Has Sweden just passed an arbitrary immigration law punishing migrants for failing to display “good behavior”, whatever that means? Yes, according to the Guardian and rights groups better versed in American-style legalese than Swedish political culture. To most Swedes, however, the new law — which grants the government the power to revoke residence permits from foreigners guilty of petty crime or wrongdoing— makes perfect sense. It may also offer a model for other European countries struggling with the effects of mass immigration on social cohesion.

Sweden, together with Germany, was not so long ago the poster child of open borders. Today, it is among the European countries moving most aggressively to tighten immigration rules and combat crime, an area in which immigrants are substantially overrepresented. In 2021, for example, foreign-born people living in Sweden were registered as suspected criminal offenders at a rate two and a half times that of citizens born to Swedish parents.

While the English term “good behavior” suggests a child doing their homework or eating their peas, the legislation in question is really about the hard-to-translate term skötsamhet, which has connotations of conscientiousness, trustworthiness and a willingness to abide by society’s rules. This term came into common use in the early 1900s and was particularly favored by Sweden’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats, which regarded strict moral education and ideals of clean living as a more dignified route out of the lumpenproletariat than simple provision of alms. The party gradually abandoned Marxist class struggle in favor of a concept of “the People”, in which anyone deemed skötsam could be included in the national body politic. Over time, this ideological evolution produced the so-called People’s Home, a reciprocal welfare state in which those who performed their duty to work earned social rights and temporary support in times of hardship.

A recent survey study that I conducted with colleagues suggests that skötsamhet, and related character traits such as reliability and truthfulness, are still intimately connected with most people’s conception of Swedishness. It is therefore unsurprising that the government’s immigration crackdown to date has generated a public backlash; in practice, it has largely affected migrants who have learned Swedish, entered study or work, and complied with requests from the Migration Agency. Such people are easy to expel but, in the eyes of most Swedes, not responsible for the costs of mass immigration. In other words, belonging is judged less by ethnicity in a strict sense than by conduct.

The new legislation corrects that unfairness by giving the government tools to act against migrants who fall short of serious criminality but who are persistently disorderly, thereby fraying the social fabric and creating the sense of unhomeliness that many Europeans today associate with mass immigration. It hits directly at people who go underground to circumvent immigration rules, wrongfully claim sickness benefits, rack up debts, and otherwise show contempt for what Sweden’s Minister for Migration, Johan Forssell, calls “the effort to do the right thing”.

Sweden – like most European societies – is not a “liberal democracy” constituted by individual rights protected by courts, but instead a historical community whose political institutions grew out of pre-existing norms and expectations of behavior. Being frank about that, and expecting immigrants to conform, is conducive both to the assimilation of newcomers and to public tolerance of immigration.

Across Europe, citizens are constantly surprised when immigrant criminals are allowed to remain in their countries due to some legal technicality while honest, ambitious people are sent back home. The Swedish policy turns the tables, making it harder for those who reject the social contract to benefit from it.

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Johan Wennström is a Research Fellow at the Swedish Defence University and author of the The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians.

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