Once a European nation receiving large numbers of refugees and migrants, Sweden completes a decade-long overhaul.
Earlier this month, Raquel Viveira’s partner handed her an envelope he had just retrieved from their postbox in Malmo.
The 31-year-old Brazilian felt hopeful when she saw the letter from Sweden’s migration agency. She had been waiting months for permanent residency.
But her partner’s face went pale when he handed it to her.
“He said, ‘You gotta leave,’” said Viveira, who had been given days to leave the country.
The next day was June 6, Sweden’s National Day. Viveira had planned to paint her nails in the colour of Sweden’s flag, blue and yellow. Having completed Swedish for Immigrants language classes, she could speak the language. She had set up a sole trader business and paid taxes.
She called the agency, seeking an explanation for the order. Her removal was said to be because she had changed track between two cohabiting partner visas, as a previous relationship had ended. Under Sweden’s current migration framework, that technicality was enough. She booked a plane ticket and left.
“I did nothing wrong,” she told Al Jazeera by phone from Sao Paulo, where she is awaiting responses to her new application.
Viveira runs an Instagram account about navigating Swedish bureaucracy. One video detailing her experience has amassed nearly 300,000 views. The private messages never stop, she said, with white-collar workers, Swedish speakers and spouses of citizens all getting in touch to say they have lost their status.
If family reunification laws tighten further, she could face removal again even after returning.
Should right-wing forces rise further in the September general election, Viveira said she will reconsider “whether we want to stay”.
In 2015, about 10,000 people per week were arriving in Sweden, most of them fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Back then, it was home to one of the largest per-capita inflows in Europe. In the decade since, the number of people applying for asylum each year has plunged from 163,000 to roughly 9,000.
This summer, three policy shifts converge.
On June 12, as the EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact came into force, Sweden chose the strictest implementation options available to any member state.
On July 12, a new law takes effect, restricting all incoming asylum seekers to temporary residence permits only, eliminating the pathway to permanence that once defined Sweden’s approach to integration.
And on July 13, the so-called “informer law” will require six state agencies, including the tax authority and social services, to report suspected undocumented people to police, shattering confidentiality norms.
Together, legal experts say, these new laws do not merely tighten Swedish migration policy. They fundamentally redefine what it means to live in Sweden without a Swedish passport.
“We’re waking up to a new Sweden after this summer,” Sofia Ronnow Pessah, asylum rights lawyer and policy adviser at RFSL Ungdom, told Al Jazeera. “Some people will feel they have to be on guard all the time, trying to understand how their life will be affected, even in ways they don’t really consider. And that, in a less legal assessment, is heartbreaking.”
The informer law has generated particular alarm among undocumented people like Leili Mehtarabbasi, a 70-year-old Iranian who has lived in Sweden without legal status for nearly 26 years, and her family.
Her son, Ali Reza Roudaki, 49, a manager at a ship battery company, tells the family’s story with the measured exhaustion of someone who has been navigating the same labyrinth for decades.
The sons obtained residency through a 2009 law allowing undocumented migrants with employment records to reapply. Mehtarabbasi was not part of that round. She stayed hidden. She survived breast cancer while undocumented, accessing treatment through Red Cross connections, and participated in demonstrations in support of Iran’s human rights movement.
Each new application was rejected. She now has a pending case at the migration court.
“With all the new laws,” Roudaki said, “it’s like Mission Impossible for us.”
Leaving is not an option. Last year, his wife died of cancer, and Mehtarabbasi now cares for her four-year-old granddaughter.
“I don’t know what more we can do,” he said. “We just have to wait and see.”
Under the move to temporary-only permits, residents must continuously demonstrate eligibility to renew. Losing a job, going on parental leave or falling behind on a debt could now trigger revocation. A new “behaviour” law allows residency to be revoked for conduct that falls short of criminal prosecution, and is, Pessah warned, “quite vaguely defined”.
A proposed family reunification law would require a monthly income of about 53,000 kronor ($5,500) for a person with two children wanting to bring a spouse to Sweden. Pending renewals mean applicants cannot leave the country, while employers are likely to be reluctant to hire people whose status is uncertain.
Sweden’s shift is taking place amid a changing political landscape.
Stricter migration measures have been enacted since 2022, when an election brought to power a centre-right government dependent on the Sweden Democrats, a party with far-right roots.
On June 17, in the European Parliament, when a vote that aimed to speed up deportations passed, far-right members chanted “Send them back”.
Swedish MEP Abir Al-Sahlani of the Centre Party rose to respond: “I’ve never felt unsafe in this room, until now.”
Sweden’s Social Democrats abstained, the only centre-left delegation in Europe to do so, as 84 percent of their Social Democratic colleagues across the continent voted against it.
The Social Democrats, the largest opposition party, have also promised a strict migration policy, but indicated they would not cooperate with the Sweden Democrats and would dismiss controversial proposals, such as revoking permanent residence permits retroactively. They would modify, not repeal, the informer law and revocation rules.
But the EU’s new migration pact is European law, and unpicking it requires European consensus.
“The effects are seen much later,” Pessah said. “The outcry we’re seeing now over young people being deported who have lived their whole lives in Sweden, those are laws from three years ago. So much has happened since.”
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