OPINION: Sweden's election won't erase what the last four years did to immigrants

The past four years of right-wing rule have seen a deliberate and systematic clampdown on the rights of people who have moved to Sweden from abroad.

The Local’s own investigation found 127 teenage children of immigrants were deported in 2025 alone. 458 British people have been deported since Brexit, with a 27.5% residency refusal rate versus 3–4% EU-wide. 100,000 people waiting for citizenship were denied transitional rules after the Sweden Democrats broke the Riksdag’s pairing agreement. People wanting to renew their work permits have faced a near-tripling of the salary threshold.

More may be on the way: the Sweden Democrats have vowed to tear up over a hundred thousand permanent residence permits if they enter government (the Liberals and Moderates are against, though).

Some of the issues of the past four years have been the result of deliberate policy decisions, others were caused by poor lawmaking, but the effect of all of them has been to pull the rug from under immigrants’ feet. Mistakes have taken years to even be acknowledged, let alone remedied. The Sweden Democrats have been against almost all efforts to ameliorate the situation for immigrants affected.

The party may claim that it wants very highly-skilled migrants to be able to come, but when we’ve interviewed them it’s clear that they want to set the skills bar so high as to exclude many of those who currently come here. Curiously, they also don’t seem to see why smart people from other countries would want to become Swedish citizens, which betrays a strange lack of confidence in their country’s attractiveness.

The opposition, if it wins on Sunday, might improve things: the Social Democrats say they want to keep a “strict” approach to migration, but they are planning a major review to make rules simpler and more consistent. This is welcome.

Magdalena Andersson’s party also plans to retroactively add transitional rules to the new citizenship reforms, meaning people who applied before they took effect could get their applications considered under the old rules. The smaller opposition parties also have some pro-immigration policies: the Centre Party wants to scrap the work permit salary threshold, the Greens want to be far more open to both asylum and labour immigration; both they and the Left Party want to make permanent residence the default.

The opposition does genuinely appear to offer a more stable future for immigrants, but there are some major caveats: some of the legislation that caused issues this parliament (include some of the laws that led to teen deportations) was in fact passed by Social Democratic governments; the last time the Social Democrats were in power we saw a wave of ‘talent deportations’ of work permit holders whose only offense was having employers who had bought them the wrong health insurance. The absence of the Sweden Democrats will remove some of the deliberate cruelty, but it won’t on its own lead to good laws.

This time round, the Social Democrats are vowing to submit work permit applications to a labour market test, in which unions and employers would negotiate over which job types employers can recruit internationally. This has plenty of potential to create new layers of bureaucracy for Swedish employers and international talent wanting to work here — and, if not done carefully, the potential for new injustices.

And of course, we are all more than just our immigration status. If you work in a startup and aren’t worried about deportation, a reform of taxes on employee option schemes, or a reduction in taxes on savings accounts, might be more important to you. Perhaps instead you’ll vote for the party that will be best at defending Sweden in dangerous times. Or the one that will offer better schools for your kids, more ambitious emissions reductions or a more ambitious plan for handling artificial intelligence.

Yet for many foreigners here, the uncertainty caused by four years of rapid and often draconian immigration reforms will be top of mind as Sweden goes to the polls. Sweden stands at a crossroads: the stakes could hardly be higher.