Nearly one in five people living in Sweden was born in a foreign country, newly released statistics have revealed.
According to Statistics Sweden, a government agency responsible for producing official statistics, around 19.1 percent of Sweden’s population, nearly 2,000,000 people, were born outside of the country.
In just twenty years, between 2000 to 2019, the number of first-generation immigrants living in Sweden has increased nearly two-fold, from close to 1 million at the turn of the century.
2018 saw the number of first-generation immigrants grow by 80,000 people, SVT reports.
For many years, the vast majority of those immigrating to Sweden came from its Scandinavian neighbor Finland. However, this is simply not the case anymore. Instead, the largest minority groups now living in Sweden are either Syrian or Iraqi-born.