Sweden increases money offered to migrants to voluntarily go home: Sweden is now looking to follow in the footsteps of Denmark, which has enticed hundreds of migrants home with financial incentives

Once seen as the most accepting country in the world for refugees, the right-wing Swedish government, elected on a promise to curb immigration, is now enacting reforms to encourage migrants to return to their country of origin.

To accomplish this, the government in Stockholm, together with the Swedish Democrats who support the coalition but are not formally part of the government, is increasing the financial support migrants can receive if they return home voluntarily.

“We are targeting the large number of groups that arrived in the past decades and failed to integrate,” said the migration minister of the Moderate Party, Maria Malmer, to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Malmer said that they will make sure that everyone who wants support to leave Sweden permanently will get the financial means to make this possible.

In the Scandinavian country, it was already possible for migrants to apply for repatriation support if they decided to return to their home country. However, the program was not popular. In the last 10 years, a total of only 46 immigrants asked the immigration office for money to return to their country of origin, and eight of them have since returned to Sweden.