Sweden will make it harder for immigrants to obtain citizenship by lengthening the minimum residence requirement from five years to eight and tightening a rule that they must lead an “honest way of life”.
“You should feel proud to be a Swedish citizen and you only feel proud once you’ve made an effort,” Johan Forssell, the migration minister, told reporters after a government-appointed commission proposed the changes.
An “honest way of life” refers to an applicant not having committed a crime or misdemeanour and having no unpaid debts.
Under the current system, the rule only applies to the applicant’s behaviour in Sweden. This will be expanded to include their behaviour abroad as well. In addition, the length of time applicants must wait after being convicted of a crime before they qualify for citizenship will be extended.
The commission also proposed that immigrants must in future prove they are financially self-sufficient. Forssell said that citizenship helped tie people from different backgrounds together under “a common Swedish identity”.
“This is particularly important at a time when Sweden has welcomed hundreds of thousands of people from many parts of the world in recent years,” he said.
The planned measures are the latest in a series of curbs on immigration introduced since 2022 under the centre-right minority government of Ulf Kristersson, which depends on parliamentary support from the radical right-wing Sweden Democrats.
Forssell said that immigrants needed to “always be very clear about the values that must apply in Sweden”. “Family is important but it does not stand above the law. There is equality between the sexes. You can marry whoever you want. Girls and boys have the right to swim and play football. If you don’t accept that, Sweden is not the country for you,” the minister added.
The commission’s conclusions will be reviewed before the government drafts a bill. The changes are expected to be passed by parliament and to come into force on June 1, 2026.
Recent measures introduced to reduce immigration included granting only temporary residence permits to asylum seekers, tightening family reunification rules and raising income requirements for non-EU citizens seeking work visas.
For decades, the Nordic state took a uniquely “open-hearted” approach to refugees, with Europe’s most liberal programme of state support for them to sustain their native languages and cultures.
During the 2015 migration crisis, Sweden took in nearly 163,000 asylum seekers, more in per capita terms than any other European Union member. After struggling to integrate them, it launched a crackdown after the mainstream parties shifted to the right on immigration in the 2022 election.
The Sweden Democrats came second and have had considerable influence on migration and law and order policies, which took up almost half of the coalition agreement.
The measures introduced so far have been so effective that provisional figures suggest Sweden now has net emigration for the first time since the 1960s. Forssell told The Times that it was impossible to manage “the enormous task of integration in the right way if you continue to have such a high influx of immigrants every year”.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Sweden had cast itself as a humanitarian superpower between the West and the Soviet Union, championing the world’s underdogs and providing refuge to those facing oppression.
This spirit persisted even after 2015, as gang-related gun murders and bombings doubled and the Sweden Democrats profited from being the only party espousing anti-immigration policies.
Civil Rights Defenders, a human rights organisation, criticised the latest plans. “Research shows that tougher requirements for citizenship do not increase the incentives for integration, but rather contribute to the exclusion of a growing group of people who find themselves in the country for a long time without the basic rights of citizenship,” said John Stauffer, the organisation’s legal director.