The rooms are as small as prison cells. Each contains a steel-framed bunk-bed – the paint long since peeled away – a stained and dingy sink and a small table bolted to the white-washed wall.
New arrivals are given a set of bed sheets, a single roll of toilet paper and a small tube of toothpaste. Not one of the near-200 residents has any idea how long he or she will be here.
But this is no prison. This is one of Sweden’s newly appointed ‘migrant return centres’ designed to house the thousands of foreigners refused asylum – and whom the government intends to deport in the coming months and years. Those without the right to remain in Sweden are offered beds in these facilities before returning to their home country, or via the Dublin Convention to another EU nation.
In the grounds of this facility, in the southern Stockholm district of Hägersten, the Mail met Alasan Jaideh, 18, a Gambian asylum seeker who had arrived in Sweden five days earlier from Calais, where he had spent two years trying in vain to reach Britain.
‘Now I’m in Sweden I want to stay here, to work and to learn Swedish,’ he told us.
But for Jaideh, as for so many other new arrivals, the hope of settling in this Scandinavian country is now more remote than ever.
Alasan Jaideh, 18, a Gambian asylum seeker who had arrived in Sweden five days earlier from Calais, where he had spent two years trying in vain to reach Britain
For after years of horrific gangland violence blamed largely on Sweden’s soaring migrant population, the centre-Right government has slammed the border shut, announcing a raft of harsh measures aimed at reducing the numbers of foreign-born residents, which currently stands at more than 20 per cent of the 10.6 million total.
Among the policy proposals is an offer of just under £26,000 for legal immigrants willing to return voluntarily to their country of origin; the tightening of family reunification and asylum regulations; and more than doubling the income threshold for those seeking work visas – up from £970 a month to £2,200.
Furthermore, dual citizens who commit crimes face having their Swedish passports revoked, while public sector workers – including doctors, teachers and librarians – could be legally obliged to report undocumented people to the police in what critics have dubbed the ‘Swedish Snitch Law’.
So just what has driven Sweden – once heralded as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ – to abandon its liberal agenda and implement a ‘hostile environment’ towards migrants that makes ex-PM Theresa May’s ill-fated efforts in Britain some years ago look positively hospitable?
First there is the sheer scale of the mass migration Sweden has experienced – and the difficulties it has brought in terms of assimilation and cultural differences. Hundreds of thousands of migrants – Syrians and Iraqis being the most common – have arrived in recent years in what was for centuries an exceptionally homogenous nation.
Over the past decade in particular, Sweden’s fanciful dream of a harmonious, pluralist society has turned into a nightmare.
The country that once boasted one of the lowest crime rates in Europe is now the gun-crime capital of the continent, fuelled by violent gangs disproportionately made up of first-generation migrants who control the nation’s illicit drug and prostitution trades.
Fred Kelly inside the return centre, where new arrivals are given a set of bed sheets, a single roll of toilet paper and a small tube of toothpaste
According to a 2023 police report, there are believed to be 14,000 active gang members in Sweden along with a further 48,000 people with ‘gang affiliation’, many as young as just nine or ten.
Over the first six months of this year alone, Sweden suffered a shocking 148 shootings, resulting in 20 deaths. Last year, 55 people were shot dead across 363 incidents. In 2022, there were a record 62 fatal shootings while 73 people aged between just 15-20 were arrested for suspected or attempted murder with a firearm.
While it is illegal in Sweden to register the ethnic origin of citizens accused of serious crimes, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention revealed in 2021 that those born to two parents from abroad were significantly overrepresented as suspects in murder cases.
As the crisis has escalated, so the attacks have become increasingly indiscriminate. On July 22, a man dressed in black hurled a grenade into a shop in the southern city of Södertälje, injuring several.
One place where anxiety is running higher than most is Farsta, a small district in the south of Stockholm, where last year a gunman opened fire outside the entrance to a subway station, blasting off 21 shots and killing a 15-year-old boy and a 43-year-old man.
Sanna Boden and Christer Frykholm – an engaged couple in their sixties – witnessed the shooting last year.
‘We live in fear now,’ Sanna told the Mail, standing just feet from the where the deadly attack took place. ‘We’ve had to begin a whole new way of thinking. I’m scared to go out at night now: I call Christer and he comes to help me walk home. I switch carriages on the train. Nowhere is safe any more.’
Christer stresses: ‘It’s not recent migrants – it’s the children of migrants.’
Sanna Boden and Christer Frykholm – an engaged couple in their sixties – witnessed the shooting last year, when a gunman opened fire outside the entrance to a subway station, killing a 15-year-old boy and a 43-year-old man.
He believes the government’s tough new policies are long overdue: ‘It’s too easy to come to Sweden. But people don’t dare to speak out. If you have an opinion, they throw the racist card in your face.’
This is an observation shared by Peter Bloom, 61, who also lives locally. ‘Of course we’re afraid,’ he says. ‘The situation is hell. But if you complain, you get accused of being Right-wing. You’re not allowed to say anything bad about migrants. Many Swedish people are blind, deaf and dumb to the problem: it’s a good idea to make it harder to come here.’
As well as toughening up entry restrictions, the government is also hoping to encourage thousands of migrants who have settled here legally to leave voluntarily.
New migration minister Johan Forssell recently boasted: ‘We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our migration policy.’ He added that from 2026, migrants who voluntarily choose to return to their country of origin will be eligible for a grant of almost £26,000.
The headline initiative replaces a previous grant of just £740 per adult and £370 per child which has been in place since 1984. In 2023, just 70 people applied for the miserly sums, with just one person receiving the payment.
It’s true that £26,000 goes a long way in Syria, where the average wage is just £17 per month. But just how likely are migrants to take up this generous offer when so many have been through great tribulations to come to Sweden in the first place?
To answer this question, I was given rare permission to visit a municipal school for adult learning in the centre of Stockholm which largely caters to immigrants studying Swedish and vocational courses.
A babble of languages echoed in the corridors as I was escorted through a labyrinth of pre-fabricated walls beneath worryingly sagging ceilings. Eventually I found myself in a classroom full of 40 adult students, the majority from Africa, Asia and South America, all with legal residency in Sweden.
Among them was Marina, from Afghanistan, who claimed asylum 11 years ago. ‘My husband had prostate cancer,’ she told the Mail, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘When he died [in Kabul], they tried to sell me to the man who I had borrowed money from to pay for his medical treatment. “If you don’t take him then we will kill you,” I was told.’
Marina, from Afghanistan , who claimed asylum 11 years ago. Sweden’s tough new restrictions on family visas mean she has failed to meet the income threshold required to reunite with her daughters, now 16 and 17
Marina has since been trying to bring her two daughters, now 16 and 17, to live with her. Sadly for her, Sweden’s tough new restrictions on family visas mean she has failed to meet the income threshold required to reunite with her daughters.
And for Marina’s youngest daughter, it is already too late. She was sold to a man for about £19,000 in Kabul earlier this year. ‘I’m going to appeal the decision now to try to bring my other daughter,’ Marina continued. ‘Or they will sell her, too.’
Might Marina – who earns a modest living in adult care in her adopted country – be tempted to return to Kabul and reunite with her daughters if she can claim the £26,000 grant in two years’ time?
‘What use is money to a single woman in Afghanistan under the Taliban?’ she demanded, meeting my gaze. ‘I know lots of people who have come here because they weren’t safe in their home country. We don’t want money, we want safety.’
She added: ‘At night, when I cannot sleep, I sing for my daughters. Maybe God will hear me.’
One man who is deaf to Marina’s cries is populist Right-wing politician, Nima Gholam Ali Pour. An Iranian refugee himself, who came to the country with his parents in 1987, the 42-year-old is one of the leading anti-immigration voices within the hard-Right Swedish Democrats – on whose support the ruling centre-Right Moderate Party’s coalition relies.
Populist Right-wing politician, Nima Gholam Ali Pour. An Iranian refugee himself, who came to the country with his parents in 1987, the 42-year-old is one of the leading anti-immigration voices within the hard-Right Swedish Democrats
Pour made headlines last year when he described mosques as ‘nests of evil’, while he is the author of books entitled Why Multiculturalism Is Oppression and Allah Does Not Decide In Sweden.
‘Sweden has had very difficult problems with immigration in recent years,’ he told me in his office in the Riksdag – the Swedish Parliament – this week, under a poster emblazoned with his party’s motto: ‘Safety and Tradition.’
‘We have areas that are 90 per cent immigrants who don’t accept Swedish values and where ethnic Swedes have had to move out. Most people don’t want Sweden to become like the Middle East. And why should we receive more migrants when we can’t integrate those who are already here?’
Integration has undoubtedly proved a major problem, with foreign-born citizens three times more likely to be unemployed than native Swedes.
And Pour believes the tide of public opinion is turning in Sweden against mass immigration.
A typical bedroom inside the Hägersten migrant return centre in Sweden
A report released this year by the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics (SCB) forecasts that Sweden could finish 2024 with net emigration – a sure sign that fewer would-be migrants see Sweden as an attractive proposition.
However, opposition parties and mainstream media outlets have scoffed at the statistics, describing them as a deliberate fudge.
‘They went back through the statistics over 20 years, found lots of people who had already left Sweden but were still registered and removed them,’ claimed Anders Ygeman, a member of parliament for the Left-wing Social Democrat opposition party. ‘No one except the government and the Swedish Democrats recognise the net-emigration statistic,’ he told the Mail.
However, even Ygeman’s party recognises the need for stricter controls on immigration: ‘After 2015 [when his party was in power] we strengthened the asylum rules ourselves. We shifted Sweden’s immigration policy. Although people might not have noticed it yet because it takes time to see the results of political decisions.’
‘We’ve all come to the same conclusion,’ Ygeman says of the cross-party immigration consensus: ‘Albeit from different angles.’
Afghan asylum seeker Sayed Darab, 25
And it’s not just at home where Sweden’s anti-immigration consensus is growing. Last week, Austria’s conservative Chancellor, Karl Nehammer, described Sweden’s new migration policies as ‘inspiring,’ and invited Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to Vienna for an exchange of ideas.
Although the trip – set for Wednesday this week – was cancelled due to the extreme flooding across much of mainland Europe, Chancellor Nehammer is likely not the only European leader who will soon look to follow where Sweden has led.
Back at the Hägersten migrant return centre, lunch is called and a single-file line builds outside of a wooden dining shed beside the main facility.
Over the roar of the nearby E4 motorway, Afghan asylum seeker Sayed Darab, 25, jokes with me that whatever is on the menu, it won’t be fresh.
Return centres across Stockholm currently have a total capacity of 1,400, with at least two people crammed into each room. The government hopes to add 600 beds by the end of the year.
The one thing all return centres have in common is their proximity to international airports. The Swedish government’s intention is quite clear. Those who end up here will likely soon find themselves on a plane home. And their journey to Sweden, which in many cases has taken years, will be reversed in a matter of hours.
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