Staff at the Swedish Migration Agency Are Not Swedish Citizens

Yet another journalist testifies about problems within the Swedish Migration Agency, a topic that Samnytt has also highlighted in a series of articles—where, among other issues, we noted that Swedes are in the minority, clan structures are present, staff often speak languages other than Swedish among themselves, there is a culture of silence, and the Tidö government is seen as the “enemy.” In his testimony, journalist Henrik Sjögren of the magazine Fokus states that some employees lack Swedish citizenship and that a significant portion of the staff wear the hijab.

In an interview with the Christian newspaper Världen idag, Sjögren discusses his investigations into the Migration Agency and highlights a problem description that matches what Samnytt has also been able to reveal through sources within the authority.

According to journalist Henrik Sjögren, his information shows that background checks of case officers are inadequate and that some case officers lack Swedish citizenship or have not undergone security screening.

Sjögren also brings up information that large groups of staff are connected to the same Kurdish clan. The Migration Agency confirms that there are employees who are not Swedish citizens but declines to comment on the statements about clan affiliations—something that both Samnytt and Sjögren have uncovered in their investigations.

Migration Agency from the Inside

Don’t miss Samnytt’s article series on the Migration Agency:

Furthermore, through his investigations of the agency, Sjögren has found that thousands of people who arrived in Sweden during the migrant crisis in 2014-2015, and the following years, received permanent residence permits without proper checks of their identity. In practice, it was often enough to hand in a passport and state that one was from Syria to be welcomed into the country.

During the same period, the Migration Agency hired many people without conducting security screenings or requiring Swedish citizenship. These employees thus had the authority to decide who would be granted asylum and who could receive Swedish citizenship. Sjögren also reports that during a visit to the Migration Agency’s offices in Sundbyberg, west of Stockholm, many staff members wore the hijab.

To this day, the Migration Agency does not require case officers to be Swedish citizens or to have completed any security screening to handle residence permit cases. At the agency’s detention centers, around 90–95 percent of staff may have names suggesting foreign backgrounds. Staff with foreign backgrounds often speak their native languages both among themselves and with certain asylum seekers, which sometimes makes it difficult for others to understand what is being discussed.

There are also suspicions of cronyism within the agency, where, for example, Kurdish managers in some cases hire people from the same group to a high degree. In certain situations, asylum seekers who had fled a terrorist group found themselves assigned case workers with ties to the same organization.

At the same time, deportation decisions often do not lead to actual enforcement—once someone has entered Sweden, there is almost always some way to stay by continuing to appeal. This has, in turn, contributed to a shadow society encompassing an estimated 185,000 people, and likely hundreds of thousands more, according to Sjögren.

Watch Världen idag’s interview with Henrik Sjögren here: