At today's press conference with Elisabeth Svantesson (M) and Jimmie Åkesson (SD), it was announced that the Swedish Tax Agency will receive SEK 500 million to conduct a census, and that they will be commissioned to produce a situational picture of who lives in Sweden.
"Sweden has largely lost control of the population. We have a shadow society that we do not know the extent of, says SD party leader Jimmie Åkesson.
Demographics professor Gunnar Andersson, who recently published a report on the census, objects to this description. He says that the only country in the world that has greater control over where people live than Sweden would possibly be Iceland.
According to him, it is incorrect for the government to call the effort a census as such is no longer done in Sweden.
- It's not a census, even if you call it that. It could possibly be said that it is an extension of the system of civil registration. And an attempt to find people who are not part of the registered population through spot checks here and there.
"These are repressive measures that they label census on.
The Swedish Tax Agency: "Around two percent is wrong"
Peter Sävje, head of department responsible for population registration at the Swedish Tax Agency, says that he is not a specialist in the concept of a census and that the authority rather looks at the actual content of the assignment.
The assignment means that the Swedish Tax Agency will now receive SEK 500 million and the majority of this will go to increasing the number of employees who work with population registration, and that special emphasis will be placed on checks, says Sävje. At the press briefing, the government said the focus should be on controls in "risk areas".
Peter Sävje says that the Swedish Tax Agency and Statistics Sweden estimate that approximately 98 percent of population registers in Sweden are correct.
"Around 2 percent are incorrectly registered, then there are those who are in the country without permission, but that is on the police's table," says Peter Sävje.