The new Swedish citizenship requirements

About six years ago I became a Swedish citizen. I'd been in the country around four years at the time. Being married to a Swedish citizen allowed it to happen early enough that Brexit never actually cost me my EU citizenship. Pretty nice! But if the new rules being introduced this year had applied back then I think I'd still be waiting today.

For starters, they're raising the minimum qualifying period from five years to eight. That threshold would have taken me until mid 2024 to meet. Then once you pass the threshold and submit your application, there's the processing time to consider. That's on the order of several years. I could very easily have found myself facing the tenth anniversary of my arrival in Sweden without a passport to show for it.

It seems likely that the shortened qualifying period when married to a Swedish citzen may live on in the updated version of the law. There's currently no clarity about whether or how much it'll change though. So lots of people who've done everything right since day one, and filed valid citizenship applications in the past few years, now have absolutely no idea if they're going to be sent back to square one. It's quite outrageous.

That lack of clarity is a theme with this new law. They're adding Swedish languge requirements to the process too, which means there'll be a test. That Swedish language test won't be ready until October 2027, but the language requirement will apply as of June 2026. What are applicants meant to do in the meantime? "Fuck off" seems to be the message between the lines.

It makes me think about the 2023 layoffs back at Spotify. Under these new rules, I could quite easily have been out on my arse there. If you're here on a work permit and get laid off, you have a few months to find a new job, but then you're outta here. Then what? Applying for a family visa back in the UK takes months, and isn't a sure thing. Some period of separation from my kids would be all but guaranteed at that point. Life-changing emotional trauma. And for what?

There's a certain smugness in the air these days in Sweden. The combination of the Greenland-related threats by the Trump regime and ICE's special military operation in Minneapolis has a lot of people here comparing ourselves very fucking favourably to the yanks right now. But at the same time, I keep reading about teenagers being deported alone to countries they've never set foot in, and tiny kids who remind me of my own whose spirits seem completely crushed by depression and anxiety from living in hellish asylum return centres for years on end.

When I wrote the other day about how I think Minneapolis can happen in Malmö, I was in a way too generous. Ask the kids of the game developer who's just been laid off and has three months to get a new work permit before the family gets split up. Ask the kids in the asylum return centre down the road in Burlöv. Ask Parham Masoudi.