The Swedish immigration “snitch law” plan, which implies public sector workers to report undocumented people to the authorities, drawn extreme disapproval in society, according to The Guardian.
The proposal, concluded in 2022, paved the way for a coalition government involving the country’s three centre-right parties with parliamentary support from the far-right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats (SD). The political issue relates to a proposal to force doctors, dentists, teachers and other social workers to report undocumented patients, clients and students to the police. As a result, social welfare sector workers are currently causing the Swedish government significant headwinds in a dispute over professional ethics by opposing the planned law.
In addition, human rights and labour law experts have questioned the legality and rationale behind the law. Some social workers have vowed to resist and violate the law if it is introduced. Indeed, recently thousands of people gathered in Stockholm and Gothenburg to protest on the issue.
Michele LeVoy of the Platform for International Cooperation on Irregular Migrants described the law as “utterly inhumane,” noting the detrimental effects as people would potentially hesitate to send their children to school and be more reluctant to seek health care or report crimes committed against them.
People will be, in a sense, terrified. Why would anyone want to go somewhere when they know that the main thing that will happen is not that they can get care, not that they can go to school, not that they can go to the library – they’ll just be turned in. (…) Everywhere where obligations to denounce undocumented people have been applied, the result has been more discrimination, suffering and fear.
LeVoy also cited the failure of this policy based on the United Kingdom’s experience when Theresa May introduced a policy in 2012 that sought to restrict access to jobs, benefits, bank accounts, driving licences and other basic services to those who could not prove they had a legal right to live in the UK. It subsequently emerged that many who were in the UK legally could not prove their status and that the Home Office often misclassified legal residents as immigration offenders. Jacob Lind, a researcher in international migration at Malmö University, underlined:
A lot of people are not going to leave. They’re just going to end up in further misery. You’ll end up with the opposite effect; society will have even less contact with people who are in this situation, further increasing their vulnerability and making them even more exploitable.
Among the groups that have spoken out is the Swedish Medical Association. For months, the association has argued that reporting requirements would contradict the rules and principles of professional ethics, which state that care should be provided as needed and that patients should not be discriminated against. Sofia Rydgren Stale, the association’s president, stressed:
I became a doctor to help people, not monitor and report them. We see it as very likely that it will lead to people not daring to seek care for fear of being reported.
According to Anna Troberg of the DIK union, more than 90 per cent of librarians also opposed the idea: “Many say they would rather lose their jobs than report those in need,” she said. “If the Swedish government advances this law, the librarians will come out on the right side of history. Ultimately, this is a question of trust, humanity and democracy.”
The Swedish government said the Committee was examining whether the duty to provide information would conflict with professional values:
“To ensure that the regulation is legally sound and does not result in unreasonable consequences for individuals, certain situations may need to be exempted from the duty to provide information. Unfortunately, many remain and become part of a growing shadow society. In such situations the duty to provide information helps in upholding government decisions and does not erode trust, quite the contrary,” according to the minister of migration, Maria Malmer Stenergard.
The protests draw attention to the professional identity and ethics of public sector workers, as well as the political potential pledged to these positions. The government has come under accusations of seeking to get employees and teachers to abandon established and cherished rules of behaviour, and it is unclear what will happen if they continue to refuse. One option would be to reduce the policy, but these measures are a priority for the Sweden Democrats, so another option would be to pull the plug on the Tidö agreement. This could completely derail the government.
Meanwhile, next to Sweden, the Finnish government is also considering extending reporting obligations on undocumented people, while in Germany social welfare services have struggled with reporting obligations for two decades.
