In the Tidö Agreement between the far-right Sweden Democrats and Sweden’s three governing parties it states that “the institution of permanent residence permits should be phased out”. 

A total of 296,981 people currently hold permanent residency (PUT) in Sweden, according to new figures provided to The Local by the Swedish Migration Agency.

So are they at risk? 

Not all of them, according to Migration Minister Malmer Stenergard, who told Swedish state broadcaster SR last week that only asylum-related permanent residencies would be affected by the changes. Permanent residency awarded to people who came to Sweden on a work permit will not be withdrawn and will continue to exist. 

READ ALSO: ‘Work permit holders will not lose permanent residency’: Swedish Migration Minister

So how many of the permanent residencies currently in existence are asylum-related? 

According to numbers provided to The Local by the Migration Agency only 69,022 of the permanent residencies currently in existence are directly asylum-related, while 16,520 are work-permit-related. 

Fully 132,105 of those granted permanent residency came through family reunification, 33,218 were classed as coming through skydd, the various forms of alternative protection, 11,065 were EU-related, and 33,457 were granted permanent residency for other reasons. 

Other reasons included categories such as tillfälligt besök (temporary visit), or uppehållstillstånd pga varaktigt bosatt i Sverige (residency as a result of long-term living in Sweden), as well as people whose reason for permanent residency had been wrongly entered into the database. 

The Local has contacted the Migration Agency for more information on how these categories are defined.

We are not yet sure whether, when Malmer Stenergard talks of withdrawing “asylum-related permanent residencies” (or alternatively upgrading their holders to full citizenship), she intends to focus narrowly on the 69,022 directly awarded cases. 

It’s quite likely that the government will also seek to withdraw the permanent residencies received by close relatives of refugees as a result of family reunification. 

Migration Agency figures on residencies granted between 1980 and 2020 show that more than 964,061 of the 2,638,547 who were given permits during the period were given permits because they were close relatives of people who have already been granted asylum. Of those 964,061, only 249,804 were close relatives of people with refugee status. 

This would indicate that perhaps only a third or a quarter of the family reunification permits are in any way asylum-related, so perhaps less than half of 296,981 permanent residencies now held by people in Sweden are under threat under the government’s plans.