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A scandal of significant proportions has been uncovered by Swedish public service media, where Swedish universities have been illicitly enrolling foreign students through recruitment agencies in Pakistan, India and Nepal, who then proceed to take advantage of lax or non-existent rules around Swedish student visas.
Among other things, the students, who number by the thousands yearly, have been lured to the country with the prospect of working and bringing family members who are then also permitted to work. The agencies hired by the universities have even aided with forged bank statements in order to fabricate solvency, in order to pass the universities enrolment fee background checks.
This is alarming for a government that has made its name by strictly tightening rules around immigration, and eliminating fraud and illegal stays in Sweden. But it is also alarming that prestigious institutions such as universities, including national top universities such as Uppsala, are using illegitimate methods to bloat their student numbers.
The prevalence of fraud in the foreign student environment in Sweden has actually been exposed before. In 2024, the government’s own National Audit Office brought attention to the systemic tolerance of abuse by the universities, as well as the financial incentives for universities to cast a wide net internationally for enrolments. Students from non-EU or EES countries must pay enrolment fees of up to 50 000 SEK (5 000 euro), yielding the individual universities significant amounts of yearly income, which they of course do not want to lose.
The same year, the conservative newspaper Fokus made a major in-depth report on the same topic, building on the criticism raised by the National Audit Office. The newspaper estimated that the annual income for Sweden’s oldest university, Uppsala University, from foreign student enrolment fees could be as high as 20 million euro, from the around 1 500 students from non-EU countries that sign up every year.
Some of the universities, typically smaller and newly founded institutions that do not have “old money”, offer basic courses with very low thresholds for enrollment, in order to facilitate foreign students with poor academic backgrounds to join. The drop-out rate for these courses are usually very high, with more than half of all enrolled foreign students disappearing before the course has finished. Instead, the students are believed to be working illegally under their student visas. In many cases the authorities cannot track the individuals due to very lax supervision, which has fuelled the parallel “underground” illegal migrant economy. This is all from alarms raised by the Audit Office, which for a number of years has called for stricter rules and control over foreign students entering Sweden – and been met with radio silence from the politicians.
Tough on immigration, but soft on fraud?
This blind spot is perplexing, because the government has been diligently adjusting legislation around labour migration to prevent abuse from employers, as well as raising the standards of competence for immigrated workers, with an increased focus on higher income earners, and skilled specialists in key industries.
The push to eliminate low-income labour migration and crack down on abuse from both employers and employees has chiefly come from the nationalist Sweden Democrats, which supports the government in accordance with the Tidö agreement: a laundry list of reforms on fixing the historically very broken migration system (among many other things). The centre-right parties in government have been realising the plans, frequently to a surprisingly smooth degree, considering the difference in political and social values that is built into the government.
Over the past three years, the Swedish government has raised the minimum wage for migrants with work permits, from a ludicrously low monthly 13 000 SEK (1 300 euro) to approximately 30 000 SEK (3 000 euro). They have also abolished a controversial system that allowed turned down asylum seekers to apply for a work permit on site in Sweden, and begun revoking visas issued under these old and oft-abused rules. The previously very generous rules on the work permit extending to a visa for family members have also been tightened, to reduce Sweden as a destination for permanent settlement for labour migrants and reduce strain on public welfare.
Some of these reforms have been, and continue to this day to be, hotly contested by pro-immigration voices, but have been conceded even by some on the opposing side as a “necessary evil” in order to curb the unsustainable labour migration situation. In short, the return of law and order to Sweden’s tattered migration system has been executed professionally and proportionally.
But labour migration has also been an area of friction; the Moderate Party, which leads the government and has the office of Prime Minister as well as minister of migration, have at times signalled their ambition to remodel Sweden into a destination for skilled foreign workers in high-tech industry, wishing to turn Sweden into the “Silicon Valley of Europe”. This is tentatively in line with the undertaken migration reforms, but it does still clash with the Sweden Democrats’ vision to make the Swedish labour market more exclusive. It is likely that this topic will lead to future conflict between the parties, especially if they are to develop the current governing coalition after the 2026 election.
The Liberals, while a party on the cusp of elimination due to poor polling, have offered the most contrarian positions on labour migration compared to the Sweden Democrats, even openly challenging the much larger nationalist party over the agreed policies in the Tidö agreement. The Liberals have the office of the minister of labour, which has allowed them some institutional power to slow down or modify even the Sweden Democrats’ most moderate regulations on immigrant workers.
This is the lens through which one must understand the student immigration problem. But the reluctance to address the problems with fraudulent student visas being used to disguise labour immigration may be larger than the sum of its parts; there is a not insignificant political will in government to keep up the labour immigration to Sweden, and there are self-evident financial incentives for certain institutions (as well as parts of the private sector) to do so as well. Yet, no matter the motive, shouldn’t everybody agree that fraud and abuse of Swedish visas must be stopped?
Migration needs to be sustainable and transparent
The inherent advantage of some degree of labour immigration is impossible to deny even for the most conservative critics of immigration. Sometimes there are vacancies in vital industries that may only be filled with international recruitments, and in the event of such needs there needs to be dependable, just and predictable systems in place to ensure that the right talent can be attracted to Sweden. The ongoing fraud with student visas is the opposite of that, and it risks undermining the legitimate needs of enterprises, as well as universities, to see to their economic and competitive needs.
Both liberal politicians and universities need to understand that their credibility and trust from the public may be squandered if they continue to allow the corruption of Sweden’s immigration system, for short-term gains.
The wider perspective must also be considered: all EU member states bear the integrity of the entire European Union on their shoulders when it comes to migration. Improper controls and passivity in the face of criminality also hurts the freedom of movement inside the Union.