Tidö cannot sort immigrants into good and bad without dividing Sweden

If you are waiting to pay at a grocery store beside someone you think is an immigrant, how would you know whether they are a ‘good immigrant’ or a ‘bad immigrant’? You cannot see the taxes they have paid, the hours they have worked or the things they have done right. All you know is that they look foreign to you.

Perhaps they have just finished a long shift and are buying dinner on the way home. Perhaps they are worried about a child who needs them, or a bill they do not know how to pay. Perhaps they were born here. None of it is written on their face. They have done nothing to you and said nothing to you.

Yet after years of hearing immigration spoken of alongside crime, failure and disorder, you may already be asking yourself which kind of immigrant they are. That is how Tidö’s language about ‘bad immigrants’ reaches the people it claims not to be talking about.

As DailySweden documented, the four Tidö parties called the previous government’s integration policy a failure and linked it to exclusion, poverty, gang crime, a values crisis and increased Islamism. On the Moderates’ own page, the same programme promised to reduce asylum immigration to the EU legal minimum while protecting highly qualified labour migration. The Moderate Party, led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, put its name to that framing.

That creates a politically useful hierarchy. One migrant arrives already imagined as talent; another arrives burdened with suspicion and must prove that they are not part of the problem. The distinction may look precise in a policy document. It does not survive an ordinary encounter on a bus, at work or beside the groceries. Nobody wears a badge saying taxpayer, nurse, parent, refugee, citizen or convicted criminal.

Some distinctions are necessary. People who commit crimes should answer for what they did. Residents able to work can reasonably be expected to make an effort, and Sweden may debate how many asylum seekers it can receive. Refusing collective blame does not require pretending that unemployment, segregation, honour-based oppression or gang violence are imaginary. The strongest argument for stricter policy is that responsibility and public capacity matter.

But responsibility must attach to conduct, not appearance or ancestry. Brå’s review records higher average criminal involvement among some foreign-born groups and notes that labour-market access affects risk. It also concludes that Swedish research is insufficient to determine migration’s net causal effect on crime. Group statistics can guide serious policy. They cannot tell a shopper what the person next to them has done.

The people flattened by this language are already part of Sweden. Statistics Sweden counted almost 1.2 million foreign-born workers in 2024, nearly one quarter of everyone employed between 20 and 65. The person read as foreign at ICA may have finished a night shift in care, opened the shop that pays a local wage, or spent the day teaching Swedish children. None of that is visible in the queue. Neither is failure.

The danger of spillover is not just rhetorical theory. The Council of Europe found that equating migration with criminality had become more common in Swedish political discourse after the Tidö Agreement. It warned that equating migration and ethnicity with crime risks exposing people with migrant or minority backgrounds to more hate speech and hate crime. The warning concerns the category, not only the person a politician claims to criticise.

Swedish politics should be capable of naming problems without turning origin into evidence. Say which law failed, which school lacks resources, which employer exploits workers, which gang recruits children and which individual committed an offence. Publish the evidence, fund measures that work and judge their results. Do not use ‘immigration’ as a container into which poverty, crime, religion, culture and political frustration can all be poured.

The Tidö parties and every other party should reject the sorting of human beings into socially approved and socially suspect immigrants. Sweden can demand equal duties only if it also guarantees equal individuality. In a democracy, people should be judged by what they do, not by what strangers assume when they see them at the grocery store.

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