Why the number of Syrians getting Norwegian citizenship more than halved
The number of Syrian citizens awarded Norwegian citizenship saw a startling drop last year from 9,033 to just 3,748, accounting for a large proportion of the fall of 9,880 in the number of citizenships awarded.
This was both a dramatic fall from the peak year, 2023, and from 2022, when 4,188 Syrians gained citizenship. But it was still well above the number of Syrians given citizenship between 2017 and 2021.
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The Assad regime collapsed on 8 December, 2024, with those still held in the regime's notorious political prisons freed and a new Syrian transitional government appointed in March, prompting 400,000 Syrians to return to the country from neighbouring countries.
At least some of the Syrians in Norway are likely to now return to their country of origin, but it is too early for them to show up in the 2024 statistics.
Statistics Norway attributes the fall instead to the fact that many of Syrians who came to Norway during the 2015 refugee crisis already received citizenship in 2023.
"2023 was a year with particularly high numbers of transitions to Norwegian citizenship among Syrians," the agency points out. "This probably reflects the fact that it was
seven years since the refugee influx from Syria
and that many had achieved the minimum residence requirement for refugees. The fact that the number is now decreasing
may
reflect that some of those seeking Norwegian citizenship already had it in 2024."
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According to Statistics Norway the naturalization rate for adult Syrians who had at least six years of residence fell in 2024 to just 25 out of 100, from 55 in 2023 and 61 in 2022.
In addition to the fall in applications from the peak year of 2023, the agency said that longer processing times at the UDI could also play a role in the lower number of citizenships awarded.
"One should be cautious in interpreting the variations in the number of transitions as reflecting differences in the number of applicants alone," it reported. "The lower number of transitions... among Syrians may also be a result of longer processing times at the UDI [The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration], and that some are waiting for their applications to be processed."
As you can see in the charts above, the number of Poles, Swedes, Eritreans and Somalis becoming Norwegian citizens also fell in 2024.
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