Members of Sweden’s new government outside the parliament in Stockholm October 18, 2022. Maria Stenergard (third from right) is Minister of Immigration. JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP
On her Instagram account on December 5, Sweden’s new immigration minister, Maria Stenergard, poses in a black blouse with her hands flat on a table as if to show her determination. Below her portrait is a quote from an interview she gave to the newspaper Expressen on the same day: “Those who do not have the right to reside in Sweden must be expelled. In the interview, she specifies that her goal is to “eradicate the shadow society”.
During the campaign for the parliamentary elections held in September, the right and the extreme right promised to step up deportations of illegal immigrants. The Conservatives, Christian Democrats and Liberals, who have governed since October 18 with the support of the far-right Democrats of Sweden (SD) party, estimate the country’s population at 100,000. These figures are not confirmed by the border police, according to which 18,000 people were required to leave the country at the end of 2021, of whom around 10,000 had disappeared.
“To be able to better control who is in Sweden illegally and to fight the embezzlement of social benefits and organized crime”, the government therefore decided in its budget presented on November 8th to allocate 415 million crowns (38 million euros) over a period of three years for the organization of a national census. The last took place in 1990 through a questionnaire sent to residents from the statistics office. This time “we have to knock on doors and look for people in certain neighborhoods,” warned Richard Jomshof, SD chairman of the Judiciary Committee in Parliament.
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In the hunt for illegal immigrants, the governing coalition also wants to step up identity checks and add a DNA test. The initially very vague proposal was made by the leader of the Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch, in August, a month before the elections. In addition to photographing people who cannot prove their identity, taking their fingerprints and a DNA sample, Ms Busch had suggested allowing police to search the cell phones or computers of people who refuse to cooperate.
But it was another proposal that caused an outcry in Sweden. The government wants to investigate the obligation for public sector workers to report undocumented migrants they come into contact with. Ms Stenergard defends the principle in the Expressen newspaper, noting that “authorities and courts decide in court proceedings that people have no protection and have to leave the country within a certain period of time”. But that “at the same time” other authorities “do not provide the necessary information to be able to enforce this decision”.
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