Sweden votes to back laws reinforcing its immigration crackdown

Sweden’s parliament has voted to escalate the country’s crackdown on immigrant rights, backing laws that allow authorities to revoke residency permits based on a vague criteria of bad behaviour and obliging most public sector workers to report anyone suspected of being undocumented.

The new legislation comes ahead of parliamentary elections in September, pitting the centre-right government, which currently depends on the support of the far-right Sweden Democrats to govern, against a far right that has said its intent is to create one of Europe’s most hostile environments for non-Europeans.
Late on Monday, parliamentarians voted to pass the so-called “good behaviour” law, which would cover pending and future residents but also be applied retroactively to many of the country’s current residents.

“Anyone ‌who doesn’t make the effort to do the right thing shouldn’t be able to count on staying,” Sweden’s minister of migration, Johan Forssell, said in March when he proposed the bill.

While the law does not specify the types of behaviour that would be deemed unacceptable, the government has previously mentioned examples such as unpaid debts, failing to pay taxes, criminality, and links to extremist organisations.

The task of reviewing permits would fall to the Swedish migration agency, and any decisions can be appealed against.

The law has been fiercely criticised by opposition politicians and rights groups, who have described the criteria as arbitrary.

“This would lead to the risk of residence permits being denied or revoked based on behaviour that was neither illegal nor punishable for Swedish citizens,” Amnesty International noted recently.

The Stockholm-based group Civil Rights Defenders said the legislation “undermines the rule of law”. In a statement it added: “The good behaviour law leaves people in uncertainty about what actions or expressions can be used against them.”

The country’s parliament also voted to narrowly back a contentious, so-called “snitch law” that will require many public sector workers to report anyone they believe is undocumented.

Critics of the new law, which passed with 174 votes in favour and 172 against, have long warned that it will negatively impact migrants’ physical and mental health while also significantly increasing the risk of racial profiling.

“It is a cruel, ineffective policy and opens up the Pandora’s box of snitching – a trademark of authoritarian states,” said Jacob Lind, a postdoctoral researcher in international migration at Malmö University, in a statement.

“Today’s vote will have devastating consequences for undocumented migrants who will be further pushed into the margins of society as their access to rights is restricted.”