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‘Swedish migration does not care that my son has never been to Iran’

When Mehdi Saleh finally got his permanent residency decision after a year's wait this July, it came as a shock. He got a positive decision, but his son Ali was ordered to be deported to Iran, a country where he has never been.

Published: 4 November 2022 10:09 CET

'Swedish migration does not care that my son has never been to Iran'

IT manager Mehdi Salah with his son Ali on graduation day earlier this year. Photo: private

“I told them ‘he has no place to go’,” Saleh told The Local. “He was born in Kuwait, he has never been to Iran, and if he goes to Iran, he will be arrested for forced military service.”

Saleh is one of the hundreds of foreigners working in Sweden who are discovering that a new immigration law brought in in July 2021 is leading to a new phenomenon of “teen deportations”, where children of work permit holders who turn 18 before the Migration Agency makes a decision on their parents’ cases find themselves suddenly required to be able to support themselves.

The new law, called the Aliens Act, includes a maintenance requirement that applies to everyone over the age of 18, including dependents of work permit holders and recent PhD graduates.

“The changes meant, among other things, that the new requirements were imposed for everyone who applies for a permanent residence permit, which meant new rules for both main applicants as well as their family members,” explains Andreas Bråthe, partner at Ernst and Young’s People Advisory Services division.

This, he said, was affecting “family members traveling with their partners, spouses or parents”, who “rely on the main applicant taking the financial responsibility due to their employment”.

To get permanent residence, they now need to show that they are able to support themselves and earn enough to cover their housing needs, plus a so-called “normal payment”, which is set this year at 5,157 kronor a month.

“There are many cases where the family members are put in a situation where they need to find employment, sometimes with limited resources,” he said. ” Even if the financial need is not required for their private household, this is a must in order to fullfil the requirement for permanent residency.”

Saleh said he had been “shocked” when he received the answer from the Migration Agency last July.

“To be honest, the whole family is depressed now. The government doesn’t pay even a single penny to this boy. He is under my expense coverage, not the government of Sweden’s.”

But living off money or in housing provided by your parents is not considered a valid form of support under the law.

“There is not an option for the main applicant to go in and “cover” for the income that the dependent needs in order to meet the requirement,” Bråthe says. “Instead the assessment is made for each applicant separately, regardless of whether they share household and costs together with their family members.”

The new law does give the agency leeway to make exceptions for those who “for other special reasons cannot support themselves”, but does not seem to be applying this in cases like Saleh’s son’s.

Many foreign workers who came to Sweden with children between 14 and 17 years old, who were then given residency rights as co-applicants, are finding that their children are given deportation orders once they turn 18 and apply for residency as adults.

Saleh’s son was not working or studying at university at the time of the application because he needed to retake some high school courses.

According to Saleh, his family is far from the only one affected.

“When I talked to my son’s school, the headmaster said to me, ‘Mehdi, you are not the only parents who are suffering, unfortunately’. This has become a general issue for young people in Sweden. The new law is really disturbing families.”

Ali, he said, has been put under significant stress by the deportation order and is “very worried”.

Since the deportation order, he has now got a job as an administrator earning a high enough wage to meet the income requirements and has appealed the decision on this basis.

But Saleh says it now remains to be seen if the Migration Court will rule that this is sufficient or whether it is too late to avoid deportation.

Are you or a family member facing a similar situation to Mehdi Saleh and his son? Please get in touch, as we want to highlight the issue of teenage deportations and bring it to the attention of politicians and campaigners in Sweden. Email us at news.sweden@thelocal.com

Member comments

Anonymous - 4 November 2022 at 11:35 CET

Hi everyone –

Great news for our friend Mehdi and his son.
Canada, a great and moden nation – has the some of the highest immigration rates in the world.
And this week – Canada announced it will increase immigration higher still.
So don’t despair. But do read the following article and make new plans:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-immigration-500000-2025-1.6636661

And our friend Richard Orange should publish this comment if he cares at all about the immigrant community in Sweden as this is good and valuable information. As Canada is one of the worlds best nations, with an advanced economy, strong social structures, state medical care, and a booming economy including both high-tech and low tech jobs across many sectors including natural resources, energy, construction, finance, telecommunications, IT, software, healthcare, tourism, etc. And it has a culture of welcoming immigrants.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.