As leader of the youth wing of Sweden's ruling Moderate Party, Douglas Thor is used to pushing his party's policy envelope, and at the start of this month he began campaigning internally and in the media for action to end the phenomenon of so-called "teen deportations", where the children of people in Sweden on work permits end up being deported when they turn 18 because they are suddenly required to meet a tough set of residency criteria.
"It's a humanitarian crisis for each of these families and for each of these young adults, who in many cases have to leave to go to a country that they don't have that much connection with," Thor told The Local of his decision to campaign on the issue. "They have lived here since they were small kids, feel Swedish, and have Swedish friends. They have gone to a Swedish school and expected a Swedish future, and then all of a sudden, they don't get to stay."
Thor is calling for the age at which children are no longer eligible for a residency permit as dependents of a work permit holder be extended from 18 to 25, a change which he argues would give them enough time to finish university studies and establish themselves.
"They would get a chance to finish their education and get a job with a high-enough wage to get them over the limit to have a work permit, and if they don't, well, then they're grown-up, so if they're deported to a country in, say, the Middle East, they can instead try their luck in another European country."
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After three years of the current coalition government, which is headed by Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson but heavily dependent on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats, Thor believes that a clear problem has started to emerge as part of the determination to crack down on asylum immigration.
"I really do think that my party doesn't want these cases to end up in deportation, that they actually want to have a system where you can have these people stay," he says.
He agrees that the high level of asylum migration in the past has overloaded the system, leading to segregation and social problems. The problem is that efforts to reduce it have also affected the type of immigration his party actually supports.
"In the process of reducing that kind of immigration, some of the laws that have come into force have brought with them this sort of 'bug': a hole in the system where people who do work and do contribute get deported anyway," he said.
It's not just teen deportations that are the problem, he says, but other policies too, including the government's planned increase in the salary threshold for a work permit to the Swedish median wage. This is a change the youth wing has long opposed, campaigning unsuccessfully against the proposal to bring in a salary limit at the party congress ahead of the 2022 election.
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The fact that the party still might push ahead with the planned new law, despite the opposition of the Confederation of Swedish Industry and many of the party's members, reflects, he argues, a fear among party leadership of appearing weak on immigration.
"If I was going to be mean to my own party, I would say that there are people at the top who are scared of the Moderate Party seeming to waver on immigration," he said. "So they take this determination to be clear and trustworthy on low migration, and they extend that into the field of work permits and visas for workers. And that, I think, is a big mistake."
The youth wing would ideally want the government to cut the salary threshold for a work permit from its current, already high, level of 80 percent of the median salary, and Thor said he was supported in this aim by many people within the broader party.
He was nonetheless critical of the call made last month by Sweden's new employment minister, Johan Britz, who represents the Liberal Party, for the government to shelve the proposed rise, arguing that by openly going against the terms of the Tidö Agreement, Britz had inadvertently made it harder for opponents of the raise to prevent it from happening.
"It's not unusual for the Liberal Party to mess things up by making something that they want to win such a big issue that the other parties are like, 'nope, this is not happening now. This is not how we cooperate. Stop doing solo plays'," he said.
"I think that even the Swedish Democrats might have gone along with staying with the income limit that we have now if the Liberals hadn't made a big issue of it, if they had handled it in the way it is supposed to be done."
Now, he said, he feared that the much-criticised and long-delayed policy might end up being put to parliament for a vote and enacted.
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In the coming election campaign, Thor said he hoped that the Moderate Party would stake out a new approach to integration which would differ both from the raw anti-immigrant approach of the Sweden Democrats and the approach of the Social Democrats, which he argued was far too reliant on housing policy.
This approach, he said, the main elements of which he had laid out in his book Nyckeln utanför dörren (The key outside the door), was the way he believed the party should win back urban voters, the so-called storstadskvinnor (women in major cities) and Magdamoderater (Moderate party sympathisers who vote for Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson).
"The reason urban voters don't want to vote for us is because we sound like and cooperate with the Sweden Democrats, who they think are racist," he said bluntly.
Unless this is somehow fixed, he argues, no amount of tinkering with other policies will win the party back the support of these voters.
“The party have focused on changing our climate policies to more green, changing the way we communicate to be more nice and tried to change to more liberal alcohol policies. And sure, all those things would be great," he said. "But the voters' view is that we are giving racists more power over Sweden. What then would it matter if we’re green helpers of racism, nice helpers of racism or a bit more pro-alcohol helpers of racism.”
Having a more positive, proactive integration policy, he argues, could help distance the party from the Sweden Democrats.
"The core question is, what do we want to do for the people who have migrated here, who are here now and who won't be deported. There are two million people here who were born in other countries. There are three million with an immigrant background, and there are 700,000 people living in segregated areas with big problems. You can't deport all of these people. So what is the Moderate Party's answer to the question of how to improve these people lives, to give them freedom, and safety? We don't have an answer. We don't have a good answer to that question."
By devolving policy-making on these issues to the Sweden Democrats, he argued, the Moderate Party had become associated with the far-right party's approach.
“We have let the Swedish Democrats become the main voice of the right on how to get on with migration. While their main focus is on deporting all the immigrants out of the country, we should develop policy on how to make these people part of society.”
Thor has a three-pronged approach. The first element is to welcome immigrants into Swedish culture in a much more proactive way, the second is to plough more investment into improving safety in highly segregated areas, and the third and final piece is a plan to cut to income tax and/or company tax in socially vulnerable, segregated areas.
By boosting the economic conditions in these areas, he argues, more and more people with an immigrant background would be drawn into the broader Swedish society.
“The mission is to make second-generation immigrants be seen, by themself and others, as first-generation Swedes.”
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