Sweden to pay immigrants to leave — RT World News

Sweden will pay immigrants up to $34,000 to return to their home countries, Migration Minister Johan Forssell told reporters on Thursday. Forssell’s announcement comes amid a broader reversal of the Scandinavian nation’s once liberal migration policies.

Immigrants who voluntarily leave Sweden from 2026 onwards will be eligible for up to 350,000 Swedish kronor (US$34,000), Forssell said at a press conference.

Under a system of subsidies set up in the mid-1980s, Sweden currently offers migrants up to 10,000 kronor ($970) per adult and 5,000 kronor ($485) per child to leave. However, Forssell said only one person took the deal last year.

Ludvig Aspling of the right-wing Sweden Democrats, whose party supports the country’s centrist government, said that if the subsidy were increased and more people became aware of it, they would be more likely to accept the deal. Aspling predicted that unemployed people or those in low-paid jobs who rely on government benefits “would be interested” in such an offer.

Paying migrants to leave is a dramatic turnaround from 2015, when then-Secretary of State Margot Wallstrom made the country a “humanitarian superpower” and opened its borders to more than 160,000 asylum seekers, more per capita than any other European country. Just under a million people, mainly from the Middle East and North Africa, have emigrated to Sweden in the years since.

This arrival was accompanied by an increase in violent crime. The number of murders and manslaughter almost doubled between 2012 and 2023. The number of sexual offenses increased by 56% between 2013 and 2021. According to a 2017 study by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, 90% of perpetrators of shootings in Sweden are first- or second-generation immigrants.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson vowed last year to take action against the growing problem of migrant crime after three people were killed in the space of 12 hours during a feud between rival Middle Eastern drug gangs.

“A lot of people saw this coming,” Kristersson said at the time that he would deploy the army to “to help the police in their work against criminal gangs.” The prime minister has also pledged to speed up the deportation of migrants caught using or selling drugs, with links to organised crime or committed a violent crime. “a threat to fundamental Swedish values.”

“We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our migration policy,” Forssell told reporters on Thursday.

Neighboring Denmark has undergone a similar tightening of its migration policies, with the country’s then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen telling Swedish television in 2018 that he often cited “Sweden as a deterrent example” of failed mass immigration.

Successive Danish governments have since tightened deportation laws, reduced refugee quotas and passed laws allowing the state to confiscate immigrants’ valuables to offset the cost of housing them. Denmark currently offers immigrants grants of up to 150,598 Danish kroner ($22,330) to leave the country.

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