Swedish Minister of Migration Launches Information Campaign to Slow Down Immigration

Recently, the Swedish Minister of Migration has appeared in several international media. The aim is to keep asylum seekers away.

“When I entered politics as a 13-year-old, I dreamed of a world without borders. But the migration crisis of 2015 changed my country.”

This is how Swedish Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard begins an article in the German newspaper Die Welt. She represents the bourgeois party Moderaterna. Stenergard paints a gloomy picture of Swedish immigration policy and writes that in the future the country will have much lower asylum immigration than today.

Recently, similar posts and interviews with Stenergard have appeared in German, French, Danish and Belgian media, writes The evening paper.

These are part of an information campaign that the Swedish government announced earlier this year. The aim is to slow down immigration to the country and correct the view of Sweden as a generous recipient country.

Among other things, the Migration Minister wants to avoid people who do not have sufficient protection needs coming to Sweden, and then staying sent home again.

According to Stenergard, the campaign is part of the government’s plan to overcome, among other things, gang violence and other problems that the country has experienced in recent years. This was one of the most important issues during last year’s election. Now there will be big changes in Sweden, according to the migration minister.

– We are talking about a paradigm shift, says Stenergard in a video on the government’s website.

Faces criticism

In the debate entry in the German newspaper, Stenergard writes, among other things, that strict requirements will be placed on those seeking asylum in Sweden. Among other things, she writes that immigrants must learn Swedish immediately.

Stenergard further claims that it is a problem that most foreign-born people in Sweden today cannot support themselves.

But this is not true, according to Statistics Sweden (SCB).

No longer a “humanitarian superpower”

In October, Sweden got a new, bourgeois government led by Ulf Kristersson from the Moderates. The new government announced a stricter immigration policy.

– Sweden is the only country in Europe, next to Germany, that really opened its borders in connection with the refugee crisis in 2015. Sweden has accepted a larger proportion of migrants than other countries, says Lise Rakner, professor of political science at the University of Bergen.

According to Rakner, it is a widespread practice for European countries to run information campaigns with the aim of making themselves unattractive to asylum seekers.

Rakner believes there has been a change of mood in the Swedish immigration debate in recent years. Now several of the biggest parties have tightening immigration as one of their most important issues.

– Previously, it was almost only the Sweden Democrats who led this policy, but in recent years there has been a marked change in mood.

Rakner believes the problems Sweden is now trying to overcome are due to a combination of strong privatization of the Swedish welfare state and a liberal immigration policy.

– This combination has made integration difficult and led to the development of parallel societies.