In 2026, the Swedish government is going to offer immigrants £26,000 (350,000 krona) to leave the country.
Rampant gang crime, strongly linked to migration, has seen successive governments put under pressure to address the issue. Now the centre-right-led government has announced it will markedly increase its offer to recent entrants into the country to return home.
Sweden currently offers migrants £740 (10,000 krona) per adult and £370 (5,000 krona) per child to leave, with a cap of £2960 (40,000 krona).
But with migration blamed for Sweden having the highest gun-related deaths per capita of any European country, politicians are scaling up their offer.
“We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our migration policy,” Migration Minister Johan Forssell told journalists, following the annoucement of the new policy.
The minority government, led by centre-right politician Ulf Kristersson, is in a confidence and supply arrangement with the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party branded as far-right by critics.
Ludvig Aspling of the Sweden Democrats told reporters that the policy of paying migrants to leave had been around for some time. Only now is it being turbocharged.
“The grant has been around since 1984, but it is relatively unknown, it is small and relatively few people use it”, he said.
For some time academics and politicians have blamed Sweden’s once-liberal immigration and asylum policy on its crime crisis.
Earlier this year, Express.co.uk spoke to Göran Adamson, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Uppsala University, who warned that the country was on the brink of “civil war” over crime and migration.
He told this website that there was a clear link between them, backed up by official data.
He explained: “Even though most migrants are law-abiding people… still the likelihood of a migrant – especially from the Middle East or Africa, especially below 50 years of age – committing a crime is much, much higher than for a Swedish person. These are just the facts.”
According to official statistics from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) between 2015 and 2018, the percentage of native Swedes born to Swedish parents suspected of committing crime was 3.2 percent. But that figure rose to eight percent for people born abroad, and climbed to more than 10 percent for people born in Sweden to two foreign parents.
Mr Adamson’s claim regarding the overrepresentation of migrants from the Middle East and Africa was backed up by the Brå too. It found: “The proportions suspected of offences are greatest among those born in the regions: West Asia, Central Asia, and different regions in Africa.”
