Immigration was once seen by voters as one of Sweden's current right-wing government's major strengths.
The jocular form of Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer taking to our TV screens on the night of September 6th signalled something had changed. Strömmer was the unexpected representative of the Moderate party at SVT's immigration debate.
Strömmer is one of the government's most solid media performers, and comes from his party's liberal wing. Or as Centre Party immigration spokesman Niels Paarup-Petersen put it: "Strömmer is here because he's the Moderate that people like," in presumed contrast to the actual migration minister, Johan Forssell.
The injustice of teen deportations, which The Local first wrote about in 2022, has finally cut through to ordinary voters, putting the government on the defensive. Other scandals, such as the deportation of well-integrated Brits in Sweden after Brexit have also started to be noticed.
The governing parties of the Tidö coalition tried to head off the opposition attacks: teen deportations were caused by laws from the previous administration, and the current government had dealt with them. Job done.
But Sweden hasn't suddenly turned liberal, and the opposition knows it, so Social Democrat Lawen Redar chose her words carefully. Sweden should have a "strict immigration policy", she said, but "no teen deportations".
Asylum, Redar added, should be at the EU's minimum level. There's a good reason she's cautious here – the shadow of 2015 is a long one: in November that year, Sweden dramatically introduced border checks as the number of asylum seekers that year reached 163,000. It was a sign of how times have changed that the Greens' proposal that Sweden accept 5,000 UN quota refugees is now portrayed by the Tidö parties as irresponsibly liberal.
Politicians on both sides seem to realise that most voters want strict limits on who comes, but fair treatment of those who have built lives here. That's why the opposition focused its attack on the government on a proposal put forward in an inquiry it commissioned to strip permanent residence from former asylum seekers.
The governing parties' representatives, apart from the Sweden Democrats' Ludvig Aspling, made it crystal clear they didn't support the inquiry's proposals.
"We mustn't create disorder," argued Liberal leader Simona Mohamsson (the implication being that removing rights from permanent residents would do just that). Strömmer vowed that "the state should work predictably" (i.e. not like this). Even Aspling shied away from a full-throated defence of the proposal, and sought instead to de-dramatise it, claiming it wouldn't in practice have a major effect on most people.
Immigration policy is no longer just a fight about who can be toughest – that's a big change. But the debate was stuck in a misconception of what immigration to Sweden looks like today.
About 23,500 people came to Sweden last year on a work permit or as a dependant of someone on a work permit. 3,500 came as asylum seekers, excluding the 9,300 Ukrainians who came under the EU's temporary protection directive. Around 25,000 came as family members, many of them family members of Swedish citizens (some of them Swedish citizens with immigration backgrounds, many not).
You wouldn't have guessed this by listening to Sunday's debate, which barely discussed any other form of immigrant than refugees, or the families of refugees.
And as readers of The Local know too well, labour immigration hasn't been plain sailing these past few years: these immigrants have been hit by their teenage children being deported, by retroactive changes to work permit salary threshholds and to citizenship rules, that have made some reconsider their choice of moving to Sweden. They also pay significant amounts in tax. The Centre Party's Niels Paarup-Petersen briefly managed to squeeze in a line about how Sweden needs to "bring people here who make us richer", but he was practically alone in doing so.
The immigration debate might be more nuanced than before – but it's a surreal debate badly in need of an update.
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