So You Want to Revoke Their Citizenship?—Some Remigration Advice for Sweden

My unashamed fascination with Sweden continues unabated. The Nordic Kingdom with its islands and fjords and blondes is pioneering remigration for the rest of the West and I have covered this subject perhaps four or five times in my year here at White Papers. My previous piece covered the shifts in the country leading toward remigration policy in the country, and for those that need a reminder:

1. The Swedish state will pay migrants (including people with Swedish citizenship) some $34,000 to return to their homelands.

2. The Swedish state is going to tighten citizenship laws by imposing language, cultural, and longer residency requirements.

3. The Swedes are going to tighten their refugee policies to “the strictest in Europe”.

4. The Swedes plan to let more migrant visas expire each year than they approve. Causing a natural decline in non-permanent resident migrants.

5. The Sweden Democrats are pushing through with a media blitz policy to inform migrant communities about the remigration opportunities.

6. The Swedish state is going to make it law that all public workers, including teachers, doctors, and other state employees, must report any interaction with an illegal immigrant.

In my previous piece I also mentioned that Sweden was exploring a series of options to amend its constitution so that it can revoke the citizenship of some of the millions of foreign-born people that have been welcomed in that country in recent decades. Sweden is now moving forward with this process.

The government has appointed a special investigator who will now point together a series of proposals to allow the revocation of Swedish citizenship from certain individuals.

The Swedish state is proposing that citizenship be revoked from dual citizens who:

• Acquired their citizenship fraudulently.

• People convicted of crimes that threaten national security, as defined by the International Criminal Court.

• People convicted of crimes that harm the vital interests of Sweden.

Hopefully the ‘special investigator’ for the Swedish government will take to Google looking for ideas and come across this article, because I have a great deal of advice to offer him.

Before starting on the three grounds for the revocation of citizenship it is important to deal with this unnecessary ‘dual citizenship’ qualification. The Swedish state should allow for the revocation of citizenship from any person without a native born Swedish parent if they qualify for a foreign citizenship. This type of revocation on the basis of foreign citizenship qualification is nothing new or radical, either. It is already a feature of British law.

To cite but one example of why this is useful, currently some 260,000-plus people of Syrian descent are present in Sweden with 196,000 being Syrian born and a further 67,000 people being of Syrian descent yet born in Sweden. Usefully (for Western nationalists) Syria does not allow Syrians to give up their Syrian nationality even when acquiring a foreign passport, and so all 196,000 Syrians could theoretically be denaturalised for one reason or another, but with the ridiculous ‘dual citizenship’ caveat the 67,000 Syrians born in Sweden would be immune from denaturalisation. Yet, under a system where qualification for foreign citizenship matters almost all of these Syrians would be eligible for denaturalisation, as Syrian nationality law recognizes the children of Syrian men as Syrian citizens upon the presentation of proof of paternity.

With more than 2.2 million foreign born persons in Sweden and some 711,000 second generation immigrants born to two foreign born parents it will be crucial that Sweden includes the ability to denaturalise those who qualify for foreign citizenship rather than those that simply hold it already. If the Swedish state is feeling like pushing the boundaries of remigration yet further it might consider it might also consider the option to denaturalise any person with the right to reside in a foreign country, such as the descendants of Indians and Pakistanis, Japanese, or Koreans who hold a ‘right of abode’ in their homelands on the basis of their ancestry alone.

Furthermore the Swedes would be advised to include a provision in their future law that allows for children under 18 years of age to be automatically denaturalised upon the denaturalisation of a parent. It is not the job of the Swedish people to care for the children of criminal or fraudulent aliens, nor is it right that the Swedish state simply break up these families when they can be deported together.

Now, onto the topical areas for citizenship revocation. First up is the possibility for revoking citizenship on the basis of fraud or incorrect information when acquiring a Swedish passport.

This is insufficient, to say the least. Yes, it is great to revoke the passport of the guy who lied about his age or the woman who lied about a criminal past when she acquired her Swedish passport but this does not cover the full plethora of ways that the immigrant population of the country has defrauded the overly-generous Swedish state. For example a report by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency found that foreign-born people account for 80% of undue benefit/welfare payments and are 30 times more likely to commit child-benefit fraud compared to native Swedes.

Any fraud, whether it be citizenship related, related to the welfare state, or other criminal fraudulent activity should result in the revocation of citizenship.

It is hard to know just how many people this issue of citizenship fraud would effect, but we can take evidence from other Western countries. From Sweden itself we know that 75% of self-proclaimed “child migrants” the Swedish state tested were lying about their age, and the process of testing these individuals only started after several years of mass ‘refugee’ based immigration. These figures are similar to the 80% fraud rate amongst “family members” of refugees to the United States or the estimated 70% fraud rate among immigrants who applied for amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), commonly referred to as the Reagan Amnesty.

Second, there is the proposal to revoke citizenship based upon International Criminal Court grounds. These grounds mostly related to crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, high treason, espionage and the like. These are all sufficient reasons to denaturalise someone but will only cover a very small share of the migrant population in Sweden and virtually none of their descendants. One could be forgiven for feeling the Swedes added this line just to give the proposal a bit more robustness.

Third and finally the Swedish state wants to revoke citizenship for crimes that are said to be ‘system threatening’ such as for involvement in organized crimes and criminal gang networks. The Swedish state even cites that as many as 1,100 individuals with dual citizenship are known to be involved in these gangs.

This is a great start for tackling foreign origin crime, but does not go nearly far enough. For one thing gang violence is but one of Sweden’s serious issues with crime. Two-thirds (63%) of those convicted of sexual assault in Sweden were first or second generation immigrants to the country while a 2018 Aftonbladet report showed that 88% of those convicted of rape were first or second-generation immigrants.

One comprehensive review of crime literature in Sweden found that immigrants and their descendants were responsible for 73% of manslaughter and murders and 70% of property crime (robbery etc). This study also found that the risks of criminality at the hands of second-generation immigrants in the country is increasing. According to the Swedish government’s own data (published at a time the Social Democrats were in power) admits that people are 2.5 times more likely to be victims of crime at the hands of a migrant and 3.2 times as likely to be the victim of a crime at the hands of a second-generation immigrant. Swedes are only 1.5 times as likely to be assaulted by a Western origin immigrant, less than half the likelihood of being assaulted by a second-generation non-Western immigrant.

As of 2017 more than 2 million people in Sweden possess some type of criminal conviction, with a staggering 33% of the total (collected between 1973 and 2017) being of foreign origin while the total number of crime suspects with a foreign background increasing to 58% between 2013 and 2017. All told at least 400,000 convicted criminals in Sweden are of non-Swedish origin. This is unacceptable.

The Swedish state is best advised to make provisions in their denaturalisation law to strip any foreign origin criminal who qualifies for foreign residency of their Swedish citizenship.

There are slightly more than one million non-Western individuals in Sweden with Swedish citizenship, another 400,000 non-Westerners who have yet to acquire a Swedish passport, and another 500,000 or so second-generation immigrants of non-Western origin (without at least one Swedish or European parent).

If the Swedish are serious about reversing their demographic decline, and they appear to be the most serious among the current Western democracies, then they must expand their vision of what is appropriate for both remigration and the circumstances under which citizenship can be revoked from a person of foreign origin.

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