Social Democrat migration spokesperson Ida Karkiainen told The Local in an interview that if they gain power after the election on September 13th, the party and its allies would launch a broad review covering the Aliens Act and Sweden's wider immigration legislation, noting that several reforms pushed through in the spring had been heavily criticised by experts.
"The consultation responses have been strongly critical and have also pointed to the fact that it is impossible to foresee what consequences these changes to the law will have for Swedish migration legislation – so there needs to be a review of migration legislation and the Aliens Act to make it clear and easy to understand," she said.
"It's very complex legislation and it is legislation that has a very big impact on people, so we need to make sure that people are getting a migration law that they can understand, that is transparent, and that provides legal certainty."
Karkiainen pointed especially to reforms concerning so-called conduct requirements, permanent residence permits and tougher rules for family reunification, but stressed that it was not simply the way these individual reforms had been framed, but their cumulative effect that risked making the system difficult to understand and administer.
"It will be very difficult to work as a case officer at the Migration Agency and deal with this legislation and know how cases should be handled, and how the rules in the worst case actually clash with each other," she said.
The plan for an inquiry was welcomed by the immigration lawyer Tomas Fridh, who has been highly critical of many of the current government's migration reforms.
"This would be a very welcome overview, but the problem started during Social Democrats' time, so they are not without blame for the situation we are in now even if Tidö is much worse," he said.
The new inquiry, Karkiainen said, would be an enormous undertaking which would require the inquiry chair and the experts appointed to work with them to spend a large amount of time analysing the impact of the new legislation.
For this reason, she argued it would run alongside a separate fast-track investigation that the Social Democrats want to launch into how to prevent people with long-established ties to Sweden from being deported in an attempt to rectify the issue of so-called teen deportations and the deportation of British citizens impacted by Brexit.
"We have said that this work will take time. It is a larger inquiry," she said.
The larger review, she said, could ultimately result in new legislation if the existing piecemeal legislation was found to be too complicated.
"The result would above all be more understandable migration legislation," she said. "Today it is a very cumbersome piece of legislation. There are also many references back and forth to different paragraphs, which makes it very difficult to interpret."
She argued that a review will arguably be necessary regardless of who wins the election, as leaving the migration law unchanged as it is at present will, she predicted, rapidly lead to unfair and controversial decisions.
"There's one part of me that is thinking, 'let them handle the consequences'," she said. "It would be interesting to see how they are going to do that, how they are going to manage, but of course the other side of me wants us to rule for the next four years."
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