Sweden Granted 1.2m New Migrant Permits Last Decade, One-Fifth of Residents are Foreign Born

Sweden, a country with a population of just over ten million people, granted a total of 1.2 million residency permits in the last decade according to figures from the Swedish migration board.

In 2010, Sweden boasted a population of 9.4 million people and in the last decade, that number has grown by nearly a million people to 10.3 million by the end of 2019 according to data from Statistics Sweden.

Newly released data from the Swedish migration board shows that in 2019, the country handed out a total of 119,568 residency permits from January to December of 2019, with the majority connected to work visas and relatives of those with work visas, followed by family reunifications and asylum claims.

While the overall number of residency permits in 2019 is lower than in previous years, it allows the final statistics for the decade to be calculated and shows that between 2010 and 2020, the Swedish government granted 1.2 million residency permits.

According to news website Nyheter Idag, when the figures are broken down, the country saw a total of 365,000 permits granted for family reunification or chain migration, 300,000 for economic migrants and 295,000 permits granted to asylum seekers.

The statistics reinforce previously released data that showed Sweden to have the second-highest population growth in the European Union in 2016 and that the growth was largely driven by mass migration.

In October of last year, statistics Sweden revealed the extent of the effect of mass migration on Sweden’s demographics, claiming that as many as 20 per cent of the population was foreign-born or one in five Swedish residents.

While previously the most common country of origin for migrants was neighbouring Nordic nation Finland, in 2015 the migrant crisis greatly changed the trend with Syrians surpassing Finnish nationals and remaining the largest single group of migrants coming to Sweden since.

Iraqi migrants have also seen a surge in numbers in recent years, putting Finns in third place as of August of 2019.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com