The Swedish government has given its migration agency an expanded mandate to collaborate with police and embassies on new procedures for tracking and investigating asylum seekers’ travel to their countries of origin. The initiative aims to make the process more efficient by improving information sharing between agencies. The agencies have been asked to deliver a joint report by July 1, 2025.
A Novus survey for the news magazine Bulletin in 2022 found that 79% of immigrants who came to Sweden as refugees have at least once traveled back to their country of origin for a vacation.
“I believe many find it remarkable that people with protection status vacation in the countries they have fled from. The need for protection can then rightfully be questioned,” Migration Minister Johan Forssell said on Thursday. “One could then conclude that you no longer have grounds for protection, or that you did not provide the correct information from the start.”
Swedish law allows for revoking asylum status for this kind of travel. However, the law requires “exceptional reasons” to rescind a residence permit—even if obtained through fraud—if the person has lived in Sweden for more than four years. A review of that time frame has not been proposed, but migration minister Forssell does not rule it out.
Asylum seekers visiting their home countries after having been granted refugee status is an issue other European countries have identified and attempted to tackle.
Norwegian Aftenposten in 2018 reported that 24% of refugees from Somalia, 40% from Afghanistan, 55% from Iran, and 71% from Iraq regularly traveled back to their home countries.
Already in 2017, German media observed the phenomenon, most frequently among Syrians and Iraqis, leading then-Chancellor Angela Merkel to call it “a reason to reconsider the right to asylum.”
In August of this year, media reports revealed that Afghans with refugee status had found a way to regularly, and in large numbers, circumvent a ban in order to travel back to their country of origin—a particularly shocking situation, given that Germany has deemed Afghanistan such an unsafe country that not even immigrants with a criminal record can legally be deported there.
