In the spring, the government will set up an investigation into return migration, which aims to get more people with residence permits to return to their home countries. Ale municipality has already started a campaign to inform about the possibility of return migration.
Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard believes that many people do not know that there is support and grants available for those who want to move back to their home country. It is therefore important to inform.
– If you feel that you have not come into your own, that you have not been integrated, that perhaps Sweden was not what you imagined, and you long to return to your homeland. Then it is important that there is support and help available so that there is a reasonable reintegration in place, she says in Agenda.
“Quite natural”
She does not consider the measure to be particularly dramatic.
– If you think that you have fled here because of, for example, war and the situation is now better in your home country. Then it is quite natural that in many cases you want to turn back.
But MP’s spokesperson Märta Stenevi accuses the government of trying to make people feel unwelcome in Sweden.
– When this proposal comes in combination with whistleblower laws, visitation zones and collective punishment. Then I meet people basically every day who feel a great deal of anxiety, she says.
“Creates an insecurity”
Stenergard emphasizes that many live in a “brutal exclusion” as a result of an “unsustainable immigration policy”. Return migration is one of the measures that the government and SD want to take to reverse the trend.
However, according to Stenevi, their policy has nothing to do with integration.
– You don’t focus on integration. You focus on making people feel unwelcome. You create insecurity for the children who grow up here and who have never known any other homeland, she says.
See the debate between Märta Stenevi and Maria Malmer Stenergard in the video player above.