I have learned that migrants are often spoken about by some long before they ever try to speak with them. Before a name, a story, or even a handshake enters the picture, there is already an interpretation waiting; a ready-made silhouette shaped by headlines, speeches, and inherited fears.
A small exchange by the coffee machine brought this truth into sharp focus for me. One of my coworkers, a genuinely kind, warm-hearted woman turned to me with a bright smile and said: “Faisal, if all immigrants were like you, Sweden would have won the jackpot.”
She meant it as praise. She meant it with affection. But tucked quietly between the syllables was an assumption, likely unintentional, that only a rare, jackpot-odds few are the “good” immigrants.
I smiled back, but inside her words reverberated. I wanted to tell her that I was not a “good” immigrant. I was simply one she happened to know. One she had worked beside, shared meetings with, traded jokes with, relied on professionally. She knew me as calm, diligent, occasionally funny, and meticulous with my responsibilities. Of course she thought well of me, she had proximity.
I wanted to say, really say, was that many immigrants are just as “good,” and many are far better than I will ever be. They work harder, carry heavier histories, and navigate this country with a sincerity.
They are the quiet backbone of Swedish life: teachers, nurses, bus drivers, small-business owners, construction workers, cleaners, social workers, taxi drivers, care assistants, pizza delivery guys, the people who keep the machinery of everyday Sweden running while carrying burdens most never even notice.
She saw a “good immigrant” because she saw me. But if she had looked beyond the walls of our office, she would have realised: I am not an exception. I am merely visible.
And in that moment, I recognised something I have seen many times: Sweden often relies on categories, not encounters.
Before I start explaining how I came to see these categories, I must offer a disclaimer, an honest and necessary one: Not everyone in Sweden thinks like this. Far from it. There are millions who don't label, who meet people as people. People with a genuine curiosity, a willingness to listen, to understand, to see the human being long before they see the background. People who ask about your day, who tell you you’re missed when you’re gone, who greet you with a smile. I know many of them. I have been helped, hugged, welcomed, and uplifted by countless friends.
But in some rooms, often the loudest rooms, the ones with the strongest microphones these categories are created, recycled, and reinforced. And lately, I have noticed something even more troubling: these rooms have become institutional.
You can hear the same categories echoed in the Swedish parliament, in the Almedalen political festival, on social media, in the public squares of politics, and in the long corridors of power. These categories do not describe real people.
They describe perceptions, fragile, shifting, yet powerful enough to dictate how entire groups are spoken about and understood. And over the years, I have learned to recognise them, the invisible labels drifting between the lines of everyday conversation.
The Good Immigrant
The Good Immigrant is imagined as someone who adapts quickly, quietly, flawlessly. They speak polished Swedish, avoid conflict, decipher every unwritten rule, and never disrupt the delicate choreography of social life.
Some go so far as to reshape themselves to fit this mould; changing their names, softening their accents, altering their appearance, trimming away parts of their identity, not out of shame but because life simply moves more smoothly when you don’t stand out. And yet it is appreciated if some "immigrantness" remains, but only as a faint whisper, a trace, an exotic seasoning. Just enough to add flavour, like a sprinkle of salt on a salad.
The Good Immigrant rarely appears as a broad, recognisable presence as a group. They exist in small, intimate circles: a workplace where colleagues know them well, a neighbourhood where trust has slowly taken root, a professional network that values their competence. A few rise to public visibility; ministers, comedians, actors, MPs. For some Swedes, the Good Immigrant exists not as a collective reality but as a handful of exceptions personally encountered.
And yet the identity is fluid. Its meaning can shift in an instant. By the coffee machine, I am the Good Immigrant. But at airports I become the Ugly one or worse the evil, transformed by fluorescent light and border-control logic into someone to be screened, scanned, doubted. I am pulled aside for “random” checks so frequently that I have long joked that if the same probability governed the lottery, I would be a wealthy man by now. Shoes off. Belt off. Laptop out. Bag emptied. After decades in this country, I am still addressed in English by default. That is how fragile these categories are: fully accepted in one room, quietly suspected in the next.
The Bad Immigrant
The Bad Immigrant is rarely necessarily “bad” in any moral sense. More often, they are simply visible in ways the majority is unaccustomed to. They keep their accent. They cook their own food. They carry their culture in public. They ask questions. They do not dissolve seamlessly into the landscape and sometimes this alone is enough to draw suspicion.
The persona of the bad immigrant sometimes can create real frictions, of course it does, just as community, Swedish or otherwise. But too often, mere difference is treated as evidence of a deeper flaw.
Unlike the Good Immigrant, who exists only in small pockets of familiarity, the Bad Immigrant is imagined to be everywhere. In the public imagination, he appears on buses and metros, in queues and corner shops, woven into the daily choreography of urban life. In political speeches and media narratives, the “Bad Immigrant” is said to belong to very specific places: Tensta, Rinkeby, Husby, Rosengård, Angered, Bergsjön, neighbourhoods that have become symbols, more than actual locations.
Every major city has its own version of Tensta, a district mentioned more often in headlines than in conversations with the people who live there. As of today, there are 65 such areas officially labelled as vulnerable ‒ but in public imagination, they number far more.
These places are not judged by the lives within them, but by their surfaces; the accents, the buildings, the colours, the ghost of the Bad Immigrant. I sometimes joke with my Swedish-Swedish colleagues that one day I’ll take them on a tour of Tensta, no visa required. They laugh, of course, but the joke lands differently for me. In that moment, we're not just talking about a neighbourhood. We’re talking about how easily parts of the country feel like a foreign land, even to those born just a few metro stops away.
The category of the “Bad Immigrant” arises not from people themselves, but from impressions and from the comfort of simple, repeatable explanations. Many who are placed in this category struggle with unemployment. And unemployment itself becomes one of the reasons they are labelled.
It forms a closed loop, a circular logic that traps entire communities in a narrative not of their making. They cannot get a job because they are seen as Bad Immigrants; they are seen as Bad Immigrants because they do not have a job. Suspicion feeds exclusion, exclusion feeds suspicion, and soon the entire system becomes self-sustaining; a paradox with many entry points and no honest exit.
The dynamic hardened during a televised debate when Jimmie Åkesson ‒ leader of the Sweden Democrats, who are Sweden’s second-largest political party, and a serious contender for prime minister according to current polls ‒ stated that he understood why Swedish employers hesitate to hire immigrants.
Åkesson, and honestly almost everyone in his orbit who rarely encounter the “Good Immigrant” in any genuine way, speaks from a worldview where most immigrants fall into the bad, ugly, or even evil categories. Åkesson reinforced this view again in another party leaders’ debate. With other politicians watching, some uncomfortable, others quietly approving, he said: “Jobs are important, jobs are crucial."
"But we must ask ourselves this: The entire integration debate has focused on jobs, that if immigrants just get jobs, everything will work out. But that isn’t happening. So we must ask: Why don’t these people get jobs? Well, because they’re not Swedish. They don’t fit into Sweden. And of course it’s difficult to get a job”.
In his framing, the Bad Immigrant is trapped in a vicious paradox: unemployable because they are not Swedish, and unable to become Swedish because they are unemployable. The stalemate continues: Immigrants cannot fit the Good Immigrant mould because they are viewed through negative categories, and they cannot shed those categories because exclusion deprives them of the very opportunities that could disprove them. A loop without a ladder. A paradox without an exit.
The Ugly Immigrant
When Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, the world watched in horror as desperate Afghans ran beside aircraft, clinging to landing gear as the planes lifted into the sky. Amid that chaos, Sweden evacuated one man and his family, twelve people in total. I know this man. From time to time, I help him untangle the Swedish knot of bureaucracy.
He had worked for the Swedish embassy in Kabul. He a gatekeeper with a stick and a panic button. His job was to shoo away stray dogs and beggars, and to alert staff if a suicide bomber approached. The neighbourhood surrounding the embassy, the very place he guarded was targeted by suicide bombers at least twice, with devastating casualties.
For many Afghans, his face was the only Swedish face they ever saw. And when Kabul fell, that visibility became lethal. Sweden honoured its obligation and offered him, his wife, and their children safety. In traditional storytelling, this would be the happy ending, the rescue, the redemption, the promise of a new beginning. One day, it might even be told as a tale of courage and responsibility, a war epic framed in heroism, something like the movie Dunkirk.
But it wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of a complicated chapter, both for the family and for Sweden’s political theatre.
And it is precisely here, in the gap between rescue and reality, that the figure known as the Ugly Immigrant is born. They arrived in Sweden with no literacy, no Swedish, no digital competence, no experience of a peaceful civilian society and with physical and psychological wounds that cannot be undone. His only skill, guarding a gate with a stick, has no place in the Swedish labour market. He cannot retrain: illiteracy, age, and declining health make it impossible. His wife carries even heavier burdens, with even fewer resources. She has no prospects at all.
Their ten children arrived with educational gaps and deep trauma ‒ wounds that will take years to repair. None of them work. The parents never will. The family lives entirely on welfare. This is the story of one family shaped entirely by forces beyond their control. War, exile, poverty, trauma: none of it was chosen. They simply survived what was placed in their path.
Sweden ‒ generous, structured, orderly ‒ was not built to absorb them. The legislation designed to help was written generations ago, for a different kind of need, and a different kind of person. Folkhemmet, former prime minister Per Albin Hansson’s vision of the “people’s home”, never imagined this man at the gate in Kabul. It was built for sameness, not complexity. It cannot remould them.
Yet in political storytelling, they become the face of an entire debate: the Ugly Immigrant. In the collective imagination, the gatekeeper no longer exists as a real person. He becomes an urban legend; a political construction, a creature assembled from speeches, debates, cropped images, and half-told stories. A silhouette, rather than a man. A symbol, rather than a father. A cautionary tale, rather than a human being who fled for his life.
He is reshaped infinitely to fit whatever argument needs ammunition. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson leans on this silhouette with theatrical precision. He rests his elbow on the podium, his head in his palm, sighing: “If you get more from welfare than working people earn, why should anyone work?”
In the political imagination, he isn’t real, which makes him endlessly reshaped. One week, he’s blamed for crime. The next, for failing schools. After that, for social collapse.
Is it all fiction? No. Such families exist. Some do receive more in welfare than two working professionals. It happens. But not often. And rarely under ordinary circumstances. These are exceptions, and proof of a broken system, not signs of a welfare state being drained.
Yet in politics, exceptions are repeated until they feel like patterns. Rare cases are enlarged until they seem routine. What these families truly represent is something harder to face: lives bent by war, trauma, collapse and a system built decades ago, now straining to meet needs it never imagined.
The Evil Immigrant
On April 7th, 2017, at around 2:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along Drottninggatan, one of my most beloved streets in Stockholm. I often pause there to read the Strindberg quotations etched into the pavement. That day I was absorbed in the simplest thoughts: how I would meet my family later, what we might eat, what we might talk about.
Then, in an instant, everything changed. Screams broke through the air. Fear swept through the crowd. A truck hurtled down the pedestrian street. Rakhmat Akilov, a man who would later be described as a terrorist, drove a stolen vehicle straight into people who, just moments earlier, were lost in their own harmless, everyday thoughts, exactly as I had been.
I survived by seconds. He missed me. I was lucky. Others were not. People died. People were injured. Lives were ruptured in ways that no repair can fully mend. And a part of me was permanently marked by the memory of almost dying at the hands of a man consumed by madness.
Whatever Akilov believed, whatever delusion he carried, nothing could justify harming a single strand of an innocent person’s hair, let alone killing them, let alone scarring families and survivors for life.
In every sense ‒ moral, legal, human he is evil. And Akilov is not alone. There are others: men driven by fanaticism, hatred, greed, desperation, or sheer madness, who choose to harm. There are gangs, drug networks, radicalised terrorists and predators who kill, who steal, who recruit children from already fragile communities and turn them into soldiers for their own profit.
These people, Akilov included, must be punished severely. They must be removed from society. Because it is not fair that anyone in Sweden should fear stepping into a shop or walking home from work. It is not fair that a parent should stare at the clock, terrified because their child is a few minutes late. A society has the right and the obligation to protect itself.
If Sweden’s laws are too lenient, too outdated, or too gentle to deal with this reality, then the laws must change. They must reflect the Sweden we live in today, not the Sweden of half a century ago. And here I speak from lived truth, not anger: Anyone who tries to impose on Sweden the very horrors I fled, religious extremism, tyranny, terror, does not deserve to stay here. Their violence makes Sweden less safe, but it also casts a long shadow over people like me. Their crimes stain others who share only their skin tone or birthplace, not their intentions.
But there is another truth we must hold just as firmly: The narrative often attached to these crimes is deeply unfair.
It is not fair to imply that being an immigrant creates a predisposition for evil. It is not fair to hear, again and again, the political slogan: “We will fight crime. We will fight immigration.” As if crime and immigration were twins. As if they rose and fell together. As if every immigrant carried a dormant threat. The pairing of crime and immigration, so often spoken in the same breath, is one of the most corrosive distortions in our public debate. It confuses correlation with causation. It weaponises fear. It takes the crimes of a few and turns them into suspicion toward millions who have done nothing wrong.
And this distortion does more than mislead. It creates a new kind of fear, a new creed of terror. It diverts anger toward the wrong targets. It pushes vulnerable minds toward extremism. We saw this recently in Örebro.
Although Swedish authorities have not classified the incident in Örebro, which took the lives of 11 innocent people, as an act of terrorism, all but one of the victims had immigrant backgrounds. I personally have little doubt that it emerged from the increasingly polarised public debate surrounding immigration, that it was carried out not by someone influenced by foreign extremism, but by a man shaped by the corrosive idea that certain people, because of their skin colour, their place of birth, or even their surname do not belong.
This is what happens when fear is weaponised. When categories replace people. When a nation is taught to see neighbours as threats.
Evil exists. Evil must be punished. But evil is not an immigration category. It is a human one. And here, finally, is the part most often forgotten: The “evil immigrant” is not a type of immigrant. He is simply a evil person who happens to be an immigrant.
Every society has its wrongdoers, some are born in Örebro, others in Shiraz, Mogadishu, or Kabul. Some would have ended up in crime no matter where they were born. For others, the weight of exclusion pushes harder.
Coda
The Good Immigrant appears only in familiar rooms: the workplace where colleagues know your name, the neighbourhood where trust has had time to grow. In the wider imagination, though, it is the Bad and the Ugly Immigrant who loom largest, especially in spaces where no personal connections exists. That is why public opinion so often clashes with private experience: people see one thing with their own eyes, and something else entirely in the stories they’ve absorbed.
Sweden is capable of seeing clearly. It happens every day, not in debates or headlines, but in the quiet spaces of ordinary life: in offices, schoolyards, kitchens, buses, parks. That’s where people meet each other as people. That’s where fear dissolves and nuance returns. The country already works better than its politics.
But our national conversation hasn’t caught up to that quiet truth. It’s time to step out of the categories. To stop speaking about immigrants as if they were weather systems or statistics. To speak to them. To listen. If you want to start somewhere, begin with this:
Meet one immigrant. A real one. Not a silhouette.
Ask one honest question you’ve never dared to ask.
Replace the abstract shape in your mind with an actual face.
And if something about immigrants unsettles you, bring it into the light. Ask me. Ask anyone. Ask about halal. About Sharia. About whatever shadow has grown too large in your imagination.
Shadows grow longer at a distance. Come closer. You’ll see the shape you feared is only a person ‒ wanting what you want, fearing what you fear, trying, every day, to belong in the same country that you call home.
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