When we're reporting on migration difficulties faced by foreigners in Sweden, those affected often want to be anonymous. They're afraid that going public will hurt their case; that their case officer, or someone senior to them, will retaliate by rejecting, slowing down or pausing their application.
People who have serious problems – Brits who missed the deadline to apply to stay in Sweden after Brexit are a particularly good example – often end up with a persecution complex: someone in the Migration Agency has it in for them and their case is no longer being handled according to standard bureaucratic procedures.
My suspicion has always been that Swedish agencies don't work like that. The Migration Agency may be under-resourced, their case officers might have poor morale and be liable to make errors. But Sweden is a nation of rule-followers. The intention will be to follow the law. To use a British phrase, it's "cock-up rather than conspiracy".
So it was quite shocking to me when a foreigner who was deported last year shared an email he'd obtained through a freedom of information request. In the email a border policeman asked for a deportation flight to be arranged as quickly as possible because he was "highly intelligent" and was causing "a whole load of problems for the Migration Agency and border police".
What made the email particularly striking was his use of the rather unbureaucratic Swedish word omedelbums, which combines the word omedelbart, meaning "immediately", with the suffix "-bums", meaning "right now".
The policeman's boss told us that as the decision to deport the man had already been made and come into force, the email was just about scheduling flights and so had no legal significance. Despite the unprofessional language, the deportation was carried out correctly and according to the law.
So will I revise my presumption that Swedish agencies don't punish (or reward) difficult customers or those who go public in the media? Not yet.
I'm not saying the Swedish system is never bent. I long ago realised, for instance, that many Swedes are adept at jumping queues to schools and day cares, and quite willing to temporarily (and illegally) register themselves as living somewhere they do not live, to get their kids into the right school.
The police may be different, and the border police even more so. (I've asked for all the other emails sent to the unit that organises flights to see how often similar language is used.) But it will take more than this email to shake my belief that Swedish government agencies – the Tax Agency, the Migration Agency, the Social Insurance Agency, are dispassionate bureaucratic machines.
Migration news
The big migration news this week was the government's decision to push ahead with its plans to phase out permanent residency for many future applicants.
As it was clear that many foreigners are confused about who will be affected, we did a live Q&A for readers, which we turned into an article and followed up with an explainer.
The most important points to take on board are that this will only affect future applicants and that it won't affect people applying for permanent residency on the basis of work permits.
We had an interview with the Indian researcher Fahima Ayub Khan, who is having to combine finishing her PhD with a battle to stay in Sweden. Her doctoral student permit renewal was rejected for reasons that Alexander Troedsson, the lawyer handling her case at Centre for Justice, says were "obviously disproportionate".
She's not the only PhD student facing migration hassles in Sweden. We had an opinion piece this week from four researchers who are part of the SULF union, who argued that Sweden's 2021 migration law had made getting research permits a "relentless bureaucratic nightmare".
While some aspects of a future bill aimed at making residency permits easier for researchers were welcome, they warned that a clause restricting the amount of work they can do to 15 hours per week risked outweighing these benefits.
We've been writing a lot about the Fair Transition campaign to add transitional rules to the upcoming citizenship bill. I spoke to Niels Paarup-Petersen, immigration spokesperson for the Centre Party, on what has to happen in parliament for the campaign to succeed.
Last year, we published a series of articles on conditions at Sweden's deportation detention centres, based on interviews with three former detainees, and hundreds of incident reports we received through a freedom of information request.
I felt I had to see for myself and the Migration Agency agreed to arrange a visit to Åstorp detention centre, which I wrote up this week.
I'm not sure what I saw was representative. The centre was being renovated, so there were only half the normal number of detainees and it was 11am, so, according to the centre's staff, most of the detainees were still asleep. It was spartan but orderly. The toilet and empty bedroom I saw were almost too clean.
The team leader I spoke to seemed engaged, talking enthusiastically about how the job involved meeting a lot of people from different cultures, and how staff were trained in the low arousal approach to handling conflict.
One thing that stuck with me was the way that Maria Lindgren, the Migration Agency section chief responsible for the centre, maintained that those detained were not innocent.
"Even if you have not done anything criminal, you have still chosen not to abide by the decisions taken by our authorities," she said. "You have demonstrated – often for many, many years – that you are not willing to cooperate."
It felt like a justification.
What else have we been writing about?
There's been so much migration news this week that we haven't had time for much else.
There's an interesting trial going on concerning a Swede who, a little like the husband of Frenchwoman Gisele Pelicot, pressured his wife into having sex with at least 120 men (unlike Pelicot, she wasn't drugged unconscious).
I've been trying to get Gemini and ChatGPT to teach me to speak Swedish with a Scanian accent, and it can almost do it. It made me wonder if any readers are finding AI apps helpful to learn Swedish. If you have used some of them, please tell us about it in the survey here.
I'm off to the house of our editor Emma Löfgren to celebrate her birthday in the traditional Swedish fashion – with tacos!
Have a lovely weekend,
Richard
Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
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