Last year, a baby named Emanuel was born in Sweden. Before his first birthday, his parents were told that Emanuel could no longer stay in the country. The department of migration ordered his removal, alone, to Iran – despite the ongoing war.

Emanuel’s parents were legally in the country. They had Swedish residency permits, but the laws that allowed them to stay were tightened after the baby’s birth, and the family got sucked into a Kafkaesque maze of official hurdles, designed to limit migration to Sweden.

Raif is a four-year-old boy with autism, who still wears nappies and is unable to talk. This spring, he was informed that he would be deported alone. Raif’s case attracted significant media coverage and the authorities eventually reversed the decision.

But the number of absurd, hardline calls from the migration department just keeps piling up. A 74-year-old British man with dementia was told to leave the country after 25 years. Another British man, on a generous World Bank retirement pension, was also told he was not welcome in Sweden because retirement money does not count as salary for the purposes of new income thresholds for migrants.

The young, the old, vulnerable people, the wealthy: all are the target of harsh and often aggressive immigration policies. And Sweden’s leaders remain unyielding. “We cannot adjust the law based on each and every personal fate,” Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister, said, commenting on a series of hardline immigration decisions involving children.

Swedes vote in a general election on Sunday 13 September and, according to opinion polls, the centre-left opposition has a slight lead. But even if there is a change of government, many previously unthinkable far-right ideas are now comfortably embedded in the mainstream of Swedish politics. The past four years have been characterised by an astonishing acceptance of ethnonationalist views, xenophobic rhetoric and authoritarian policies, increasingly targeting children. And many of these ideas have been absorbed and appropriated by the centre-left opposition Social Democrats.

Not even the deportation of toddlers or the alarming new shift in judicial policy to build prisons for teenagers as young as 14, are too much of a moral red line, it seems.

The story of the transformation that now blights Sweden goes back to 2022, when the conservative bloc won that year’s Swedish general election, but only with a tiny margin. The Tidö agreement struck that December, between the three conservative parties (Moderates, Christian........

© The Guardian