Prior to World War II, emigrants generally outnumbered immigrants. Since then, net migration has been positive with many immigrants coming to Sweden from the 1970s through today.
Emigration Between 1820 and 1930, approximately 1.3 million Swedes, a third of the country's population at the time,
emigrated to North America, and most of them to the United States. There are more than 4.4 million
Swedish Americans according to a 2006 US Census Bureau estimate. In Canada, the community of
Swedish ancestry is 330,000 strong.
Immigration The demographic profile of Sweden has altered considerably due to immigration patterns since the 1970s. As of 2020,
Statistics Sweden reported that around 2,686,040 or 25.9% of the inhabitants of Sweden were from a foreign background: that is, each such person either had been born abroad or had been born in Sweden to two parents who themselves had both been born abroad. Also taking into account people with only one parent born abroad, this number increases to one third (33.5%). Additionally, the birth rate among immigrant women after arriving in Sweden is somewhat higher than among ethnic Swedes. Taking into account the fact that immigrant women have on average fewer children than Swedish women of comparable age, however, the difference in total birth rate is only 0.1 children more if the woman is foreign born – with the disclaimer that some women may have children not immigrating to and not reported in Sweden, who are thus not included in the statistics.
Historical immigration ;World War II
Immigration increased markedly with
World War II. Historically, the most numerous of foreign born nationalities are
ethnic Germans from
Germany and other Scandinavians from
Denmark and
Norway. In short order, 70,000
war children were evacuated from
Finland, of which 15,000 remained in Sweden. Also, many of Denmark's nearly 7,000
Jews who were evacuated to Sweden decided to remain there. A sizeable community from the
Baltic countries (
Estonia,
Latvia and
Lithuania) arrived during the Second World War. ;1945 to 1967 During the 1950s and 1960s, the recruitment of
immigrant labour was an important factor of immigration. The Nordic countries signed a
trade agreement in 1952, establishing a common labour market and free movement across borders. This migration within the Nordic countries, especially from Finland, was essential to create the tax-base required for the expansion of the strong public sector now characteristic of Scandinavia. but the influx gave rise to an
anti-Finnish sentiment within Sweden and Norway. This continued until 1967, when the labour market became saturated, and Sweden introduced new immigration controls. On a smaller scale, Sweden took in
political refugees from Hungary and the former
Czechoslovakia after their countries were invaded by the Soviet Union in 1956 and 1968, respectively.
Contemporary immigration Since the early 1970s, immigration to Sweden has been mostly due to refugee migration and family reunification from countries in the
Middle East and
Latin America. According to
Eurostat, in 2010, there were 1.33 million foreign-born residents in Sweden, corresponding to 14.3% of the total population. Of these, 859,000 (64.3%) were born outside the
EU and 477,000 (35.7%) were born in another EU Member State. By comparison, the Swedish civil registry reports, for 2018, that nearly 1.96 million residents are foreign-born, a 47% increase from 2010. There are 8.27 million Swedish-born residents, giving a total population of 10.23 million, and a 19.1% foreign-born population.
Malmö, the third largest city of Sweden and
Skåne County as a whole have taken in highest numbers of refugees who reached Sweden, in particular during the
Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s and the
Syrian civil war in the 2010s. The first group of
Assyrians/Syriacs moved to
Sweden from
Lebanon in 1967. Many of them live in
Södertälje (
Stockholm). There are also around 40,000
Roma in Sweden. Some Roma people have long historical roots in Sweden, while others are more recent migrants from elsewhere in Europe. Immigrants from
Western Asia have been a rapidly growing share of Sweden's population. According to the government agency
Statistics Sweden, the number of immigrants born in all of
Asia (including the Middle East) rose from just 1,000 in 1950 to 295,000 in 2003. Most of those immigrants came from
Iraq,
Iran,
Lebanon and
Syria, according to Statistics Sweden. A significant number of
Syrian Christians have also settled in Sweden. There have also been immigrants from South-Central Asia such as
Afghanistan and
India. Since the
European migrant crisis, Syrians became the second-largest group of foreign-born persons in the Swedish civil registry in 2017 with 158,443 people (after former
Yugoslavia). Note that the table below lists the citizenship the person had when arriving in Sweden, and therefore there are no registered
Eritreans,
Russians or
Bosnians from 1990, they were recorded as
Ethiopians,
Soviets and
Yugoslavs. The nationality of Yugoslavs below is therefore people who came to Sweden from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before 1991 and people who came from today's Montenegro and Serbia before 2003, then called the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Counting all people who came from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, there were 176,033 people from there in 2018.
Migration data of Sweden (2000–present) ==Language==