You Still Have Sweden on a Pedestal? It Stepped Off Long Ago.

It betrayed 100,000 people who played by the rules, and cheated to do it.

On April 29th, a statue appeared overnight in central London. Banksy had installed a man in a suit on a plinth in Waterloo Place, holding a flag that blows back and covers his face so completely that he cannot see where he is going, which is off the edge of his own pedestal.

On the same day, the Swedish parliament voted to change who gets to become Swedish. The new rules raise the wait for citizenship from five years to eight and add language tests, a civics exam, and a minimum income. More than 100,000 people had already applied under the old rules, some of them two or three years ago, and rather than let their applications be judged by the rules in force when they filed, the government will decide them under standards written afterward. Its own expert inquiry and senior judges both recommended protecting those people. The government refused and won the deciding motion by a single vote, 147 to 146, a vote it obtained by cheating.

Here is how. In the Swedish parliament, the parties agree in advance on who will sit out a vote, so that absences cancel each other and no one can swing a result by who happens to show up. The Sweden Democrats, the far-right party that now keeps the coalition government in power, had been shut out of the arrangement for a decade because no one trusted them with it. They needed only half that long, once let in, to prove everyone right: on this vote, two of their MPs were marked absent, then walked in and cast the two deciding ballots that killed the protections. The Swedish press called it a coup, and the party did not bother to deny it. But it only worked because the mainstream parties let it. Three coalition members wanted to vote for the protections and were pressured to stay home instead.

The new law took effect on June 6th, Sweden’s National Day. Of all the days available, the new rules came into force on the one day each year when, by law, every municipality in the country holds a ceremony to welcome its newest citizens with speeches, choirs, coffee, and cake.

I am one of those 100,000 people, or I would have been. I am a foreigner who moved to Sweden five years ago for my wife’s work with a major Swedish company. I started a business here. Every one of my clients is outside Sweden, which means every krona of income tax I have paid, at one of the highest rates in the world, is money the Swedish government would not have otherwise seen. On April 25th, I became eligible to apply for citizenship under the rules I had followed from the day I arrived. Four days later, the rules changed. I could have filed in the weeks before June 6th, and it would have made no difference. The Migration Agency was never going to decide my case before the cutoff, and every application left undecided as of June 6th will now be rejected, and the application fees kept. Countries set their own citizenship standards, and Sweden’s old requirements were among the more lenient in Europe. The rules themselves are not the betrayal, but retroactive application of new rules without transition is a deliberate choice to break faith with people who built their lives around the system as it existed.

The government justified it on security grounds, saying the police needed more time to screen the people in the queue. Everyone in Sweden knows what it is actually about: the refugees who arrived in 2015, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the families they have built since. Sweden let them in and then never really let them in. The failure to integrate a generation of newcomers was the country's own, and the new law punishes them and everyone else for it. The Swedish way is not to say that out loud.

An expat and an immigrant move to the same country for the same reasons. They want to build a life, contribute to a place, and raise a family somewhere that appears to want them there. The only difference between the two words is where you come from and what you look like. I am an immigrant. So are the 100,000 people in that queue.

People tend to invoke Sweden as proof that high taxes, generous systems, and shared prosperity work. I can confirm that the systems work. I have a pension, public healthcare, and a tax bill to prove it. But if a country can move the goalposts once, retroactively, it can move them again. Every skilled worker in the world considering Sweden should now be asking themselves why they would bet a decade of their life on a country where the rules are written in pencil.

Sweden recorded its fewest births in more than two decades last year. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.43 children per woman, an all-time low, and the government was concerned enough to commission a formal inquiry into why Swedes have stopped having children. Sweden’s own Migration Agency has identified dozens of occupations including healthcare workers and IT professionals, where employers cannot find enough workers domestically. The country’s population growth now depends almost entirely on immigration, which is the one thing its politics has decided to make as painful as possible. The government is simultaneously offering repatriation grants of up to 350,000 kronor (roughly $32,000) to asylum-based residents willing to leave the country. Sweden stepped off the edge of that plinth some time ago. It is now in free fall and has not yet looked down.

I have built a life here and I do not want to leave. But Sweden has shown every foreigner inside its borders that the welcome can be withdrawn, and it is doing it while running out of the very people it is turning away. Where exactly do you think the future comes from?

Thanks to The Local Sweden for its coverage and campaigning on this.

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