Police officers stand guard outside the adult education center Campus Risbergska school in Örebro, Sweden, on February 6, 2025 two days after a shooting there left eleven people dead.
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP
After years of dealing with immigrant gang violence and crime, Stockholm aims to make it harder for asylum seekers to remain in the country.
Sweden is set to further tighten its immigration system after parliament approved a government bill that will eliminate the possibility of permanent residence permits for asylum seekers and certain other groups of immigrants.
The legislation, passed on Tuesday, will come into force on July 12th. From that date onward, only temporary residence permits can be issued to those falling under the new rules.
Temporary residence permits are already the norm in Sweden. The new law, however, removes the possibility for these groups to eventually obtain permanent residence status. Individuals who already hold permanent residence permits will not be affected by the change.
The move comes as Sweden continues to grapple with serious problems related to gang crime and violence, much of which authorities have linked to criminal networks with immigrant backgrounds. Over the past decade, the country has struggled to contain shootings connected to rival gangs involved in the drug trade and their violent feuds.
According to police data from May, 23 innocent bystanders have been killed and another 30 wounded in gang-related shootings over the past three years. Authorities said the victims were not the intended targets but were instead hit by stray bullets, mistaken for someone else, or targeted because of links to individuals involved in criminal networks.
Police have also warned that gangs increasingly recruit teenagers through social media and encrypted messaging services, often offering money to carry out attacks. Many recruits are younger than 15, the current age of criminal responsibility in Sweden, making them particularly attractive to criminal organizations because they cannot be prosecuted under the criminal justice system.
The Swedish center-right government had planned to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13 years of age, but it announced on Thursday it has dropped the plan as there is not enough support for the measure in the Swedish parliament. The administration will now draft legislation that will lower the age of criminal responsibility to 14, Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer said.
The latest residence permit reform follows other measures already taken by Swedish authorities against individuals connected to serious crime. Earlier, the Swedish Migration Agency revoked the permanent residence permits of 11 individuals with strong links to organized criminal networks who had been living abroad for extended periods.
The affected individuals were believed to be residing in countries including Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Spain. As a result of the revocations, they lost access to Sweden’s welfare system and faced restrictions on conducting business and traveling freely within the Schengen area.
Zolta Győri is a journalist at europeanconservative.com.
