Sweden Passes Law Allowing Immigrants’ Residency Permits to Be Revoked Over Bad Behavior

Sweden’s parliament has passed a law allowing authorities to revoke residence permits from immigrants for “not behaving properly,” the latest in a series of moves breaking away from the country’s once-liberal immigration system.

Residency permits can now be revoked for conduct including unpaid debts, undeclared work, organizing begging, and more, even where the behavior falls short of a criminal conviction.

The law, passed on June 15, applies to pending applications and can also be used retroactively against permits already granted.

Sweden has tightened its liberal immigration policies because of the vast numbers of immigrants it has taken in over the past two decades, which the government says has led to parallel societies and gang violence.

Sweden’s center-right governing parties, and their backers, the right-wing anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, who won the 2022 election on a promise to keep reducing immigration and gang crime, said that people who misbehave or commit crimes are not welcome.

“Anyone who doesn’t make the effort to do the ⁠right thing ​shouldn’t be able to count on ​staying,” Minister of Migration Johan Forssell said when he proposed the bill in ​March.

In a June 15 post on X ahead of the vote, the Sweden Democrats said that one “should be able to be deported simply for not behaving properly, even if the acts aren’t illegal or don’t otherwise lead to deportation.”

It said that conduct in this context can refer to several different things, for example, “not paying debts, organizing begging, regularly breaking rules, or having an asocial behavior with disturbances of the peace.”

“With these proposals, we gain increased opportunities to deport individuals who pose a threat to public order or security, who have been convicted of crimes, or who in other ways have failed in their conduct,” it said.

“This means that even gang criminals, even if they are not convicted, can be deported, and that more of those who are in Sweden with residence permits can lose them.”

Proposed changes are to take effect on July 13.

The law was criticized by nongovernmental organizations.

“The good behavior law leaves people in uncertainty about what actions or expressions can be used against ​them,” Stockholm-based group Civil Rights Defenders said in a statement.

“It ​undermines the rule of law and the principle of equality before the ‌law.”

Sweden has the highest rate of gangland killings in Europe and has experienced more than a decade of rising deadly gang violence.

In the mid-1980s, about 40,000 immigrants per year arrived in Sweden, according to the national statistics office. That number rose sharply, and by 2015, more than 160,000 were arriving annually from countries such as Syria, Somalia, and Eritrea.

About 20 percent of Sweden’s 10.5 million citizens were born abroad. Almost 163,000 people, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, applied for asylum in Sweden in 2015.

Many of those immigrants who arrived in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s have struggled to integrate or have found themselves drawn into organized crime.

In 2025, the Swedish Migration Agency released data showing that Sweden had significantly reduced the number of residence permits issued to asylum seekers and their relatives in 2024.

Residency permits were given to 6,250 asylum seekers and their relatives in 2024, the lowest number since comparable records began in 1985.

“I think it will need to continue to decrease,” Forssell told a news conference at the time.

“We now have a historically low asylum rate, but that should be put in relation to a number of years when it has been at very high levels.”

Sweden is also preparing to change its constitution to remove citizenship from those deemed a “threat to the state,” its government said in 2025.

“The background is that Sweden is dealing with three parallel and very serious threats to our internal security,” Strommer said at a news conference in January 2025.

“Violent extremism, state actors acting in a hostile manner towards Sweden, as well as systemic and organized crime.”

The Swedish government is also offering naturalized citizens money to leave the country.