The leader of the populist Sweden Democrats (SD) Jimmie Åkesson has made a new proposal on immigration, advocating for migrants to be stripped of Swedish citizenship if they refuse to integrate into Swedish society, along with migrant criminals.
“Somewhere, the starting point has been that you can’t make someone stateless. But if you have citizenship in another country, there are actually opportunities to reconsider the Swedish one,” Åkesson said, the Swedish newspaper Expressen reports:
What we have said so far is that you should be able to look at citizenship for terrorists and for gang criminals. These types of crime are put on an equal footing. That means that you are abandoning the principle of equality before the law. And once you’ve started doing that, you can actually take that reasoning further. And I am absolutely prepared to do so, in the situation we are in.
We have a situation where people live in Sweden, as citizens of Sweden, but they still can’t speak Swedish. They have no connection whatsoever to Swedish society. They are only here to commit crimes. They bring down the reputation of Swedish citizenship and Swedish passports internationally. Sweden now needs to get away from all this … I don’t think there’s any other solution than to start looking at tearing up citizenships.”
The SD leader claimed that Sweden’s integration policy has been based on a faulty premise, that foreigners who come from abroad actually want to be Swedish. “They don’t want that,” he said.
The new proposals come just over a year after Åkesson and Sweden Democrat migration policy spokesman Ludvig Aspling penned an op-ed for the newspaper Aftonbladet in which they called for the repatriation of migrants from Somalia, Syria, and Afghanistan due to a lack of integration and high rates of unemployment.
“Remigration is not a miracle solution, but the failures of recent decades show that it must be an option—a solution for all those who live in long-term exclusion,” the pair wrote, adding, “Incentive structures and the welfare system must be reformed, so that people in exclusion cannot get caught up in welfare dependency, but are either forced into society or encouraged to remigrate.”
While the Sweden Democrats are not formally part of the current centre-right government in Sweden, they are signatories to the Tidö agreement and support the government in the Swedish parliament.
Earlier this month, Aspling co-authored an article in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter with Swedish Migration minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, a member of the centre-right Moderate Party, in which the pair stated that Sweden would be adapting asylum rules to the minimum level required by the European Union in order to keep the number of new asylum seekers low.
“Large internal migration flows damage trust and openness in the Union.The government is now implementing a necessary paradigm shift in Swedish migration policy. In order to break and eventually reverse a development with exclusion and integration problems, it is not only [sic] necessary that the number of asylum seekers be very low for a foreseeable period of time,” they said.
They added that the government will also create a special investigator to review those with asylum status in order to determine whether they are still in need of asylum and if not, to look at revoking their residency in Sweden.
They concluded:
Finally, the unique role of the permanent residence permit in Sweden will be addressed. Although Sweden has implemented certain changes in recent years, we still grant a large number of permanent residence permits on asylum-related grounds. This, despite the fact that any such obligation does not follow from EU law or other international commitments. This arrangement runs counter to the idea that protection is something that is granted temporarily and creates strong incentives to seek asylum in Sweden in particular.
Sweden has seen one of the highest rates of immigration per capita in Europe, with the country’s population growth being almost entirely driven by mass migration in recent years. Within the span of just a decade, the country of just over 10 million people granted over a million residency permits.
However, among the migrant-background population, unemployment has remained several times higher than that of native-born Swedes, and criminal gangs, who are some of the most violent in Europe, are made up largely of those from migrant backgrounds.
Last year, reports claimed that as many as 85% of fatal shooting suspects in Sweden were from migrant backgrounds.