2023-08-27 14:07:49
About fifteen kilometers and less than 30 minutes by metro from the heart of Stockholm, the Rinkeby district no longer has much to do with the beautiful colorful houses of the old center of the Swedish capital. Blocks of buildings, a central square with a few cafes, shops reduced to a minimum. This district built in the 1980s has more than 80% of immigrant population. Mahmoud Francesco arrived from Chile with his parents and sister when he was 4 years old. He is now 42, and has never left Rinkeby.
More welcome
He has seen growing hostility towards refugees in recent years. He describes a discrimination that has become commonplace: “The security guards always follow me to the supermarket, people don’t look at me on public transport, I feel like I have to prove all the time that I’m not a criminal. » Over coffee, his Chilean friends feel the same: “We are called back less for the job, for the same task we are paid less than the Swedes, and, above all, much more supervised while we work. »
It has been a year since the right-wing bloc won the elections, making even more visible a hostility already present when the Social Democrats were in charge. Conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson needs the Democrats of Sweden, his far-right ally, to build a majority.
In mid-July, they jointly defended a very restrictive immigration bill. The text makes it more difficult to obtain a right of residence for humanitarian reasons. He proposes to double the minimum wage required to obtain a work permit, to prevent family reunification. Permanent residence permits are being replaced by temporary residence permits, which are increasingly shorter and more complicated to obtain. “The argument of the government is that migrants should not have more rights in Sweden than those provided by the Geneva Convention. So to level everything down to make our country as unattractive as possible,” explains Björn Åhlin, an immigration lawyer in Stockholm.
“We weren’t prepared and the system collapsed”
In Rinkeby, everyone knows that the rejection of migrants began long before, as early as 2015. That year, in the midst of the Syrian crisis, Sweden was the most welcoming country in Europe, in proportion to its population of 10 million. inhabitants. “We weren’t prepared and the system collapsed,” sadly remembers George Joseph, director of La Caritas in Sweden. “But the Swedes mobilized, opened their doors,and it worked well. Public opinion was in favor of welcoming refugees at the time, nearly 70% of Swedes were in favour,” he continues.
Since then, terrorist attacks have plagued Europe and gang warfare linked to drug trafficking has intensified in Sweden. Sweden’s Democrats took advantage of this to equate immigration with insecurity. “It’s the strategy of the scapegoat: we blame the migrants for everything”, laments George Joseph.
Deterrence strategy
With the arrival of the new government, the situation only got worse. Björn Åhlin takes the example of a client who arrived as a child, who studied in Sweden and then found a job in a retirement home. He should have obtained a permanent permit because of his work. “But last February the Supreme Court for Migration issued a new ruling that finding a job after school is not enough, you have to find it within six months, but it took eight months to find it. So he didn’t get his license even though he’s been working for three years. It’s insane,” castigates the lawyer.
Making Sweden an inhospitable country to deter arrivals, the strategy seems to be working. In Rinkeby, Shimal, 40, fled Iraq in 2006 because of the war. Arrived alone, he is now married, father of three children and runs a store in the neighborhood shopping center. After having taken so long to adapt to his new country, he thinks for the first time to leave it.
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From opening to retreat
Sweden is one of the most multicultural countries in Europe, with 20% of its population born abroad.
In 2015, in the midst of the Syrian crisis, the Scandinavian kingdom took in 163,000 refugees for 10 million inhabitants.
In 2021, 13,000 asylum applications were submitted, ten times less than eight years ago, and only 7,000 were accepted.
The current so-called “Tidö” coalition, named after the Renaissance castle where the negotiations were conducted, proposes a new brake on the reception of refugees, which will increase from 6,400 people last year to 900 over the next four years.
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