Sweden just made it harder to get citizenship

New rules apply from the 6th of June.

Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash

The right-wing government in Sweden has just made it significantly more difficult to obtain Swedish citizenship.

Beginning on the 6th of June, the Swedish National Day, it is now a completely different story for people to get citizenship.

But here is the thing. Really, these new laws sound like a basic common sense, something that should have been in place a long time ago.

So what are these new rules?

1. A new stricter rule for residency. People wishing to obtain Swedish citizenship must have lived 8 years in the country as opposed to only 5 years before. The 8 years must also have been continuous.

2. People must prove that they are able to support themselves financially. People must earn around $2200 per month to qualify. So people that are relying on benefits in Sweden will therefore generally not get citizenship anymore.

3. People must have had a ”orderly and honest life” to be allowed to get citizenship. This is to promote integration into Swedish life. If people commit crimes, there will be a delay in the possibility of getting citizenship.

4. Those seeking citizenship must now show sufficient knowledge of the Swedish language and Swedish society. So now people must be able to speak the Swedish language in order to become a citizen.

5. Children are now no longer automatically included in the parent’s citizen application. Children must have their own citizenship application.

There are a few more rules also that were changed, but these are some of the main ones.

So, people must now be able to speak Swedish to get Swedish citizenship. This sounds like obvious common sense to me. Why wasn’t this a rule before? I thought this should have been one of the first requirements to get citizenship, that you actually can speak the language of the country you are living in.

As the situation is now, many people in Stockholm don’t even speak Swedish anymore. In many Stockholm shops, English is spoken instead of Swedish.

Something very interesting has happened also. There are reports that the Swedish migration authorities have worked overtime to try and accept as many citizenship applications as possible before these new stricter rules came into effect.

Why would they do this?

Staff were required to work overtime on weekends and holidays to go through applications.

A politician from the Swedish Democrats accused the migration authorities of trying to obstruct the new stricter rules by working overtime to ”push through as many citizenship cases as possible” before the new rules applied.

Interesting.

But now at least Sweden has much stricter laws for getting citizenship.

However, if you ask me, many of these new rules are just common sense, which makes me wonder why these rules didn’t exist before?

People must be able to provide for themselves, life a honest and orderly life and be able to speak the language is just basic common sense if you ask me.

Sweden has had notoriously open borders previously, I guess the fact that we didn’t have these common sense rules before is one of the reasons.