Children of illegal immigrants are used as pawns in their parents’ game to stay in Sweden, and the media portrays the children’s suffering as the result of the nation’s heartless betrayal. But who really bears responsibility for the children – the state or the parents?

As a parent in Sweden, you are constantly under surveillance. If your child has excessive school absences, if you do not follow the (voluntary) vaccination program, or if healthcare records an incorrect note in a medical journal, you run a very real risk of social services intervening and taking your child away from you. You are then deemed to have failed in your parental responsibility.

But this does not apply to all parents. Some bear no responsibility at all.

During Thursday’s broadcast of Aktuellt, viewers were introduced to such a family — and in order to frame the segment in the desired way, the focus was placed on one child: ten-year-old Murad.

Murad’s parents came to Sweden from Ethiopia in 2015. The Swedish Migration Agency determined that the family lacked grounds for protection, an assessment shared by all appeal instances. The parents nevertheless refused to return, and for the past two years they have been living in a detention center in Märsta.

So why have the parents chosen to remain in Sweden?

“We have appealed, but we have not received the right answer or a sufficiently good answer,” says Murad’s mother, Fayyoo, who despite twelve years in Sweden does not speak the language.

“If we return, we risk dying. I have daughters who risk being raped and sons who risk being killed.”

The Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) and all appeal bodies have reached a different conclusion: that it is safe for the family to return. And the fear that daughters will be raped and sons killed is now shared by an increasing number of ethnically Swedish parents in Sweden.

Murad’s parents have thus chosen not to comply with the deportation orders and have simply remained in Sweden. Year after year. Despite removal decisions, they have been entitled to financial benefits, childcare, and schooling for their growing number of children — despite the terrible conditions in Sweden, the parents have chosen to have two siblings for Murad, and a third is on the way.

The segment is then followed by an almost bizarre debate between the Green Party’s migration policy spokesperson Annika Hirvonen and Migration Minister Johan Forssell, in which Hirvonen essentially argues that the family’s desire to stay should be reason enough for them to do so.

Making such a decision would be sheer madness and would only result in more people without asylum grounds seeking their way to Sweden, more people choosing to stay despite deportation orders, and even greater pressure on an already strained Swedish society.

There is, however, one point on which Hirvonen and I completely agree: it is inhumane and unreasonable that children can be born and live in Sweden for ten years while awaiting deportation.

But unlike Hirvonen, I believe that such an inhumane situation cannot be solved by Sweden and Swedish taxpayers taking responsibility for all the world’s children. The solution is instead spelled “parental responsibility”. Murad’s parents, too, must take responsibility for their soon-to-be four children. Under what conditions will they grow up? In uncertainty at a detention center in a country where they are not welcome? Or among the relatives who probably exist, in the place Murad himself calls his “homeland”?

The only reasonable exercise of parental responsibility is, of course, not to subject one’s children to that stress, but instead to pack the family’s belongings, board the plane home, and begin building a long-term, sustainable life. This is not what the family wishes — but it should have happened already when the family’s appeals were denied. Had the parents respected Swedish law, Murad and his siblings would have been spared much suffering.

Sweden’s only responsibility is to process asylum cases as quickly as possible and then carry out the deportations. That is what is truly humane — even for the children.

The segment about Murad’s family and the subsequent debate between Annika Hirvonen (Green Party) and Johan Forssell (Moderates) can be seen here:
https://www.svtplay.se/video/e4ddWYQ/aktuellt/igar-21-00?video=visa&position=49