Swedish Children Of Work Permit Holders 18-21 - Teen Deportation Risk

A lot of Swedish journalists still don't seem to fully understand what the teen deportation issue is about. Aftonbladet’s recent data story is a case in point. As the Migration Agency has no data on teen deportations, Aftonbladet's reporters requested rejection decisions from 2025 and went through them one by one, identifying 92 teen deportation cases. It's a great piece, filling in a knowledge gap the government has often used to claim the issue only affects "a few individual cases". But the journalists focused exclusively on young adults refused residency on the basis of family reunion. This means they entirely missed out the children of work permit holders. Data the Migration Agency has provided to The Local suggests that these could account for at least as many cases. Nearly 1,500 residency permits were granted between 2020 and 2022 to children of work permit holders who will have turned 18 between 2024 and the end of this year. Many of their parents will have delayed a permanent residency application to keep their child's right to stay as a dependent: children of work permit holders count as dependents up until age 21, while those of permanent residents only count as dependents until they turn 18. This will have kept their children in the country, but at a price: their right to stay in Sweden still depends on keeping their job long after they arrived in the country. Some, though, will have received poor legal advice and applied for permanent residency. Some of their children will have already had to leave Sweden, others will be appealing, and others will have sought their own grounds for staying (either through study or work). We're now trying to find out exactly how many. Whether these workers, most of whom will be high-skilled, have fallen into the 'teen deportation trap' or not, the issue makes Sweden a less attractive place to work . The bottom line, as our reporting at The Local has shown, is that the teen deportation issue is as much about national competitiveness as it is about integration.