“Sweden is a humanitarian superpower.”
Carl Bildt, Foreign Minister, Sweden

A Senior Official at the Swedish Migration Board (Migrationsverket) tells the following in a letter that has also been published in Swedish:

Congratulations, Sweden! This is what is going on at the Migration Board.

Never before has it been as easy to get a residence permit and refugee status in Sweden based on lies, as it is today!

If you speak Arabic, have bought a fake Syrian identity card and if you have bought — or thought of them ourself — a good fake asylum story, you are almost with certainty accepted and grabnted permission to stay. Permananently. The asylum seeker — more often than not — meets a stressed out and inexperineced asylum investigator. He or she lacks time and knowledge to make more than a quick and superficial investigation. The asylum seekers knw this and if they can just sound believeable and show their fake papers , then a permanent residence is well within reach in a few weeks or, at the most, a few months. Right after the investigation the administrator is told by his or her team leader to quickly make a decision.

A decision that is made quickly always means that permanent residency is granted. The decision takes around an hour to write.

A negative decisions, on the other hand, takes considerably longer to process. There may be need for additional documentation, questions and language analysis or a request may have to be sent to a foreign authority. In case of a possible negative decision, public counsel paid by the State must be appointed. A second asylum interview with the asylum seeker with the legal counsel present needs to be held. After that the legal counsel will write a statement. The total time required for a negative decision, including the decision writing, may be ten working hours or even much more.

In a stressful situation the official at the Migration Board prefers to write a positive decision that takes an hour and gives him extra points in the statistics, points that are important when it’s time to discuss a salary raise with his manager. A negative decision that takes at least ten working hours of work or more also only gives him one point while could already have earned ten or more poitnts by granting residence permits to ten or more people!

This way the management will “force” the officials to issue fewer negative decisions. This totally absurd practice is one of the main reasons as to why the number of refusals is decreasing!

Since the boss values an easily written positive decision as much as a time-consuming negative decision, it is natural that the positive decisions are increasing.

So why reflect on the matter and why ask additional questions and do the extra work that, admittedly, can turn a supposed positive decision to a negative one, if it just means extra work and no bonus in the salary discussion when the time has come to evaluate your performance during the year?

So what can we do? Well, we could provide temporary residence permits to asylum applicants who are traveling to Sweden and who do not prove that they are coming directly from Syria. And we could require that people living in Sweden must be able to support themselves as well as their relatives that they want to bring to Sweden.

Through these and maybe a few other steps, there will be fewer asylum applicants coming to Sweden — when those applying on false grounds disappear — and Sweden will be more in line with its neighboring countries that are receiving far less asylum seekers.

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Please note that there are of course also asylum seekers who really are Syrians, coming directly from Syria; people who have managed to get out of the country and who have had enough money to pay for the very expensive trip to Sweden, arranged by human smugglers. Those Syrians will show their true identity documents and will be able to prove their asylum claims in different ways. But there are not so very many of them. And according to officials at the Migration Board, the fact that someone from Syria has a valid id-card does not mean that he or she comes straight from Syria. They may have lived outside the country for a long time; some may even have residence permit in another EU state! If they do not show their passports, there is no way of knowing where they come from…

P.S. Another official of the Migration Board informs: On 25 June there were 498 people applying for asylum (yes, in one day!), and during the past three days a total of 1467 asylum applications have been handed to the Migration Board. Among the staff of the Migration Board there are many who say that they feel “desperate” and that the situation truly is “chaotic”.