Is Sweden a security risk for Europe?
Sweden’s passports are forged, stolen, declared lost and sold by people smugglers to refugees from the Middle East. It is a real racket. According to Swedish police statistics, two individuals have lost 20 passports in a short time; they quickly get new ones. There are no legal methods to stop this. The men lose them sequentially: that is, they “lose” them, one at a time, and after each occasion apply for a new one. No questions are asked from the Swedish police – who handle new passport issues in Sweden – when issuing a new travel document whether these men are genuinely losing their passports or are losing them on purpose. Nearly 900 men have lost three passports, according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, There are 200,000 genuine Swedish passports on the loose. The Swedish government does not block them. It costs just 350 kronor (about £30) to get a new passport. A passport sold to passport racketeers can earn a person 80,000 kronor (£6,500) say Swedish police. These passports are smuggled out of Sweden to locations in the Middle East, Istanbul, Damascus, Amman.
The Swedish passport, which invariably belonged to a Swedish person of migrant origin, is distributed in Istanbul or Damascus to a “lookalike” among the migrants seeking to enter Europe. It probably wouldn’t work for getting into a country with an e-passport system – which electronically scans passport photo at passport control and compares it to a photo scan of the passport holders face – it is common at British airports – but is clearly successful enough to fool many European passport control checks to be a common method, according to a recent programme in the Swedish TV4 documentary series old Facts (Kalla Fakta.) Migrants use these genuine passports to fly into the Schengen zone, say Berlin, flash their genuine Swedish passports to the German passport official, then head over to Sweden by train. Once in Sweden, they seek asylum, claiming to possess no travel documents, in the usual manner. It remains to be seen whether the new stricter border controls introduced by Sweden in the past week will have any effect on this; the passports are, after all, genuine.
Using someone else’s Swedish passport is far less risky than the alternative: entering Schengen illegally, by boat to Greece, say, and then travelling in the back of a truck through the Balkans to Sweden. Travelling this way, people drown or suffocate. It is unpleasant, dangerous and the risks of being discovered and turned back are everpresent.
Passports declared lost or stolen are not always, perhaps not even often, checked against Interpol’s database of lost passports when people go through passport control at European airports (I didn’t know this), but to avoid even that possibility, Swedish newspapers say, the passport racket involves the original person who “lost” the passport not declaring it missing until the migrant lookalike has passed through border controls into Europe. The successful migrant throws it away and the original owners can now safely go to the police, says. he has lost his old passport and that he needs a new one
Another option is to travel on a genuinely forged passport. There are workshops in Sweden that forge passports. A Swedish local newspaper interviewed passport officers at Stockholm’s Skavsta airport and said that migrants were frequently caught out when the extremely shoddy forgeries, which won’t even reflect patterns when shone with a UV lamp. The good ones by definition are not caught. In March, Swedish police rolled up a passport forgery workshop located in the town of Sodertalje, which is heavily immigrant, and number of men are now awaiting trial
But despite the odd story like that, journalists and politicians have complained that Sweden has done far too little to combat passport fraud for far too long. Goran Larsson is a policeman based in Gothenburg, He and his unit tracked criminals in the migration racket by tapping their phones. Their raids uncovered a complete portable workshop for manufacturing forged passports, large numbers of completed forgeries, USB sticks with information that would be the basis for fake diplomas and certifications, a machine for the production of identity cards and half a million kronor in cash. Fifteen people were given jail sentences; and three criminal groupings were broken up. Alas, as Larsson has said, the police leadership closed the investigations down, officially because the investigations were “too expensive”, but Larsson says the cost of the police investigation was no higher than security costs of policing “two high-risk football matches”. The leadership were simply mindful of the way political winds were blowing. The government was not interested in pursuing the passport racket. Larsson also told a radio programme. “A lot of policemen are afraid of speaking out about the cover-ups. I am not afraid because I am close to retirement.”
The government’s passivity has manifested itself in even more public ways. In 2009, moderate party (right of centre, liberal) MP Elisabeth Svantesson made a proposal in the Swedish riksdag (parliament) that Sweden should tighten up regulations: before a new passport is issued, the question of how many passports the person has had previously has to be taken into a account. Maybe people shouldn’t be allowed more than three passports in a five year period? Anyone who loses more than that clearly isn’t genuine. The judicial affairs committee, dominated by right of centre MPs, turned down her proposal with the argument that the Swedish government was already doing enough, Another MP’s proposal encountered a similar fate when presented in 2014. Swedish journalist Thomas Gur blames the weakness of Swedish political journalism “The failure to do anything about the passport issues reveals a defect in Swedish politics. One of a government’s most important roles is to safeguard its borders. The fact that this is not raised and dealt with, year after year, and that neither the legislative nor the examining estate react over this is very sad.”
Whichever way the migrants enter Sweden, by forged passport, lookalike passport or no passport at all (the back-of-a-truck route), if they apply for asylum they will be granted it automatically if they are fleeing the civil war in Syria. So there is an incentive for migrants to claim they are fleeing the civil war , even when they are not. Whistleblowers from within the Migration Agency claim many applicants are not coming from Syria at all, but Syrians legitimately resident in other countries, eg Dubai, or Italy; or Arabs from other countries in the Middle East, such as Morocco or Libya, but no one checks out their accents or asks test questions about Syrian conditions. This is another story of astonishing Swedish slackness in issues relating to migration. How many are ISIS cells no-one knows.
Having been granted asylum, after a few years of Swedish residence these migrants will be legit and have genuine, real passports of their own, as Swedish citizens. (Incidentally there are no civic or linguistic demands on the applicant in order to be granted that desirable Swedish passport) And then these individuals from “Syria” can settle, and move, wherever they like in Europe, as genuine citizens of one of the world’s most respected countries. Britain, because of the English language, and because the EU allows free settlement, is a favoured destination.
Völkerwanderung 