An estimated 1,000 people joined a protest in Stockholm's Sergels Torg on Saturday in support of the estimated 600 people currently facing deportation as a result of the government's decision to scrap the so-called spårbyte or "track change" law in April last year.
The protest, by the group Stoppa utvisningarna, or Stop the Deportations, was organised by Alexandra Valin, whose daughter is a school friend and classmate of the daughter of Zahra Kazemipour and Afshad Joubeh, together with other parents of children in the class. Kazemipour and Afshad Joubeh told The Local of their plight before Christmas.
"A large group of parents in her class feel the need to do something to change the Migration Court's decision," Valin told The Local. "We all realised the scope of immigrant families affected by the new policy in the process of learning about the family's case."
The Stockholm protest followed protests in Stockholm, Malmö, Lund, Umeå, Norrköping, Linköping, Skövde, Härnösand, Mora, and Biskops-Arnö on December 18th, which the UN has designated International Migrants' Day.
These protests, organised by the protest group Nu är det nog, meaning, "that's enough now", among other organisations, called for the government to scrap a proposal which would abolish permanent residency for asylum-based immigrants and recall permanent residency permits already issued. Hundreds of protesters joined the biggest procession in Umeå.
Niels Paarup-Petersen, immigration spokesperson for the Centre Party, said he expected opposition to the government's reforms to grow steadily in the months to come as more and more people face deportation because they have been refused a work permit renewal ‒ either because they received their permit as a result of the track change law, or because their salary is below 80 percent of the median wage.
"Those two changes together mean that a lot of people who have done everything according to the book are now being kicked out, and a lot of people find that very annoying, especially the ones that are working, and there are now going to be new cases like that every single week," he pointed out.
Up until recently, he said, the hike in the work permit salary threshold in November 2023 had primarily affected first-time work permit applicants, which made the impact harder to notice.
"Now this isn't only affecting new people who are not here yet, but instead all the people who are here and who are contributing, and those are the ones that people get annoyed about," Paarup-Pedersen said. "You see people that are doing everything right and they're still having to leave. And we hadn't had that many of those cases earlier. It's really starting to have an effect now."
Some 4,700 people affected by the track change abolition have formed a protest group on Facebook which is helping to coordinate their campaign. At the same time, a petition against the recall of permanent residency permits has now received more than 70,000 signatures.
Fereshteh Javan, the personal assistant from Iran who started the track changes group, told The Local that it had taken her months of effort before the Swedish media and even migration activists begun to understand that even well-integrated people with jobs were affected.
"It's never happened in Sweden before that a law like this has been applied retroactively, so in the beginning no Swedish people believed it, even activists who have worked a long time on migration issues," she said. "It was really difficult to explain to the media and to civil society what was happening to those of us who have built a life here but who the Swedish government has betrayed in the worst possible way."
But she said that after she was interviewed in the local Göteborgs-Posten newspaper, more and more journalists got in touch.
As The Local reported before Christmas, Douglas Thor, leader of the Moderate Party's youth wing, has begun calling for adjustments to the way the track change law was abolished and also for the work permit salary threshold to be reduced to 25,000 kronor.
Håkan Jansson, leader of the Moderate Party in Norsjö, near Skellefteå, has called for the law to be changed after a local family was threatened with deportation.
The unions are also toughening their stance, with the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, on December 16th deciding to call for the proposal to revoke existing permanent residency permits to be dropped, arguing it was contrary to fundamental democratic principles and respect for the equal value and rights of all people.
Five of Sweden's biggest unions, meanwhile, wrote a joint debate article calling for it to be dropped, arguing that as well as being legally unsound, it would massively increase costs for employers, lower economic growth, and depress tax returns.
The signatories included Kommunal, which represents municipal workers, the main restaurant and hotel workers' union, the retail workers' union, the metal workers' union, and Seko, an umbrella union which represents workers in the energy, transport, telecoms, post, care workers, prison workers, among other sectors.
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