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How has the number of Brits in the Nordics changed since Brexit?

The UK leaving the European Union has been a headache for many British people living in Scandinavian countries. Here's what the data tells us.

Published: 24 August 2023 10:16 CEST

How has the number of Brits in the Nordics changed since Brexit?

A woman wears Union Jack sunglassses at the late Queen Elizabeth IIs Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022. Photo: Daniel Leal/AFP

There’s been a marked difference in how the number of British citizens in the official statistics has changed since Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, with Denmark seeing a more or less steady increase and sharp falls in both Norway and Sweden.

The number of British citizens registered as living in Sweden has fallen from a peak of 19,965 in 2018 to just 14,158 in 2022.

Norway has seen a comparable, if slightly later fall, from a peak of 17,208 in 2020 to 15,683 in 2023.

Denmark, on the other hand, has seen the number of British residents fall much less dramatically, dropping from a peak of 19,086 in 2019 to 17,888 in the at the start of July this year.

So has there been a mass exodus of Brits from Sweden and Norway?

It doesn’t look like it.

Nearly 4,495 British people gained Swedish citizenship in 2019, and a further 2,150 gained it in 2020, with all of them then no longer classed as UK citizens in the official data, which only includes people who don’t also have Swedish citizenship.

Norway changed its laws at the start of 2020 to allow dual citizenship, with 1,600 British citizens becoming Norwegian in 2021 and a further 800 in 2022.

As it take nine years of residency to become a citizen in Denmark, the country has not seen this effect to the same extent. The number of British people getting citizenship rose from well under a hundred a year before the Brexit vote in 2016 to a peak of 692 in 2020, after which it slowly dropped off, with 546 getting citizenship in 2020 and 327 in 2021.

How do the stats look for people of British origin?

If you look at country of origin rather than current citizenship, the number of British people living in all three countries has been climbing steadily, with Sweden seeing the greatest growth as well as the highest overall numbers.

The number of British-born people living in Sweden has risen from 23,341 in 2013 to 32,575 in 2022, an increase of more than 40 percent.

Denmark has also seen a significant increase in the number of British-born residents, with the number rising 27 percent from 14,150 in 2013 to 18,098 in 2023.

The smallest increase in the number of British-born residents has happened in Norway, where the number has risen just 16 percent from 18,634 in 2013 to 21,663 in 2023.

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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 on 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.