On Monday, Sweden’s national parliament approved a deeply divisive new piece of legislation that requires most public sector employees to alert police to any undocumented migrants they encounter during the course of their work. The policy marks the latest step in Sweden’s broader push to toughen its national migration rules, arriving amid a continent-wide overhaul of the European Union’s migration framework focused on speeding up deportation processes for people denied residency.
Following widespread public and expert pushback, a small set of professions were carved out as exemptions to the mandate: teachers, primary care doctors, and social workers will not be required to report undocumented individuals they serve. The mandatory reporting rule still applies to staff across a wide range of other public bodies, including tax agencies, employment services, social insurance departments, and prison and probation systems.
The vote itself exposed deep rifts within Swedish society over the policy, passing by an extremely narrow margin of just two votes: 174 parliamentarians supported the bill, while 172 voted against it. John Stauffer, a representative of Swedish civil rights nonprofit Civil Rights Defenders, emphasized that this razor-thin result makes clear how widespread opposition to the law remains across the country.
Migration experts and human rights advocates have roundly criticized the new regulation, warning it will have severe social and public health consequences. Jacob Lind, a migration researcher at Malmö University, called the policy the latest addition to a growing slate of problematic migration restrictions in Sweden. He noted that the law carries unique symbolic weight, framing it as a mandate that forces core state institutions to act as informants on the people they serve.
A coalition of researchers from three leading Swedish universities issued a warning earlier this year that the law directly undermines undocumented migrants’ fundamental human rights and creates systemic incentives for racial profiling, the discriminatory practice of targeting individuals for suspicion based on race or ethnicity rather than concrete evidence. In interviews with public servants ahead of the vote, the research team documented widespread ethical unease among workers who would be required to enforce the rule.
Louise Bonneau, a policy advisor at Brussels-based migrant advocacy nonprofit PICUM, explained that the reporting mandate will foster a pervasive climate of fear that harms not just undocumented migrants, but any community member that relies on public services. Even with medical professionals exempted, she noted, the cross-agency flow of information still creates dangerous deterrents to accessing care. For example, if an undocumented mother gives birth in a Swedish hospital, the attending midwife is not required to report her. But the birth registration is automatically shared with the tax agency, which is bound by the new law to report the entire family to immigration authorities.
“This creates a huge deterrence effect to be in contact with a healthcare professional,” Bonneau said. “We’ll see what happens in practice. Will we see people fearing to be in contact with authorities, issues of maternal health, of the children being born?”
In defense of the policy, the Swedish government has argued that additional enforcement measures are necessary to ensure that all people denied legal residency can be properly deported to their home countries.
This mandatory reporting requirement remains an unusual policy across the European continent. Only a small handful of EU member states have enacted similar rules. Germany adopted a limited version of the policy in 2005, requiring a narrow set of public bodies including welfare offices to report undocumented migrants, while also exempting schools and hospitals. Even with those exemptions, data and anecdotal evidence show that many undocumented migrants in Germany avoid accessing necessary medical care, because accessing care requires paperwork from welfare offices that exposes them to deportation. To address this gap, grassroots organizations in major German cities like Berlin have set up separate, confidential healthcare services exclusively for undocumented migrants.
The United Kingdom offers another recent case study of the risks of such policies. In 2018, the British government rolled back a policy that allowed immigration officials to access confidential patient records from the National Health Service, after widespread outcry that the rule deterred sick migrants from seeking care and violated core patient confidentiality protections. Under the revised framework, UK immigration officials are only permitted to access personal information for individuals suspected or convicted of crimes who are actively part of deportation proceedings.
Contributions to this reporting were provided by Associated Press correspondents Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Brian Melley in London.