Sweden pays foreign residents £27k to leave amid right-wing immigration crackdown

But over the past decade, the country has not only shut its borders – its right-wing government is now paying some foreign-born residents huge sums to leave. In 2015, Sweden took in 163,000 asylum seekers. That was the second highest per capita in Europe.

By 2025, that number had fallen by 96 per cent. And since the start of 2026, the coalition government – which ran on a pledge to cut both immigration and crime – has been offering those with non-EU residency permits up to 350,000 Swedish crowns (£27,100) to leave the country. The Sweden Democrats, a far-right party that is outside the government but backs it in parliament, has thrown its support behind the scheme.

The party launched ads on buses in July promoting the scheme to Somali immigrants. Anti-immigration rhetoric has surged across Europe since over a million people, mainly Syrian nationals fleeing war, arrived in 2015. Right-wing nationalist parties have seen a surge in support, and governments across the continent have adopted increasingly restrictive migration policies.

Mary Khan-Hohloch, a European Parliament politician for Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won 44 per cent of the vote in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, welcomed the Swedish initiative. However, Bram Frouws, director of the Mixed Migration Centre, a research body, said that there was no evidence such schemes produce any significant increase in voluntary emigration. So far this year, just 171 people have taken up the offer of cash to leave.

The Sweden Democrats now want to extend the offer to immigrants with Swedish citizenship, if they agree to revoke it. The opposition and civil rights groups have accused Mr Kristersson of going too far and call the policy divisive. Latest opinion polls for the 13 September election show an almost equal split between the government on one side and the Social Democrats and centre-left on the other in the country of 10.6 million, where two million people are foreign-born.

In the working-class Stockholm suburb of Satra, a dozen immigrants have gathered at a community centre to have coffee and practice Swedish. Among them are a Sudanese woman, two people from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, one person who fled the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a dissident from China. They have all heard about the government cash incentive to leave.