New citizenship statistics reveal impact of Sweden's security checks
Brand new figures from the Swedish Migration Agency suggest that the awarding of citizenships has slowed down radically since the government ordered it to impose stricter security checks on applicants at the start of April.
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The number of granted citizenships plummeted by 74 percent between March and April, from 4,769 to 1,229.
The Migration Agency made a decision on 3,009 citizenship applications in April. An agency spokesperson wasn't immediately able to share the number of concluded citizenship cases in March, but via the Wayback Machine we found that it concluded 7,915 cases in February.
So far this year, 24,844 citizenship cases have received a decision, which means that prior to April 1st, the Migration Agency processed on average around 7,000 cases per month – in other words, there was also a sharp decline in the number of concluded cases in April.
"It's hard to draw any conclusions based only on the figures for the month of April, but in our forecast which we published on April 25th 2025, we estimated that the measures to increase security in the processing of citizenships will affect the pace of decision-making," the Migration Agency spokesperson told The Local.
"That's a reason for why we, compared to previous estimates, lowered the forecast for the number of concluded citizenship cases this year and the coming years. The lowered forecast is also due to, among other things, our work on resolving the oldest cases."
More detailed statistics on citizenship applications are expected to be available from May 15th.
In October 2024, the Migration Agency predicted that it would conclude 87,000 applications each year in 2025 and 2026, thanks to increased staff at the agency – a first step towards reducing the heavily criticised long waiting times for Swedish citizenship.
But as the spokesperson said, the new security checks forced the agency in April to lower its previous estimate by more than a quarter: to 64,000 concluded citizenship cases in 2024 and 65,000 in 2026.
The security checks that were introduced on April 1st involve applicants, future and present, answering a detailed set of additional background questions, as well as having to verify their identity in person.
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They came on the orders of the government and its far-right Sweden Democrat allies, who instructed the Migration Agency to take 'forceful measures' to prevent people who pose a threat to security or use a fake ID from being granted citizenship.
Experts had previously guessed that security checks would be tightened as a pretext of slowing down the awarding of new citizenships until the reforms planned for 2026 are in place – a slowdown strongly hinted at by the government in an opinion piece in the DN newspaper in November.
In March, Sweden's National Audit Office criticised both the Migration Agency and the government over "unreasonably" long processing times which allow thousands of applications to "lie dormant".
According to the Migration Agency, 75 percent of adult applicants whose cases were concluded "recently" had to wait 23 months, but waiting times have in the past tended to vary widely, from a few weeks to many years. The full extent to how waiting times will be affected by the new security checks is not yet clear.
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