The Centre Party is running on a significantly more open migration policy, promising to abolish the current wage floor for labor immigration. At the same time, the party sets as a condition for supporting a new government that permanent residence permits should not be able to be revoked or converted into temporary ones. Other election promises include a special startup visa and a billion-krona investment to attract AI researchers and entrepreneurs to Sweden.
Centre Party leader Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist and the party’s spokesperson on migration issues, Niels Paarup-Petersen, on Friday presented four migration policy election promises that the party wants to implement as part of what it describes as a coming centrist government. All promises concern migration policy and are liberal in their direction.
Wants to “restore Sweden’s attractiveness”
The main message at the press conference, however, was that the Centre Party believes that the Tidö Agreement government’s migration policy has made Sweden less attractive for migrants, whom the C leader described as mainly consisting of researchers, students, and entrepreneurs.
Thand Ringqvist described the importance of immigration for Swedish business with anecdotes about entrepreneurs of foreign background such as Herbert Felix and hotel entrepreneur Bikky Chakraborty. She also pointed out that according to party data, about one in three doctors and four out of ten employees in the hospitality industry are born abroad.
– People born abroad have always been an essential part of Swedish society and have come here to build their lives. But not anymore, she claimed.
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The Centre leader claimed that the decrease in labor immigration during the years 2023–2025 corresponds to nearly SEK 30 billion in lost value for the Swedish economy and about SEK 10 billion in lost tax revenue. The number of first-time residence permits granted to labor migrants is said to have dropped from just over 24,000 in 2022 to about 11,000 last year.
As further evidence, she pointed out that Sweden has fallen from second to sixth place in the IMD World Talent Ranking since 2022. In terms of the ability to attract and retain international talents, Sweden is said to have dropped from eleventh to twenty-first place in one year. Thand Ringqvist placed the responsibility for this development on the migration policy of the Tidö parties, especially on the Sweden Democrats’ influence over it.
Promises to scrap wage floor for migrants
The first of the four election promises concerns the current wage floor for labor immigration of SEK 34,450 per month, which was introduced to counteract wage dumping, displacement of domestic labor, and exploitation of migrants in the labor market. The Centre Party wants to abolish that model.
– We will remove the wage floor of SEK 34,450. It worked before. I promise that this will be one of the first decisions we make in a centrist government, said Thand Ringqvist.
According to the C leader, a national wage floor hits especially hard at occupations and areas of the country where wage levels are lower. She mentioned butchers, seamstresses, and cooks as examples of labor that could be affected, even though she says they are needed by Swedish companies. Why such professions need to be recruited from abroad was not explained.
She argued that labor migrants should be able to support themselves properly, but that the requirements should not be set at a level that prevents smaller companies from recruiting staff, nor be so low that they need to look to less developed countries to find interested candidates.
Does not want to touch permanent residence permits
The second election promise concerns people who have already received permanent residence permits in Sweden. According to Thand Ringqvist, the Centre Party will not support a government that implements a general retroactive withdrawal of permanent residence permits for people who have not committed crimes.
– A promise from the Swedish state should be kept. Those who have received a permanent residence permit, built their lives here, worked, and contributed for many years should be able to rely on it holding, she said.
The proposal on revoked permanent residence permits and converting such permits into temporary ones, however, concerns the idea that those who intend to live permanently in Sweden should apply for Swedish citizenship with the rights and obligations that entails, rather than living in indefinite limbo with a residence permit.
According to the C leader, the party wants a migration policy that is tough on people who commit serious crimes, but does not affect people who obey the law, work, and pay taxes.
Startup visa for entrepreneurs
Niels Paarup-Petersen then took over the presentation and criticized both the raised wage floor and the government’s tightened rules for family reunification. He claimed, among other things, that people who have come to Sweden for work may have problems fulfilling the maintenance requirements when family circumstances change.
Paarup-Petersen also compared the Swedish development with Denmark, where wage requirements for labor immigration were sharply increased in 2017. According to him, the change led to a reduction in labor immigration even among highly educated workers, while the skills shortage grew.
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Denmark therefore began in 2023 to make it easier again to recruit internationally, he emphasized. The Centre Party’s third election promise is to introduce a special startup visa for labor migrants.
– We want to introduce a special startup visa for entrepreneurs from non-EU countries who want to start innovative and scalable companies here in Sweden, said Paarup-Petersen.
The application process should, under the proposal, be faster and simpler than the current system. The party thus wants to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs from far away to establish companies in Sweden.
A billion annually for AI competence
The fourth election promise specifically deals with the international competition for expertise in artificial intelligence. The Centre Party wants to allocate one billion kronor annually to recruit and retain international AI researchers and entrepreneurs.
The money will, among other things, go to scholarships and research funding that allow Swedish universities and colleges greater opportunities to recruit international researchers and build stronger research environments.
– We should not push out competence, we should attract it to us. That is how we become richer, said Paarup-Petersen.
The party also wants to develop AI clusters where research, computer capacity, and capital are brought closer together, and make it easier to start and scale AI companies through, among other things, startup visas, shorter processing times, and better access to venture capital.
Paarup-Petersen described this as a clear dividing line from the current government.
– We should not push out the competence of the future. We should compete for it.
The Centre Party’s overall message is that tighter migration policy, according to the party, must not mean that Sweden at the same time makes it harder for companies to recruit or for sought-after international expertise to establish itself in the country.
However, critics of a liberal migration policy argue that Sweden is a highly developed country that can and should mainly train its own talent. Above all, it is inappropriate to “steal” such competence from less developed countries where it is needed to raise the country to higher prosperity.
Critics also point out that people from other parts of the world not only come with their labor, but also with values that often clash with Swedish ones. More than economic calculations need to be considered in the migration policy debate.
Watch the full press conference below.