José Naves Moura Neto, a Brazilian IT engineer working at Volvo, tells The Local how his family had to leave Sweden in June after his son was denied residency, and why he will also leave Sweden next month.
José Naves Moura Neto, a Brazilian IT engineer working at Volvo, tells The Local how his family had to leave Sweden in June after his son was denied residency, and why he will also leave Sweden next month.
José Naves Moura Neto, a Brazilian IT engineer working at Volvo, tells The Local how his family had to leave Sweden in June after his son was denied residency, and why he will also leave Sweden next month.
When José Naves Moura Neto’s 19-year-old son celebrated his student graduation in June it was bitter-sweet: only a few weeks after the celebration he was on a plane back to Brazil, along with his parents and their dog, after becoming a victim of a change to Swedish law that has led to thousands of so-called ‘teen deportations’.
“It feels terrible. We were devastated. I still feel very sad leaving,” Neto, a back-end software engineer working for Volvo, told The Local.”We had plans to stay longer here – not for our whole lives, but at least until he finished college.”
The family moved to Sweden in 2020, when their son was 14, and choose to put him into an ordinary Swedish school in Gothenburg.
“We thought it was important not to send him to an international school in English. We wanted him to know the culture and the language – so he is fluent in Swedish, although he took two years to move to gymnasium [upper secondary school], because he needed to learn better Swedish.”
His son had been accepted into three university courses, two in IT and one in solar energy installation, but he already knew he was unlikely to be able to take up any of the offers.
READ ALSO: ‘Sweden is less appealing’ – How teen deportations deter foreign talent
Teen deportations
When Sweden’s new migration law came into force in June 2021, children aged 18 years old and over were no longer counted as dependents in permanent residency applications, instead having to apply for their own permanent residency permits. This means that they now need to show they can support themselves and that they have a permanent job. Given that most 18-year-olds are still at upper secondary school, this is a difficult bar to meet.
Neto was actually aware of the problem before he applied for permanent residency, but wrongly thought his son would be able to stay and apply for permanent residency anyway under the so-called Gymnasium law, or Gymnasielagen. It was only when the Gymnasium Law expired in December 2023 that he realised that applying for permanent residency had been a mistake.
Neto says he was “expecting the worst” when he realised the law would no longer apply. “I thought, ‘oh, that will be a big problem'”.
Sure enough, the family soon received a letter saying that he couldn’t stay in Sweden because he would need to support himself.
“The company supported me and they paid for a lawyer, and in April 2024, we appealed the decision, but I just knew that they would reject the appeal, and in May this year they said, ‘he can’t stay here’.”
His son was ordered to leave Sweden only weeks before he was due to graduate, so another lawyer advised Neto to appeal again, this time to the Supreme Court. “The lawyer said, ‘this is only for you to buy time. They will need a month to analyze the appeal and give you a decision’. So that’s what we got.”
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The fact that so many families like Neto’s are being forced to leave Sweden because of the changes to the law on permanent residency will, he is convinced, end up damaging Sweden’s economy, perhaps more than it will damage the careers of the foreign workers affected.
“It surely will. Because there’s no sense in me staying here working. I can get a job in my country, in Brazil, and I can also work remotely for other countries. And life can be less expensive than here. Of course, the job market here is really good, and the way we work here, it’s a bit less stressful.”
The young adults being forced to leave will also be a loss to the country, he believes. “A lot of these young adults are already working, paying taxes, and they are fluent in Swedish. They are so integrated in the society and the culture.”
But he suspects that these concerns don’t count for much in the considerations of the parties tightening immigration law in Sweden.
“At first I thought, ‘this is stupid. They don’t understand the consequences’. But then I thought, ‘no, they have a method. It’s a mean decision, but they just want numbers’. These politicians don’t see, ‘oh, this is young adult, and he or she was leaving Sweden with their parents. They are high-skilled workers’. They don’t care. They just want the numbers, to say ‘okay, we got rid of all these immigrants’.”
According to Neto, Swedish people who hear about his family’s situation, such as his son’s teachers, often find their situation hard to believe, given his high-status, well-paid job and level of education.
“They say, ‘no, they can’t do that, you are good immigrants’. But I think there is no such thing as ‘good immigrants’. We are all immigrants.”
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