presumably, people like Jönsson. 

Despite the uproar, Jönsson has never explicitly denied receiving funding from outside organisations, only that such funding does not influence his output. 

“I am quite open about the fact that I willingly take money from all decent organisations and private individuals,” he told the Dagens ETC newspaper, while declining to give any further details. “But no one controls what I say,” he added. 

He has admitted that the website for his Energiupproret campaign, which blamed green policy and the shutdown of nuclear power stations for high power prices in the run-up to the 2022 election, was built by Näringslivets Mediaservice, a right wing social media outfit the precise funding of which was always unclear, although it was linked to Stiftelsen Svenskt Näringsliv, a foundation set up partly by the Confederation of Swedish Industry. 

The founders of Oikos’ new influencer education programme would probably argue that nothing is stopping the political left and centre from raising funds to train up young social media influencers in exactly the same way. 

Left-wing parties are not above taking donations. Approached by the same donor as part of the Kalla Fakta undercover report, representatives of the centre-left Social Democrats – as well as the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Sweden Democrats on the right – also recommended ways around party finance laws.

But do we really want the UK or Sweden to follow the path the US has taken in recent decades, where a handful of billionaires with radical right opinions have aggressively pumped money into think tanks and media outfits and so succeeded in pushing one of the main parties towards previously fringe political opinions? 

It didn’t need to be this way.

When Sweden was developing its new party financing laws back in 2016, experts warned the then government must not to allow the identity of donors to be hidden behind foundations, the key method used by so-called dark money in the US, but the loophole was left open by the law.

It’s not just Oikos, which is funded by an opaque foundation, Insamlingsstiftelsen för Svensk Konservatism (The Fundraising Foundation for Swedish Conservatism), which uses this loophole. 

When caught in the sting by the Kalla Fakta programme, a Social Democrat also suggested that the donor set up a foundation to hide their identity. 

It may be that money from US billionaires, big companies, or indeed from other states, is not yet being spent in Sweden in a way that can alter the political landscape, but because neither think tanks nor influencers need to give much information about who funds them, it’s impossible to know. 

In the UK, the danger may soon be averted. No one seems to take the new outfit fronted by Liz Truss too seriously, and the general election later this year should offer the chance to clean up the country’s politics.  

Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve come very close to losing my original homeland to the kind of political developments seen in the US. I don’t want to lose my adopted country too.

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